Unsolicited Advice

Translating written work is one of my most, and least, favorite things. On the one hand, I hate reading things in translation. It's just not the same. Particularly since the sorts of fiction I like tend to be full of puns and wry, clever phrasing -- it's just not possible to get both the tone and the content of the joke the same every time. 'Stuff I can't read' is one of my very biggest pet peeves, and because I am crazy, every time I run into something I desperately want to read and can't I fix the problem by learning another language. My taste in literature runs to old and drôle , so the tongues I have cover most of the series I know about, but I'm sure I'm missing a fantastic line of snarky adventure novels in Indonesian or something. Because I have had my nose in the Arsène Lupin books again, and I have a number of friends who don't speak very much French who would nevertheless love the things, I have sat down to try to bring some of the storie...

The nice thing about ebooks is that they come from all over the world. It's ridiculously difficult to get foreign-language works in the US. If it ain't English, it ain't here. There are the occasional exceptions, but you really have to get up to the notoriety of "The Little Prince" or "Don Quixote" before anyone will stock a work in anything but the English translation. Consequently, a lot of the stuff I read, I can only get by shipping things from halfway around the world, or electronically. I do the former occasionally; one of the most expensive non-class books I've ever bought was a first-edition printing of „Die unendliche Geschichte”, the original source of "The Neverending Story" that was made into the film I remember so fondly from my childhood. It's a beautiful piece on its own -- the German edition is printed in green and black, will full-page illuminated capitals at the start of each chapter. I have another Ende book also, ...