I've been struggling to read "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge and I think I just realized why I need to put this book down until after the election in the US is over: It's just a little too depressing given the climate of misinformation and horr...
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@futurebird I have almost stopped reading science fiction the last two years, for reasons much like this.
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@futurebird There are two ways my reading habits have changed in the last couple years.
First is that I've tended much more towards historical fiction than sf and fantasy. I've grown much more fascinated with how people used to live, work and relate to each other than with space travel, orcs and magic. *When* I read speculative fiction, I now tend to gravitate towards the more mundane than towards the epic and spectacular.
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@futurebird Second is that earlier this year, I realized that - without ever having made a conscious decision about this - at some point I had started reading exclusively in English. While I was recovering from surgery and spent a morphine-addled week on my couch, I'd gotten a boxed set of an old Danish comic book series from my childhood (figuring that would probably be about what my brain was able to take in), and realized that this was the most I'd read in my native language in over 5 years.
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@futurebird So, I decided I'd start reading more Danish literature this year. The highest point was a Bronze Age epic (that is, a modern author trying to write something that believably *could* be an epic set in among the Sun-worshipping tribes who lived here at that point, right around the time where all the imports from the Mediterranean area started freezing up). But Danish literature tends towards harsh social realism, so there's been a lot of that.
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@futurebird It feels so weird to realize that despite being a very avid reader, I'd basically turned my back on the entire literature scene of my own country and my own language for something like a couple of decades. (Largely because I used to mostly read sf/f, and there is very little of that in Danish - and the Danish writers who often do write that sort of thing often do so in English - a language with 5 million native speakers, of which only a subset reads sf/f, is a small market).
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Not being bilingual I will forever wonder if I wrote a story in English, then translated it myself... would I be able to think of them as the same story?
My instinct is to say... not exactly.
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@futurebird One of the sf I did read this year was Olga Ravn's "The Employees" ... though I read it in Danish, as "De Ansatte". It's set on a starship in the future, but structured as a collection of employee interviews (with both human and android employees).
The tone is *COMPLETELY* different in the translated bits of the English version I've read. (Ravn wrote both; she is a professional translator as well as a writer).
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@futurebird (Notably: The Danish version feels a lot more depersonalized, distant and alienated. Part of this is that Danish has an impersonal pronoun that doesn't exist in English, and the least clunky translation is often "we" ... but that connotes a togetherness and community.
(roughly) "One does not fly out here, one merely drifts" vs. "We do not fly out here, we merely drift".)
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@futurebird @datarama These days I primarily read translated works (usually international literature courtesy of Archipelago Books, or epics, etc.), with dalliances elsewhere, and I am haunted by this. The most I can manage in another language is reading Spanish language literature, of which I grasp maybe 80% of the story and approximately 0% of the wordplay.
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dataramareplied to aaron last edited by [email protected]
@aaron @futurebird That is also where I'm at with Spanish. I've read all Borges' short stories in Spanish, but *a lot* of it (and certainly all the linguistic cleverness) went over my head in a way it didn't in Danish or English. My German is in a similar state: I can read it, but I can't be a reader in it.
(I've read a few books in Swedish and Norwegian over the summer, but those are very closely related to Danish.)
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@datarama @futurebird It is so interesting, I studied a bit of Russian back in the days, and russian books translated to Swedish, sounds more ”Russian” than the same book in English.
In Sweden it used to be common with Swedish translation of books that was translated into English from some other language and one may wonder how different that book is from the original… -
@GoblinQuester @futurebird I read Russian at about the level of a six-year-old, I think.
I read Cyrillic fine, but my actual reading comprehension is terrible. I can read children's stories, but no adult literature.I've read Danish and English translations of Dostoevsky, and felt the tone was *VERY* different ... but I can't attest to which one is more faithful than the other.
