After twenty years of other people's sentences

I have translated German into Polish and Polish into Czech for twenty years, and there is a particular kind of intimacy involved in that work. You occupy another writer's choices. You ask why they built the sentence this way and not another way, and then you answer the question with your own language. What I found, somewhere around year fifteen, was that I had developed strong opinions about what good prose does and no place to apply those opinions that belonged only to me. The translation work is service, which I don't mean pejoratively. It is skilled and demanding service. But it is not expression. I live near Tempelhof and I've been writing fiction for four years. The novel I'm working on is set in Silesia in 1945, in the months of displacement and transition after the war, and it follows a family navigating the shift in languages that accompanied the shift in borders. The research is the most interesting I've done since my postgraduate degree. I read court documents, deportation orders, letters. What I'm trying to write is the emotional interior of a period that the historical record describes entirely in terms of movement and numbers. The sentence-level work is the best I've done. I know this.