>SEPARATE BUT RELATED TOPIC
>
>Over the years I've taken classes in four foreign languages. I actually enjoy "errors" in the posts here by non-native English speakers. It's an interesting view into the sentence structure and idiomatic use of their native languages.
You may check
http://ndragan.com/sf/index.htm - those are my stories that I translated, while trying to keep the spirit of the original sentence, which wasn't really normal in the original to start with.
And "wasn't ... to start with" sounds so unhandy to me, because English lacks the "which nor was(n't?) normal" (the "nor" being the same word as in "neither - nor").