Works in translation

Another question I’ve been wondering lately: can a woman who only reads in German ever read Ulysses? Can a woman who only reads in Chinese ever read Virginia Woolf? Can I ever read any of the Russian texts?

I believe the answer is rather obvious but I also think it’s sometimes better not to read a thing in its original form. Sometimes the translation is better, because sometimes you can take an old cliché in one language and translate it more or less literally in a different language and the result is glorious. I’ve experienced this twice, both times from Chinese to English. There’s something sublime in the chemistry between these two languages.

(Whereas I find that Japanese translates quite poorly to English. I almost have to keep trying to think of what it might’ve been in the original in order not to get nauseated.)

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Sometimes it’s a blessing to not know a language, so you don’t feel pressured to read in it. For example, I envy people who cannot read Chinese, who are limited to reading The Three Body Problem in English or German or French. I found the latter three much more agreeable than the Chinese original (the cross section snippets I sampled anyway), because they omitted certain linguistic and cultural nuances which I found tedious and distracting. The presence, for example, of the suffix 儿 to imply that the speaker comes from a certain region & class, this is not able to be translated into any language originating outside of China, and I think the story is stronger for its absence.