Writer's intellectual cramp

It starts with an imaginary email.

From a "regular reader" wondering where you have got to.

Are you still there? Health problems? They haven't silenced your dissident voice (and do we need dissident voices now more than ever?)?

Still here. Exhaustion set in last week, we had a couple of days away visiting friends, came back, the exhaustion has still not gone away, neither has the insomnia, neither have the financial difficulties (€800 that should have been received have not been, but enquiries from the tax authorities have) usw. Ton of work to do. My client in Austria has sent me enough work to keep me busy for 10 days.

Writing? The ideas are as fertile as ever. The expressive powers have gone dormant though. Did Hardy have this problem? Did Dickens, Balzac, Cervantes, Thomas Mann? When Zola was working on the twelfth book of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, did he suddenly find  that the words he needed were simply not there at that point?

There was a piece to translate last week that touched a chord. There was an article that I have wanted to write forever, it would have been the "pièce de résistance"! On aspects of the Holocaust that are rarely discussed, but need to be raised again. Given the rise of creeping Fascism in Europe again, it is a subject that absolutely needs to raised!

If you are going to write a piece on the Holocaust you have to do so in a way that it states that the Holocaust did happen, was real, did occur, absolutely and without question. Those rewriting history to say it didn't are typical of people who rewrite history - it doesn't suit their agenda, therefore it did not happen.

IT DID!

But to write on the subject you need to convince even the sceptics, or at least write in a convincing enough fashion to sound like you have the facts at your grasp. If those people in the Muslim world who now deny the existence of the Holocaust as a Jewish myth - if I told them that if some elements of the extreme nationalist movements in Europe ever get to power, history will repeat itself, but this time round the European Jews will not be the target - but rather the European Muslims? Now will they start looking at the facts and not let their prejudices get in the way?

But when I read the quality of English that I was producing for one of the translations that I was working on yesterday? Would I convince anyone?

Where have my expressive powers gone? Why am I producing tack?  Does Günter Grass ever have this problem, or did Schiller or Goethe?

Words fail me.