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Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft | Hacker News Reader

Dunno. I can't read Russian for shit (pre-kindergarten level, I'd guess), but it seems like cheating to read it in English.

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I can't imagine how much amazing and important literature you'd miss if you were snobby enough to think that you could only read things in their original language.

I'm so glad I get to read the Russians and Kafka and Calvino and Murakami and Camus and Marquez and Homer and Plato and, heck, the Bible.

I do know the feeling. I struggled through the start of My Brilliant Friend because I ought to read it in Italian, because I speak it pretty well. So then I didn't read it for years. Finally I just read it in English and enjoyed myself.

Aww, I loved My Brilliant Friend (but I've never studied Italian at all, it was translation or nothing for me).

There’s a Milan Kundera essay (having trouble locating atm) about how most of the great writers, including the Russian greats, read the literary canon exclusively through translations (Shakespeare for example) and were no less intellectually rewarded for it.

Translation is an art I think equal to authorship. Someone below mentioned My brilliant friend which was originally written in a Neapolitan dialect but the English translation, at least for me specifically, is a monumental achievement.

Here's the essay: Die Weltliteratur (2007) http://archive.today/1M3Q3

Thanks for sharing! I probably last read it in 2010 so I’ll have to see if my interpretation of it holds up.

A translation is by necessity a work of both the author and the translator. There have been some amazing pairings such as Kafka translated by Edwin and Willa Muir. I don't think a translation necessarily diminishes the original work or the reader.

I have Crime and Punishment in both languages, in the same book, page for page. So you can always fall back to English if you get lost. It also has (or I remember it having, I don't have it at hand) extensive translation notes, useful for non-obvious idioms and cultural/contemporary references.

If you can read more than one language, try reading translations into two or three different ones. It'll give you a different view of a book you enjoy: the translations will all have a different feel, in my experience.

some portion of this is based on your own relationship with the language, the people and contexts you use it in and learned it in, and your familiarity with this langugage. This is not only okay, its actually cool as all heck. It's being read the same novel by a stern father, a passionate lover, and a friend in the pub doing stupid voices to make you laugh.

I know the feeling. Reading Don Quixote in English would be cheating.

Then again, so would reading Shakespeare in Spanish - even though I'm more comfortable reading in eng, I'm better in Spanish than i am 500 year old English

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