/lit/ - Literature

Even if you speak a relatively large language like French or German, the quality and volume of the translation work is dwarfed by the anglos. The only exception is native literature, of course. Obviously the French editions of French works will be better.

>>19652294
>NOOOOOOO NOOOOOO YOU CANT JUST RELY ON THE MOST KNOW LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD THATS NOT FAIR
Seethe pseud. I'll read the Iliad, the aeneid, the song of Roland, the brothers kasmarov, and everything else in English and I'll have read the same thing you did without having to learn a worthless language

>>19652294
EOPs will never learn, OP. They are so extremely buck broken by either being born *nglophone or been subjected to American cultural propaganda since childbirth.
English is a disgusting creole language taking all the bad from latin, germanic and celtic and none of the good parts from those languages.
It's outright laughable that I see people here act like they know anything about philosophy when they're relying on English translations (Hegel, Kant and Kierkegaard in English is borderline incomprehensible and a huge insult to their works).

If you can't read at least 2 languages other than English, you're never gonna make it.

You're only right in that people could use the chance to learn a new language when reading a work they're interested in in its original language, but that's about it, really.

>>19652294
For me, it’s reading in Spanish.

>>19652294
>de anglo

Machen für das Deutsch gut?

>>19652380
Machen das Gut, ja und ja!

>>19652353
>EOPs will never learn, OP. They are so extremely buck broken by either being born *nglophone or been subjected to American cultural propaganda since childbirth.
>English is a disgusting creole language taking all the bad from latin, germanic and celtic and none of the good parts from those languages.
>It's outright laughable that I see people here act like they know anything about philosophy when they're relying on English translations (Hegel, Kant and Kierkegaard in English is borderline incomprehensible and a huge insult to their works).

>If you can't read at least 2 languages other than English, you're never gonna make it.

>>19652309
French and German editions of books are of astonishing quality when compared with English editions.

>>19652343
based

>>19652294
I agree but wouldn't it be preferable to read the English translation when the original was written in a Germanic language?

>>19653075
Seethe, resentful anglo

>>19654566
Jein. There are some basic rifts which make a lot of things disappear or transform in between German and English. King James' witch of Endor was glossed from Pythia to witch because the Insular monks glossed Pythia in a Celtic language, and in James' mind, this meant witches and witchcraft had biblical proof. Luther on the other hand maintains the Pythia is a Pythia in the traditional sense of a seer or prophetess, and the ghost is not a result of her or Samuel's power but the devil's ghost. Most of the wordplay that exists in German for debt and guilt also ceases to exist in English translations of Nietzsche. The amount of false friends you would run up against even between German and English in their early modern forms would be immense. And if you won't learn German, you definitely aren't going to learn old English for the "Germanic" similarity of English to have any real room to be at play.

>>19653075
he's right you know

>>19652294
English is a good language.

>>19652294
If i know a work's native language i'll read it in that. Otherwise i go for the English translation because they're usually far better than the one in my native language.

Sometimes I compare translations in Portuguese and English and it's a lot more comprehensive in English. Brazilian translators like using archaic words for the sake of showing off. The same applies to contemporary novels - it's not a story, it's the author showing you how smart he is. Unfortunately I've been cursed by being born here and learning this godforsaken language.

>>19652294
Only like a 2 million people speak my native language. You think some dude has translated the entire works of Wolfe or whatever in it? No.
I had to get good at English to read and it's the few things I'm glad about from my public factory education.

Do some countries really teach certain languages in school? I thought it was something you had to practice daily and put effort into immersing yourself into said language. When I look back at my middle/high school years, I feel like I really only learned some stuff in the final two years - and that was in one specific subject I was interested in.

Now you're telling me that some of you guys got an extra language for free? Without all the self-discipline?

>>19652294
Slit your throat my friend. Not one language in the world has the equivalent of Penguin Classics, Oxford Classics, Loeb Classical Library and Everyman's, there are similar formats in other major languages of course, but nothing on this scale: affordability and availability, quality and classiness. American publishers, NYRB and New Directions, did more for non-English European writers than anyone on the Continent in their puffed-up provincialism. I would abandon my own language for ever just for a Dalkey Archive catalog.

