Welcome

I guess introductions are in order.

My name is Alberto Calvo. I started writing articles on a variety of themes about 18 months ago in a mailing list by the name of La Hoguera de las Necedades (The Bonfire of Silliness, which in spanish sounds quite like The Bonfire of Vanities). A few months ago I felt the mailing list format had already served its purpose and it was time to move on, so I turned it into a blog under the same name.

A little after that I invited a couple of friends to colaborate in the blog. Later still, faced with the fact that La Hoguera wasn't entirely my own anymore, I started another blog for posting more personal stuff, this time under the name of Get Out of my Head!. So for the past few months I've been writing (in Spanish) on different topics for these two blogs.

In the past weeks I started noticing a variety of latin american bloggers posting in English, which I found curious but not much more than that. Then I noticed people writing blogs combining English and Spanish posts, and furthermore, some guys even keeping two blogs, one in each language. This particular aspect seemed atractive to me for different reasons. I started writing almost by accident. I have always had writing skills to compose texts with good grammar and ortography but had never tought about doing it in a regular manner for any reason at all.

Then, a few years back, I landed a job translating comics as the result of an offhand comment about the lousy translations found in comics in Mexico. The comics I were to translate were The Authority, and Planetary, both written by Warren Ellis, one of my favorite comic writers. For those who have ever read Planetary it's no news than the stories in that title contain several references to 20th century pop culture. I mentioned this to my editor while explaining to him the first issue of the series. As a result of that conversation I was comissioned with a monthly column to cover these references and try to help readers to get the most out of these stories. A couple of months later I was appointed to do another column to go with The Authority.

I translated the comics and keep the columns for a little over a year, when both titles were canceled in their mexican editions. But the damage was done. I started writing about anything, eager to present my view of things, to express my opinions. And that lead to the mailing list and the blogs mentioned earlier. So you must be wondering where am I going with this rambling. About a month ago I received an e-mail from a friend, an archaeologist, who needed help to translate an essay for a Congress taking place in Calgary. So I faced my first backwards translation job. I'm used to translate English to Spanish, and I have to say that doing it the other way around it's not as easy as I tought. So I 've been thinking about it and decided to get some practice. And what better way to do it than translating myself?

So, Get Out of My Head! - Redux is born. I plan to translate most of my posts from La Hoguera and GOOMH!, past and present. Maybe I'll get about translating my columns from Planetary and some other texts I have lying around. Maybe even some short fictions and scripts done over the years. Anyway, I'm always complaining about not having enough time to write as much as I 'd like, so I don't know how often I 'll be able to post, but I'll try to do it at least once a week.

Comments and suggestions are welcome and appreciated.