Recently I noticed just how much I was missing out on when I saw how many works by Julio Cortázar (1914 ȸ4), one of my favorite writers, have not been translated into English. I may know enough Spanish to get me around Spain on vacation without looking like a total idiot, but I’m lucky if I can count to ten in Russian anymore without throwing in a few Gaelic numerals. I learned Spanish in high school, Gaelic in college, Russian in my free time, and I’m now just beginning to dabble in French. I have something of an ADD problem with languages, and have never gained fluency in any beyond English. My greatest failure as a reader is my inability to read literature in a second language.
