Bribing Cops

 

Three books I love.  One satirical literary fantasy, one Gothic romance horror, one epic high fantasy.  What do they have in common, aside from being amazing?  They’ve all been translated from another language—in these cases, German, French, and Russian.  And I’m currently rereading The Count of Monte Cristo, which is what prompted this post.

About two years ago, I went on a modern books-in-translation binge, especially Russian books.  Since 2016, I’ve read at least twelve books in Russian translation (the best of which is definitely the aforementioned Chronicles of Siala, beginning with Shadow Prowler by Alexey Pehov, translated by Andrew Bromfield).

One of the most fascinating things about this is one starts to see trends.  Most of the books I’ve read are either British or American (with the occasional Australian/Canadian/Irish/ etc. author thrown in).  Every nationality and culture has its own unique flavor, but all of these, ultimately, came out of the British empire, and so aren’t that different.  I’ve had a little more diversity through editing—I’ve edited for quite a few native Chinese speakers, whether they now live in China, Singapore, the U.S. or elsewhere—but my only real encounter with Russian culture was the semester of Russian I took my first year of college.  (And Russian Sherlock Holmes, of course).  Then I later had more exposure through a friend of mine who is a professional chess player and teacher (and with whom I wrote Game of Kings.)  But learning about a culture in class or hearing funny chess stories is much different than engaging with literature.

Here’s an example:

In every Russian book I read, police officers and guards could be bribed.  Almost all of them, almost always.  Didn’t matter if the books were high fantasy, sci-fi, or low fantasy, you could bribe law enforcement.  In none of these books was this made a big deal of; it was simply a fact of life.

Compare this to British/American stories.  When you find any bribable cop, he’s the exception, and scandalous.

That’s one of the fascinating things, to me, about reading books from less familiar cultures, especially in translation.  Not only will a good translator give you a taste of the language, the writer will give you a taste of something foreign—not through explaining it to you as in a class, but through trends of basic assumptions.

(Well, that and the fact that you have a higher probability of finding higher quality books in translation, since otherwise no one would have bothered to translate them.)

And through those basic assumptions, you begin to see your own assumptions—which may be more or less interesting.