Expected letter to his father
When I read Kafka I feel so blessed being able to read German
It's just something else to read a writer in his native language.
Sometimes I regret not learning French.
@Martin needs to upload more tutorials on youtube
I read Camus, Balzac, Maupassant, Rabelais, Hugo, Proust, Voltaire, Stendhal, Dumas, Montesquieu in French during my youth... and while it's lovely reading an author in his native tongue, unless you are quite fluent in that language a translator likely has done a far better job of it than you are doing in your head, not to mention footnotes and endnotes that explain colloquialisms and references you aren't likely to get. Seeing as my ability with French was never as great as it should have been, I feel that, having read translations of most of these works as an adult, I took a lot more from them. Poetry, of course, is a far different story, and translations are far the most part utterly pointless.
Now Russian is the language I really wish I could have learnt to the point of fluency. Reading Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Chekhov, Lermontov, Gogol, Artsybashev, Goncharov, Gorky, Zamyatin, Bunin, Pushkin, etc in their native language...
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No doubt about that. It's even more obvious when it comes to poetry. There are great translations, surely, but it can't really be compared.
I feel that luck when it comes to Selimovic, Kis, Pavic, Pekic, Andric, Kapor and Crnjanski.
I can't recall... have you read Pynchon yet? I know Gordo and I have both told you to...
