汤圆的制作过程Ann Morgan
中央戏剧学院分数线My year reading a book from every country in the world
Posted Nov 2015Rated Inspiring, Informative
It's often said that you can tell a lot about a person by looking at what's on their bookshelves. What do my bookshelves say about me? Well, when I asked mylf this question a few years ago, I made an alarming discovery. I'd always thought of mylf as a fairly cultured, cosmopolitan sort of person. But my bookshelves told a rather different story. Pretty much all the titles on them were by British or North American authors, and there was almost nothing in translation. Discovering this massive, cultural blind spot in my reading came as quite a shock.
00:51And when I thought about it, it emed like a real shame. I knew there had to be lots of amazing stories out there by writers working in languages other than English. And it emed really sad to think that my reading habits meant I would probably never encounter t什么呼什么唤
阿姨的英语怎么说
hem. So, I decided to prescribe mylf an intensive cour of global reading. 2012 was t to be a very international year for the UK; it was the year of the London Olympics. And so I decided to u it as my time frame to try to read a novel, short story collection or memoir from every country in the world. And so I did. And it was very exciting and I learned some remarkable things and made some wonderful connections that I want to share with you today.
镜湖湿地公园
01:41But it started with some practical problems. After I'd worked out which of the many different lists of countries in the world to u for my project, I ended up going with the list of UN-recognized nations, to which I added Taiwan, which gave me a total of 196 countries. And after I'd worked out how to fit reading and blogging about, roughly, four books a week around working five days a week,
02:08I then had to face up to the fact that I might even not be able to get books in English from every country. Only around 4.5 percent of the literary works published each year in the UK are translations,and the figures are similar for much of the English-speaking world.切开的苹果
Although, the proportion of translated books published in many other countries is a lot higher. 4.5 percent is tiny enough to start with, but what that figure doesn't tell you is that many of tho books will come from countries with strong publishing networks and lots of industry professionals primed to go out and ll tho titles to English-language publishers. So, for example, although well over 100 books are translated from Frenchand published in the UK each year, most of them will come from countries like France or Switzerland.French-speaking Africa, on the other hand, will rarely ever get a look-in.
03:05The upshot is that there are actually quite a lot of nations that may have little or even no commercially available literature in English. Their books remain invisible to readers of the world's most published language. But when it came to reading the world, the biggest challenge of all for me was that fact that I didn't know where to start. Having spent my life reading almost exclusively British and North American books, I had no idea how to go about sourcing and finding stories and choosing them from much of the rest of the world. I couldn't tell you how to source a story from Swaziland. I wouldn't know a good novel from Namibia. There was no hiding it -- I was a clueless literary xenop
苏州西山hobe. So how on earth was I going to read the world?
03:54I was going to have to ask for help. So in October 2011, I registered my , and I posted a short appeal online. I explained who I was, how narrow my reading had been, and I asked anyone who cared to to leave a message suggesting what I might readfrom other parts of the planet. Now, I had no idea whether anyone would be interested, but within a few hours of me posting that appeal online, people started to get in touch. At first, it was friends and colleagues. Then it was friends of friends. And pretty soon, it was strangers.
04:32Four days after I put that appeal online, I got a message from a woman called Rafidah in Kuala Lumpur.She said she loved the sound of my project, could she go to her local English-language bookshop and choo my Malaysian book and post it to me? I accepted enthusiastically, and a few weeks later, a package arrived containing not one, but two books -- Rafidah's choice from Malaysia, and a book from Singapore that she had also picked out for me. Now, at the time, I was amazed that a stranger more than 6,0
爱的话语00 miles away would go to such lengths to help someone she would probably never meet.
05:18But Rafidah's kindness proved to be the pattern for that year. Time and again, people went out of their way to help me. Some took on rearch on my behalf, and others made detours on holidays and business trips to go to bookshops for me. It turns out, if you want to read the world, if you want to encounter it with an open mind, the world will help you. When it came to countries with little or no commercially available literature in English, people went further still.
05:51Books often came from surprising sources. My Panamanian read, for example, came through a conversation I had with the Panama Canal on Twitter. Yes, the Panama Canal has a Twitter account.And when I tweeted at it about my project, it suggested that I might like to try and get hold of the workof the Panamanian author Juan David Morgan. I found Morgan's website and I nt him a message,asking if any of his Spanish-language novels had been translated into English. And he said that nothing had been published, bu
t he did have an unpublished translation of his novel "The Golden Hor." He emailed this to me, allowing me to become one of the first people ever to read that book in English.
06:37Morgan was by no means the only wordsmith to share his work with me in this way. From Sweden to Palau, writers and translators nt me lf-published books and unpublished manuscripts of books that hadn't been picked up by Anglophone publishers or that were no longer available, giving me privileged glimps of some remarkable imaginary worlds. I read, for example, about the Southern African king Ngungunhane, who led the resistance against the Portugue in the 19th century; and about marriage rituals in a remote village on the shores of the Caspian a in Turkmenistan. I met Kuwait's answer to Bridget Jones.
