The Uncomfortable Truth about Reading in Translation
Plus, reserve your spot at our first live workshop
I remember the poster, though not where I saw it — probably in a library or a bookshop somewhere. Travel The World Through Reading, it read, printed above a bright and cartoonish globe with books spinning round it like satellites. Each book had a little flag sticking out of its spine. That poster summed up everything that rubs me the wrong way about the idea of "reading as travel."
Not that there’s anything wrong with reading globally. I’ve made a resolution to read more books from outside the English-speaking world. But travel, for me, doesn’t let you sit in your favorite chair, sipping coffee while leafing through somebody else’s story. It drops you on your own in the back of a bus, head bumping against the window, trying to figure out where the hell you're going, and realizing no one else speaks your language or cares. It’s being in over your head, maybe a little lost, and out of your element. It’s wondering how you got there and not sure if you want to know the answer. Though I know many folks don’t have the luxury—or the stubbornness, depending on your viewpoint—to get themselves into uncomfortable corners of the world, there's something about calling reading “traveling” that feels, well, a bit easy.
Or so I thought, until I read a sneak peek of Ann Morgan’s latest book. If you don’t know Ann, she’s a UK-based writer who, in 2012, vowed to read one book from every country in the world. She did it (that’s 1.8 days per book) and didn’t stop there. Her year of reading the world turned into a decade, in which she ventured even further off the map, and off the charts of books that the big publishers market. Sailing past the ‘best books in translation’ longlists in places like The New Yorker and The Guardian, she followed local leads, scanned limited run presses and the unadvertised back alleys of academic publishing houses, to discover books that - while they had been carefully translated into English - didn’t really offer many handholds for the Western reader. In fact, some of these books seemed adamantly not intended for outsiders, and said so.
She chronicles this experience in reading in translation with remarkable humility in her latest book, Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not-Knowing, available for pre-order from Renard Press. This book floored me. Though it might sound like a book about reading may, well, not exactly meet my bar for high adventure (especially from my curmudgeonly introduction), the ‘adventure’ in the title is all about what’s happening inside Ann’s brain, and heart, as she sits in her discomfort and tries to tune in to her emotional reactions to learn from these translated texts. I loved this book, and felt deep recognition in frank passages like this one:
How could I deal with jokes that went over my head? Or rituals I didn’t understand? What if happy-ever-after looked rather different in certain traditions – so different that I couldn’t even be sure whether a story had a happy ending? Could I really claim to have read a book that confused me, in which whole passages slid past my eyes without conferring anything other than befuddlement? — Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not-Knowing (working draft)
Book Fails and Findings
I recently got back from a reporting trip to Jerusalem, where two Palestinians and one Arabic-speaking Israeli suggested I read a particular author. It was less of a book recommendation than a secret handshake. A you-have-to-read-this sort of thing. I was intrigued.
If you don’t mind, I’ll leave out the author’s name. It’s embarrassing, because he’s clearly smart and interesting, but I didn’t finish his book. In fact, it shocks me how quickly my enthusiasm turned to confusion turned to boredom. Pretty soon I was flipping pages without absorbing a word. I would have happily forgotten this incident and ignored this little book fail, except that having read Ann’s book, I wonder if part of the reason I couldn’t get into this book was because I felt — unfairly, no doubt — that the author didn’t care if I did. As if the pacing, the humor, the whole vibe of the book was meant for someone else.
Has anything like this ever happened to you? Have you ever picked up a book that people you liked swore was the book, only to feel like you were reading an instruction manual for a machine you don’t own? Or maybe you’ve wanted to branch out your reading, but find yourself circling back to the same well-trodden literary ground?
Well, I have a treat for you.
RT’s First Live Workshop. Reserve Your Spot!
On Wednesday, September 25th, at 12pm EST, join me and Ann and some amazing Rough Translation fans for a live workshop that Ann is creating just for us. She’s been leading these workshops — she calls them “Incomprehension Exercises” — all over the world, and I’m excited she’s agreed to design one specifically for you. Here’s how it works: she picks a few texts from authors that she is certain we won’t recognize, and she guides us through her process, teaching us to pay more attention to the questions that come up inside us as we read. These are the opposite of the “Comprehension Exercises” you might have encountered in school, where books are presented as puzzles to solve. Ann’s approach is all about sitting in the confusion to nurture our curiosity and wonder.
I’ve told her about all of you, and she’s up to the challenge of designing a workshop for this well-traveled crowd. And if all this sounds like going back to school, I promise it won’t be. Having met Ann, I can say that she approaches books the way I try to interview people, with her whole self. I’ve learned a lot from watching her think. Besides, what better way to use a Wednesday lunch hour than hanging out with good people, talking about books and stretching the way we read?
So how do you join?
In order to make this workshop a special experience for a limited number of people, I’m opening it to paid members only. For $5 a month, you can join this and all future livestreams.
Subscribe now to get the workshop reservation link below…