Scottie Bowman wrote: > French is the one language other than my own that I can > read with moderate ease. And I've had much pleasure not > only from translations of great stylists like Flaubert or Camus > but also, in schooldays, the straight stuff from Daudet, > Maupassant & so on. But, in honesty, I haven't the faintest > idea how these writers really `feel' to a native speaker. > > Indeed, despite my affection for him, I'm sure I miss many of his > nuances too. So much depends on a shared culture as well as > a shared language. When I see how subtly `wrong' Americans or > English, for example, get the Dublin of James Joyce or Brendan > Behan, I despair of us ever really understanding each other. When I first became obsessed with James Joyce and learned that he had used a work of Maupassant's as a crucial model for Ulysses I was devastated to find that it hadn't been translated into English. Still, Joyce taught himself Norwegian so he could read Ibsen's original texts, so what was my excuse?