Watch Your Language Blog

Reading the World

Two of my favorite things: languages and literature. But if you've ever been a beginner in any language, you know the frustrations of learning everything you need to know to get around Moscow, but still not being anywhere near the level you need to be in order to read War and Peace in the original Russian.

I once went to a Russian bookstore in New York and bought a copy of Master and Margarita in Russian. The bookseller smiled as she rang up my purchase. "You're going to read this?" "Probably not any time soon," I answered. She seemed offended. "What's the point of buying a book if you're not going to read it?"

I didn't know how to tell her that I was being ambitious. That someday I might improve my Russian enough to read Bulgakov, or Tolstoy, or the entire Russian canon. But that "someday" might be a long way off, and until then, the Russian Bulgakov would just be pretentious shelf decoration.

I didn't tell her that I'd already read it — in English, as I'm sure most Americans have. Why was I so afraid to tell her? I should have been proud. Translations are the only way many of us ever get the opportunity to read some great literature written in languages we might never learn, in the languages we have learned but which have gone a bit rusty, or even in languages that are nearly there.

This June, bookstores and publishers are celebrating world literature with an endeavor called Reading the World, now in its third year. There are some fantastic offerings from all over the world, including authors we already know, such as Gabriel García Márquez, and many other authors the English speaking world is being introduced to for the first time.

You never know: reading Natsuo Kirino's crime fiction in English translation might eventually inspire you to learn enough Japanese to read it in the original. "Someday." (SUZANNE)


June 5, 2007