Anyone else who mainly reads books written in his native language avoiding translations as best as he can?

Plenty of classic translations which are required reading, and translations of much repute that are worthwhile also.

How conceivable is this to do, where you only access foreign thought through secondary writings?

>>24501833
>required reading
If you're at school maybe, not if you read for fun

at the end of the day, if you know, you know you are missing out fr fr on my momma

>>24500622 (OP)
English translations are most of the time superior to the source material, especially if the original is in Spanish, German or Russian

>>24502796
>English translations are most of the time superior to the source material, especially if the original is in Spanish
I pity the fools that think they read Quijote after reading a translation.

>>24502796
Weak bait

Sure, but at some point you're going to have to read some European classics and I don't want to wait learning a dozen of languages.

>>24502821
I respect a guy who is fully embraced is his own language's history and tradition of literature than someone who just read all the word classics because they're part of some random canon.

>>24502796
im fluent in russian and german and this is true lmao. especially dostoevsky, original gets mogged to oblivion even by the worst translation.

>>24502828
Assuming you're European, your literary tradition is intertwined with those of neighbouring cultures, and it makes little sense to disregard these, at least not if you wish to understand native authors in any meaningful depth. The same does hold true for the classics, wherever you happen to be, you're likely reading authors who themselves engaged closely with, not to say pillaged, Greek and Latin sources. It is difficult to overlook them when their influence has been so foundational and pervasive.

>>24502833
I'm a native German speaker and no, this is not true. Can't comment on that Russian part.

>>24502838
Yes, it's intertwined, but that also means that those same ideas and influences get represented in works that were written in your native language. I don't think you have to trace every idea and influence back to its foreign source, if you want to understand your own culture and its impact on it better.

>>24502839
Of course you are not going to admit it, it would hurt your national pride.

>>24502842
It's not just about an idea being available in one language. Most authors are engaging, whether responding, resisting or imitating sources from outside their own language, especially in the post-war era with the increased circulation of material and the emergence of a transnational canon. A lot of writers are missed without reading Homer, Virgil or Ovid. Dante's for example is drawing on the Aeneid, and it's not just an influence, he engages deeply with him, meaning that there'a a wealth of intertextual references and a conscious “play” in subverting and accomodating the original work. There's a strong echo of rhetorics and Cicero in the lexicon and the way characters interact—there's an excellent chapter on this in Erich Auerbach's “Mimesis”—and scholastica in the argumentation part. The whole text is a dense mixture of Roman epic, mediaeval disputation and theology, filled with politics and literary controverse. Reading it without any experience with a single Latin author is just impossible. This is true for most people, there's no Borges with Kafka, no Milton without Dante or Petrarch, no British romanticism without Goethe and Schelling, no Baudelaire or Mallarmé without Edgar Allan Poe who in turn produces T. S. Eliot and Poud, and so on.

>>24502862
Or to put it plainly, how do you read Milton without reading the bible?

I avoid reading books as much as possible. At the end of the day, thoughts came before language. Even native language is foreign and exoteric.

>>24502713
The KJV is not required reading?

>>24501893
NTOP, but I'm currently learning Koine Greek and I hope to learn Hebrew and French after, so that should hopefully minimize my need to read translated works.