>>19656715
Nobody learns a language in that way

>>19656856
kek, what's your native lang?

>>19656856
>English is good because of cultural imperialism
imagine unironically being this buck broken

>>19652294
>>19652353
>written in English
Nice concession, buck

>>19657182
>written in the current lingua franca of the world

you are so smart dude

>>19656856
>he doesn't know about the gallimard stranglehold
>he probably doesn't even know olympia
lol k

>>19652309
Not true at all. Anglos are used to only reading their own authors, that's why this place is full of DFW, Pynchon, Nabokov, McCarthy, etc. (though /lit/ is unusually open to other languages -- reddit is even worse). Other languages have long traditions of translation -- see Le Monde's list of the 100 best books of the 20th century for reference.

>>19652309
>quality
false
>volume
true

This is the only advantage English has. Sheer volume.

>>19656856
What's your native language then? English can be discounted entirely just by it not having Cartarescu, let alone everything else it's missing. Dalkey isn't special, you're just suffering from a lingual inferiority complex -- look around for small presses in your language and you'll find many.

>>19656715
English lessons in school don't actually make you an English speaker by themselves. You still need to put effort in and make yourself use it.

>start with the greeks -- a greek

What are the most concrete things in any language? Probably things like verbs and adverbs. Anyway, there's a handful of things that actually completely constrict you in a language. With the luxury of writing a book you're not confined by a social context and can just write how you want regardless of how confusing the vocabulary might be to the reader because they have the power to get the hang of it by continuing to read the book or reading it again.

But language is still textured by its origins so English is still a particular culture. But people who speak English created all the standards for the global culture born from globalism so English is actually the best universal language no matter what any autist says about French or German or Chinese or whatever dumbass language they like to imagine as the alternate universal language of the world. One day we'll all speak Chinese though. You won't own anything and you'll be happy.

>>19657752
>Probably things like verbs
English places a much stronger emphasis on verbs and their subject/object relationships than a lot of languages. The lack of a commonly used passive in English usually means that English speakers convey more blame and personal responsibility to actions which in other languages would have to purposefully construct such a relationship.

>>19652294
No can do, friendo.
I'm Dutch and my language is pretty insignificant on an international level. Sometimes translations just straight up do not exist, and when they do they're very likely to be of lower quality than an anglo translation due to the fact they have a much smaller audience and are subjected to way less scrutiny.

>>19652294
>just read books in your own language when 99% of all books youve shown the slightest interest in have neither been written in nor translated to it bro
thanks /lit/, fucking meme board for children and 18 year old new york urbanite onions drinking faggots

>>19658153
>lit/, fucking meme board for children and 18 year old new york urbanite onions drinking faggots
Does anyone have the NYC green text?

>>19658153
>not learning a language in order to read interesting literature
I think you are the 8 year old here, anon.

>>19657904
I think it's the opposite. In languages where a certain feature is stronger than in other languages, speakers will understand that it's just a linguistic feature and not reflective of reality.
We can see this with the Latinx phenomenon in America, where white English speakers think that hispanics dislike the term latino because they think it ignores women. But Spanish speakers know that grammatical gender is just a part of the language, not a creation of the patriarchy.

>>19658199
>white English speakers
No, it's just onions guzzling urbanites that think that, and we already know they're pretty much completely disconnected from reality.

>>19656856
you are an embarrassing cuck. Immigrate to Canada please.

>>19652294
>He still doesn't accept that English is Lingua Franca
>He still bitches about ESL

Look dude, you lost this one. The language of the future isn't gonna be Chinese or Indian, and its certainly not gonna be any of the European languages. Europe's day is done - you guys had a good run but now its over.

You don't have to bow before the greatness of Burgerstan, but you could at least acknowledge that it won the role of World Protagonist about 70 years ago and that hasn't changed since. There's nowhere left to go from here but downward, since the only possibility for next protagonist is China, and no self-respecting human being wants to live with, around or near anything Chinese.

