The Next Best Book Club discussion

I was adding georges Simenon (Maigret stories)to the authors I am a fan of and wanted to add some more of his books to mys helves. i came across english ones first and noticed I couldn't add them. Simenon and in particular maigret stories I have to read in French (which isn't my mother tongue). I was wondering if anyone else has this too. I can't think of any other writer I have this with. I read most of the books of writers in English, dutch or Italian whatever the language is that I have the book.

I only speak/read/write English. Living in the US, few of us have any need for a second language, except, perhaps in regions close to the Mexican border, or a small part of the Canadian border with Quebec, and those only for the spoken word. We do ourselves a disservice by not having more widespread fluency in other languages.

I read both in English and Spanish. If the book was originally written in Spanish then I prefer to read it in its original format. Most times when books are translated they tend to lose something.

I would love to learn another language too.

Like most folks here, I am an english speaker primarily. I am an American living in the bilingual American southwest. I stumble through Spanish--I live in a traditional spanish village. Also I know a very little French. But I read prose only in English. My weak language abilities are such that foriegn language prose is too difficult for me.

However, I do like reading poetry in published versions that feature the original language available on the opposite page.

For example, two favorite poets are Arthur Rimbaud and Pablo Neruda.

I have versions of Rimbaud's poetry in English translation(on the left page) with the original French poems on the opposite (right hand) page. The same is true for the books of Neruda poetry that I have--English on the left page, original Spanish on the right hand page.

Having a poem in its original beautiful language is a real treat for me.

I wish I could read french books in French :(

But Portuguese is my mother-tongue, and I´m always reading in English or because I prefer to (like Jane Austen, I´m reading her books all original language), or because there is no translated version.
For exemple, there´s no Portuguese version for: I Capture the Castle, the Sookie Stakehouse Series, Rebecca, Ice Queen (Alice Hoffman), the Shopaholic Series etc, not even Breaking Dawn of Twilight Series lol

I'm fluent in both English and Spanish (Spanish being the first language I spoke), yet I have never read a spanish novel. I've read a lot of articles and textbooks that were in Spanish, just not an actual novel. I feel like I should, though. Two of my favorite books ever are The Hummingbird's Daughter and The Shadow of the Wind and those were originally published in Spanish. I'm thinking that I should pick them up in their original language. Who knows? Maybe something was lost in translation.

Now I can only read English with any ease but back in the day (way back in the day), during my graduate student days, I claimed a fair knowledge of German, French & Italian but I never had the time to read any fiction in those languages except for the last - on a Christmas vacation in Italy, I picked up a anthology of H.P. Lovecraft's stories.

I'd love to learn Russian since I don't know whether my adoration of Chekhov and Dostoyevsky is because of their translators or because of them :-)

I have a hard time reading in Italian, mostly because the styles are so different and I find it hard to get into the flow of the language.

Depends on the author, of course. Pirandello is never a problem. But now I'm trying to read a history of the political party system in Italy and I may have to give up. When one sentence has 10 commas in it I find the experience really trying!!

I give a huge ammount of credit to the translators, not because they make the works better, but because they (when worth their salt) are able to transmit to you exactly what the author was thinking and feeling.

A former boss, now friend, said as I was starting out at my editing job (I had to make sure the translations and the original scientific papers said exactly the same things): the work of a good translator should be invisible; you shouldn't feel that what you are reading has something slightly off (unless the original did too).

I'm not a good translator - I'm slow; I agonize over every word; I try to make the translation better than the original... it's a really hard job.