Books and translations

Thanks to a certain fantasy roleplaying game *cough* dnd *cough* I am attempting to read THE fantasy book series Lord of the Rings again. Mind you… I have attempted this before with a dutch translation in 3 beautiful paperbacks, but got frustrated halfway through the fellowship of the ring and closed it. it took me months to get halfway. It was a very difficult and hard read for me (pre-adhd diagnose). I thought fantasy would be an easy thing for me to read as I breezed through Harry Potter.

The more I read further into the lord of the rings, the more I have the feeling that I have read an abridged version of the same book as whole parts seemed to be missing, or I don’t remember them like that, but this reading experience seems to be much more enjoyable this time around. This time seems more like a book i would love to finish, and that only because I started to read them in a different language, so good translations do matter.

Sadly, I haven’t read one translation that did the original language justice, so be wary of translations. This is why I studied english up to the point where I can keep this blog not in my original language but in a totally different language, same with Dnd, the game I started playing recently, which I also play with a group of english speaking (and one other native dutch speaker) people, which is so fun and why I urge people to read further than their own language as they will miss certain jokes, certain nuances that are not easily translated or not translatable at all.