I so badly wish I could understand everything in its intended voice. The idea of losing even a bit of nuance to translation no matter how much I learn leaves me quite disheartened. What is missing extends beyond the words themselves to the culture behind them: the exact place and time, its history, what it meant to grow up there; things that cannot always be carried across languages in full. Nuance is not only lost, instead it can also unintentionally distort the author's words. Consequently, fluency does not eliminate distance.

Vladimir Nabokov's relationship with translation interests me as it approaches this feeling. He appears to deeply distrust any translation that attempted to adapt the prose, arguing that this weakens the original text. This approach to translation is heavily polarizing, immortalized through his translation of Eugene Onegin. On the opposite end of the spectrum we have Jorge Luis Borges, who viewed translation as co-authorship, something that paves the way for literary evolution... something that may possibly surpass the original. 

Despite my stubborn, voracious desire to understand every facet of an author's voice and erase the distance created by nuance, I've come to learn that translation is an art in itself. There are so many meticulously, elegantly translated literary works with so much effort and care put into them, unlike anything the world has ever seen before. Alongside these modern translations, learning another language through English, the lingua franca of the 21st century, provides an incalculable number of resources.

I've found myself very thankful to have learned and retained a workable amount of French over the years, and I'm happy to have gotten back into something which has been a part of my life for so long. Watching movies in French surprises me with how much I understand, and I was unaware of how beautiful the music is! Very embarrassed with how much fun I'm having with it when I hated the language so vehemently as I absolutely despised studying it in school. Though to be fair the verb conjugation is fucking stupid.

I wish to further my studies in German as well; such a strange contrast to what French teaches you, being more akin to a puzzle than to the reliance on patterns and familiarity. I love Grimm's Fairy Tales, and we own copies in both English and German, but the original German edition is rife with archaic vocabulary and grammatical structures. Modernized, shortened editions make adapting a lot easier. I want to reach the point where I can read the original, keeping a glossary of modern words and their archaic equivalents.

Anyway... none of this changes the fact that I'll never have enough time to read every book I want to read, and of course, reading multiple translations of one book is quite the task. The audacity of myself lamenting not being able to read books in languages I'll never learn when I haven't even read every English book ever...