Over at Bookslut, Adrienne Martini takes issue with translations:
My shunning of works that have been moved out of their original tongue is based on my deep-seated belief that language is a vast and subtle mistress whose will cannot be tamed just because you have a box of shiny baubles to give her. Language and culture are inextricably intertwined. You can’t separate one from the other and you need to have a solid footing in one to fully grok the other.
Which may very well be the case, but, really, what’s the alternative? Either learning to read in the original languages — no small feat, that, even if it was just one — or not reading the books at all? Personally, I would much rather read a book in translation and possibly miss out on some of the nuances that only a native speaker would catch than not read and miss everything.
Martini goes on to write:
The same holds true to a lesser degree for book that are written by other English speakers with whom I do not share a country. Even with writers like Neil Gaiman and Jo Walton, who are incredibly accessible on infinite levels, I still feel that there are tiny bits of information that I’m not picking up on because I didn’t grow up under a Queen’s rule.
Which, I have to say, sounds fairly ridiculous. I don’t know about her, but part of why I read is so that I can encounter those different perspectives, so that I can see a world that’s different from the one I grew up in. If we start excluding books by writers of different nationalities, why not then also exclude writers of different genders, or centuries, races, sexual persuasions, or whatever category we think we can’t relate to? How could I hope to understand anything a black woman in the 1800s might have to say, for instance? What do I know about gay men living in the 1960s? Victorian England? Aboriginal Australia? Turn-of-the-century China? I just wouldn’t get it; why even try?
I agree with Martini that Andreas Eschbach’s The Carpet Makers is not a perfect book, and I will even concede that some of that may be due to translation. Maybe it is a better book in the original German. But I’m still very glad for the opportunity to read it without needing to be a native German speaker.