The lovely folk at Pan Macmillan forwarded on the author copies of Nacht über Villjamur, from the lovely people at Egmont Lyx. This month the Germans will be able to visit Villjamur in their own language. I’m excited! It’s a lovely edition – very nice paper quality, if you’re into that sort of thing.
If you live in Germany, you know what to do…
I still prefer to read the books in the original English. 🙂
But tranlsations always help to spread the love. I meet a lot of people from the natural sciences on my commute (the ‘Campus Line’ bus) and a lot of them are reading Fantasy / Scifi / Spec Fic or whatever you may call it in both English originals and German translations.
There seem to be loads of European readers who like to read in English. I’m jealous that people can read so much, so well, in another language!
It’s a traditon, I think. Educated Romans had Greek (and Germans like Arminius had Latin), educated people in the Middle Ages had Latin, in the 18th/19th century it was French, and now it is English. And that one spreads through the media like no other language did before and reaches a broader audience.
Translations also have a gread tradition. Germanicus translated Greek natural science treatiese into Latin (to name just one example), Medieaval French epics got translated into Old Norse, High German, Franco-Venetian and Catalan; the first bible translation was actually not Luther’s German one, but an Old Norse version from the 13th century. Morevover, a translation culture developed in Germany in the 18th century where even great writers in their own right (like Goethe or Schiller) translated texts from foreign languages all the way from Euripides to Shakespeare.
One of the reasons I write in English is the fact that, should I ever get published, there is a good chance for a German translation, but never the other way round. And more people read English. 🙂