Meloves a good bilingual book, especially one with one of my favourite
stories in German: "Die blasse Anna/Pale Anna" by Heinrich Böll.
Some of the works I urge people to read, if they haven't already. Why?
Because they are not like anything else, and each changed me, and for the most
part they aren't completely obvious must-reads, at least not today, so I may
succeed in steering someone toward a book they wouldn't have otherwise picked
up. Böll's is a short-story, so it doesn't exactly fit in this category, but it
fits in my category of works that somehow changed me. This is the first time
I've read this short-story in translation, and it does not "pale" in
comparison with the original. I've written about the pleasure of reading literature in German, when compared to its shadowy counterpart in English (I
imagine the same happens when one translates from English into German).
Some of the stories are so good I think they have been chosen not on academic
and learning grounds but for their literary acumen.
The translations, by
different translators for each short-story, are idiomatic rather than a word-for-word
rendering. This makes this anthology potentially interesting to the general
reader, or at least to anyone curious about post-war German literature and
culture.
NB: I got this in a second-hand bookstore. Sometimes serendipity works in mysterious ways…
