Small success and JD. Salinger

What is the best thing that can ever happen to you if
You are new in a country, -fairly new-, and love to read
but somehow you cant enjoy reading in the language of the country
you are now based?


Well, the best thing that can ever happen is what i call the fact of realizing that
“you are loosing the fear of the language”
This sort of respect that you get out of feeling isolated.
When you cant have the words or understand the words
Because all you hear is like a huge humble
Of noise
That makes no sense at all.

What really cool is that after a while somehow your brains starts to play,
as a child who starts getting all the letters
and walks really slow holding on to his mums hand because
he needs to read everything,
read and understand,
What he sees on the street, What he reads near the train´s doors and windows.

Lets say this is the first step.
The second step comes once you lost the fear of reading newspapers and magazines,
and you ask your people if you could borrow this book,
books that you see in shelves which you have read before in other languages,
to see what happens.

If then, the fun starts to appear and
You can read again, visualize what the writer is telling
and get into it in another new language, with its own turns and exact meanings,
you may feel a huge weight leaving your back and brain

And maybe also you realize that the translation you read back then
was a complete piece of garbage.

JD Salinger, El Guardián entre el Centeno
A Catcher in the Rye
Der Fänger im Roggen


I´m discovering how similar can be german to english
And how visually can the words accompany the text. Smoothly or very forced.
Depending on the translation or the idioma they come from.
Saramago used to say to his wife and also translator Pilar when she was
working on a new novel of him that somehow he felt that the spanish didnt
have enough words and Pilar used to get really mad. how can you say that?
a language like spanish, lacking of words, with this richness we have?
but i can see that afirmation as a sign of a writer who has the need of
feeling that he can control the terms and meanings of what he writes.
cielo y firmamento no son lo mismo.

Im really enjoying Der Fänger in der Roggen and Holden wearing his
"Regenmantel" -Raincoat- because somebody has stolen his "Kamelhaarmantel" -Abrigo de lana de camello-.
And the best is, that now comes the "compulsive reading in the new language", where you feel like a junkie playing with a new drug.

How exciting is to dig into the huge amounts of books with that complete new perspective when reading them directly in german?
Rilke, Schlink, Hesse, Brecht, Mann, Schwarzenbach, Nietzsche.
Cant wait! ;)