Picked up my copy of Fuselit last night. The postman can't be bothered to descend the short flight of steps to my door so sticks everything through the upstairs letterbox. Collecting my mail is something I tend to put off doing as it usually involves ringing for the woman who lives on the second floor. She moans a lot and runs a brothel. Sometimes her clients knock on my door by mistake. This is a mistake the postman never makes.

I always have a bit of a problem knowing how to handle Fuselit because it's the only delicate crafted thing I have in a flat full of mass-produced junk. The first thing I look at is the original version of the poem Fuselit ran through babelfish and then asked me to translate. I'm slightly annoyed to find I've translated pretty close to the original as I loved what I produced but am now not sure I could include it in a manuscript of my own. One of my specialist papers for finals centred around trying to return corrupted Latin texts to their original form, an area of scholarship dominated by the poet A.E. Housman, so this babelfish exercise felt familiar.

I really enjoy reading the Fuselit original and translation poems. I notice some translators have tried to find meaning in the garbled babelfish version they were given, in the process producing some wonderfully wayward lines. I thought 'they would know how useless the rain is' was great, particularly as it arose from the innocuous 'until the rain eased off'. Other translators have taken elements of the babelfish version and used them to create an entirely new poem. This latter approach was employed on a poem of my own and I love the result - a piece that's really funny and humane. It also includes an intriguing quirk of translation. In my original version there are effectively three characters, the narrator, Luca, and the city of Venice. In the translation, Venice has disappeared, to be replaced by a new character - Marcus. What interests me about this is that in an early version of the poem, I included the line "pax tibi Marce evangelista meus" (but had dropped this line by the time I submitted to Fuselit). St. Marcus is Venice's patron saint. How did he find his way into the translation, I wonder - the city of Venice effectively taking human form.