>>19653075
wojak posters deserve to be put on a cross

>>19658210
>Entire generations of children being systematically indoctrinated by the education system that you voted in, pay for and allow to continue to exist
>Be surprised when your children turn out to be dumbasses
>Blame the kids and not the adults
You get what you pay for. No exceptions.

>>19658260
>and its certainly not gonna be any of the European languages.
English is a European language.

>>19658290
I was genuinely confused over his post until I saw your post. Like... it's not Chinese and it's not one of the European languages, so it's... Arabic? Swahili? Don't Americans know that English is European?

>>19652294
Is the payoff that good, really? I can speak decent French and Russian but not good enough to read a decent book in it. I might restart learning them if it's truly that good

I'm 99% sure these threads are always made by germoids, frogs, spaniards or russkies. You wouldn't make this argument if you spoke a sub .5% language and were frequently faced with shitty translations or a complete lack of them.

>>19656611
This

>>19656715
English, German, French etc
99% of schools only teach one of the above and 99% of those schools exclusively teach English
Every single language teacher is an utter troon thats at the absolute most is semi-fluent, and he tries to teach the language at hand with a class of 40 disinterested kids and only 1-2 hours a week to work with, so if you're actually expecting to learn the language properly you're shit out of luck. It doesn't help that they, without exception, are required by the education ministry to explain all the retarded tiny parts of grammar (which you can easily bypass by just immersing and skimming through grammar books when learning by yourself)
I thought they taught you shit like spanish over there in murica?

>>19657904
Good point, polite phrases and figuring out how to not imply discontent or anger with people is not very straightforward in English. A language i.e. Japanese seems to offer more memorable, exact appropriate phrases. The difficulty of English in this regard depends on how autistic or intrinsically social you are.

>>19652294
True, but you can't find pdfs of uncommon books in your original book, well you can but it's way harder, and that's especially true if your native language is croatian or something.

>>19656856
Germany has Reclam and Suhrkamp. Their covers are fantastic as well.

>>19656715
Im a native German speaker and I had French and English in school. I learned 99% of my English online and I know like 3 sentences in French. School is terrible for this kind of thing.

>>19659098
Same experience as a frenchman, and I learned later on that this didn't apply only to languages but just basically everything, learned more online than in all my years in a private catholic school.

>>19658349
those are some amazing deductive skills, my retarded friend

>>19652294
I don't really have a problem with "neutral" Spanish, even though the words they pick are in the 70% of the cases, different in my country. But when they are angry and insult or use lingo it's unbearable

I'm learning russian so hopefully I'll be able to read russian literature in a decade or so
Probably a waste of time but I find it to be rewarding and it's helping me keep my mind sharp after the monotony and misery of covid lockdowns and years of isolation destroyed my mind
I've stopped reading russian literature now, the next time I read it it will be in russian only
Am reading a lot of russian history though

>>19652353
Exacto: ingles es lengua germanica-cum-latina. Producto final: lengua creole & mestiza.

>>19660119
Sounds like you're criticizing the Mexicans or, vice versa, the Spaniards. No one criticizes the Argentines, they're too exceptional.

There are many thousands of good books that unavailable in my language, or at the very least hard to procure.

I normally pick the language that is closest to the origin of the work. I know English, Russian and Japanese, so I'm mostly covered.

>>19660182
Nice anon, I can't imagine how it must feel to have so much literature open up to you because you learnt a language

>>19660171
Well, I'm Argentinian and let me tell you Argentine writers don't actually write 100% like argies do and translations are usually done in neutral Spanish because the argie market is small. Using "vos" for example, isn't seen as "literary", they use "tú" (well, most writers at least) and therefore the conjugate verbs like a foreigner. But using our speaking manners for literature isn't seen as something adequate, unless you want to specifically write something with an argie feeling/story/context. That's rooted in my brain, so I prefer neutral Spanish for reading, but at the same time I can't connect or relate with that language completely

>>19658290
English is more Indian than european.

>>19657572
>Cartarescu
Anon, I...

>>19660239
Quite right, English is the closest language to Sanskrit barring possibly Hindi.