A feel for a word and some art —
Behold, it’s done!
Blessed thou art!
After two years of obligatory Russian language at the elementary school I chose English. That summer my grandparents took me on a short trip to Italy where I pronounced a historical sentence: “Granny, one day I’ll write you letters from here.” As soon as I had come back home from the trip I rushed eagerly into a local bookstore, I bought a textbook for self-learning Italian, the only available one at that time, and this marvellous language has been keeping me company so far.
At the grammar school I added German and finally I graduated in English and Italian philology at the Philosophical Faculty of Palacký University of Olomouc. Since I was thinking about the future, when I was asked to choose between teaching and translatology, I decided to study both of these specializations. While studying Italian I also learnt some basic Spanish.
It was really Italy where I was really writing letters from some time later. During my university studies I got a study abroad scholarship and spent a term in Florence, the first place in my life from which I didn‘t feel like returning home, and after eight years of frequent moving to and fro this amazing jewel of Tuscany has truly become my dear second home.
In Italy I found my Albanian husband and at the present time we live in Moravia bringing up our three trilingual children. That is why it is my great honour again to discover and to be astonished at the beauty of a less known but not less fascinating Albanian language.
Right after having finished my university studies I became a secondary school teacher. I was teaching English and Italian at the grammar school in Vyškov for five years and after my return from a five-year Christian mission in Italy I started to teach and translate as a freelancer.
I love communicating with people when I‘m teaching courses and I also love those solitary immersions into the depths of a language while I‘m translating. My passion is poetry, I write it myself and sing it as well and I‘ve been dealing with the matter of poetic translation since the time I was working on my master‘s degree thesis. Poetry, song lyrics, good books and popular-science publications are among the areas in which I really feel at home when translating.