Wednesday 7 September 2016

Learning a language to savour great works of literature


My experience of reading books has always gone hand in hand with learning languages. I have gone through the pain of withholding from reading certain titles for years only with the purpose of reading them, once ready, in their original versions. This painful but rewarding time-killer is something I've done with works in English, Spanish, French and German and as insane as it may sound I have high ambitions of expanding this further to other five languages. Apart from sharing my experience from reading, I would also like to use Confusio Linguarum to document this translingual journey.

Exhumed archive of stories by Angerhuber - printed back in 2005
I set out to learn German over ten years ago so that to read works of Gustav Meyrink, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Philipp Mainländer and Eddie M. Angerhuber among others. Over this time I have read countless other books in German just to improve my reading skills and to be finally able to savour the works that are high on my list. 

It is high time that I delve into "Eddie" M. Angerhuber's oeuvres - Angerhuber is a writer who  seems to have been on my list almost forever.


If you don't know who "Eddie" M. Angerhuber is you are missing a great deal. German writer of numerous strange stories, translator of the woks by Thomas Ligotti and many other luminaries of weird fiction, she is one of the most obscure and talented voices of horror of this generation. I have just obtained access to her earlier stories (many of them exhumed from old issues of the German magazine Solar-X)  as well as a few hard-to-find collections. From now on, I will be definitely devoting more time to this writer and sharing my experience on Confusio Linguarum as I go on rediscovering her works.
The whole run of the German magazine Solar-X,  Edition SOLAR-X  - in preparation for rediscovery of Eddie M. Angerhuber

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