grylliade.org Free minds. Free markets. Free beer.

the only stuff i've collected, and mostly by accident, are english and american translations of the tao te ching - fascinating to watch them slowly go from early 20th century orientalism curios to serious academic inquiries and all the way into hippie fuckface land. (the last being fond of changing all the pronouns to "she")

i've read both borges and marquez in spanish and english, and at the very least i was glad to discover i wasn't going completely fucking nuts when i finally read the english versions.

It is comparatively much easier to get a translation approaching the original for, say, philosophy or science than for literature or especially poetry. Poetry is what gets lost in translation. An excellent translator can approach the spirit of the original, but the translation is at best only a derivative and usually second rate work of art. Still, I suck at foreign languages and, besides, even those who have a knack for them rarely know more than a half dozen. That leaves an awful lot of world literature (in the broad sense) which you either have to read in translation or miss out on entirely.

OMG, I was just about to write about Stanislaw Lem as well. Last year I read The Futurological Congress and the Cyberiad and was struck at how well the humor came across given that so much of it seemed to be based on wordplay and made up words.

I don't think anyone should let translations get it the way. Sometimes my wife will talk about how amazing Love in the Time of Cholera is, but then mention how it wouldn't be the same outside of Spanish, so the net effect is my not bothering to read it. But I'm sure I would enjoy it anyway; more so if I weren't constantly being reminded that I'm having an inferior experience.

I have a copy of Solaris in Polish, but honestly my friends in Poland scared me off of it. They say they really couldn't understand him, as he was pretty difficult. Hyper-level Polish plus neologisms plus a really dreamlike writing style, apparently.

I did read some Kir Bulachev in Russian, mainly as a translation exercise. My main takeaway from all these things is that Slavs need to learn how to use a goddamn period.

EDIT: It's like they're all having a Proust-alike competition.

I don't think you can translate poetry. Nearly all the foreign language literature in the US is in the form of novels. Russians consider Pushkin their greatest literary figure, not Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Goethe and Schiller are almost unread in the U.S. (I don't know about other English speaking nations), despite the fact that Goethe, at least, should be ranked with Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. I've read the Canterbury Tales in Middle English and in translation to Modern English. As art, the modern translation was useless.

It can be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to translate philosophy. In my experience with German philosophy, you lose an awful lot of the meaning of words. E.g. "gewalt" often gets translated into English as the relatively neutered "force," when it means force as well as violence, or "force/violence."

goethe is still read fairly widely on the university level, though as far as i know mostly selections from faust and sorrows of young werther.

i often wonder if mann is crazy in german, too, or if the delightfully fucked magic mountain got messed up even further in translation.

Ah, I found that copy of the Decameron I'd mentioned. It's the John Payne translation, it truly sucks, and according to a quick Google search Payne's version was considered stilted and crappy even by the standards of the Victorian era when he wrote it. Anyway, the full footnote used to explain the sudden switch from stilted Victorian English to Boccaccio's original medieval Italian in order to avoid mentioning the sexy parts says:

Pompous prudish prick. The whole translation sucks.