I grew up in a house with two languages and a wall of dictionaries, and I have been moving words from one to the other for as long as I can remember. My first translation was a poem for my grandmother, who said it sounded nothing like the original and was exactly right. I have been trying to deserve that ever since.

Now I translate for a living, mostly novels and a few poems a year, from a desk above a harbour. Every Thursday I write a letter about the small decisions: the word I left alone, the joke that would not travel, the line I rewrote nine times and then put back.

What I sell is what I wish I had when I began: workbooks to practise on, glossaries of hard words, templates for the letters a translator has to write, and a course that goes through the whole of a translation, from the first read to the last proof.