Tuesday, March 8, 2011

[State of the Reader] Reading in Bulgarian

I'm not making the headway I wanted with the edits. I had a very busy weekend, which I spent in the company of other people [yeah, I'm surprised I did that as well] and had very little time to sit down and edit [naturally, the holes that I had filled up with official duty as a marketing maven]. I have nothing to report on that front, but I hope to make a difference this week.

As far as my reading goes, I manage to steal several pages in bus rides or when I decide that my of so worked fingers need to rest. The bizarre coincidence is that my main reads are both in Bulgarian and it's odd to read in my mother tongue. Since I review in English, I prefer to read my materials in English, because of the names. I'm terrible at names and when they are translated, the task grows a lot more complicated.

As is the case with "Game of Thrones". I'm reading this brick in Bulgarian and while the translation is adequate, there are god knows how many names being thrown right from the start. So yeah, I finally got around to working on that project [read GoT and compare it to the TV series as they air episode after episode]. I just hope that I manage to watch the series in order to make it happen, because let me tell you, watching things in Bulgaria is quite the challenge.

For pleasure [yes, I actually hope to read books that I won't have to review] I'm reading a super old edition of "The Birds" by Daphne du Maurier. The translation is from 1983, which makes the book older than I am and the lineup is pretty bizarre, because I can't find all the stories, but that may have to do with the translation rather than anything else. I've watched the Hitchcock movie and now that I'm reading the original novelette, I'm surprised that there is almost no correlation between the text and the motion picture.

2 comments:

Charles Gramlich said...

I read "the birds" years ago but don't remember a lot about it. The movie had some stuff in it based on an outbreak of a bird fungal infection in California. I'm not sure the book was tied in with that.

Harry Markov said...

Yeah, the book [which precedes the movie] is set in the UK and the story is about a provincial family rather than a love story.