Ever read anything both in translation and in the original? I’ve read “Mateo Falcone” and “The Little Prince”, both in English and French, in high school.
Does New Testament Bible Study count? Aside from that, a few works in Latin and Classical Greek.
yeah everything I read in Latin and Greek I also read in English
Same here. Also some stuff in German - Die Verwandlung/The Metamorphosis by Kafka, and Der Besuch der alten Dame/The Visit by Friedrich Durrenmatt.
Regards,
Shodan
Apparently that’s a favorite with high school German teachers - I read it too.
The Little Prince and Cyrano de Bergerac. Also The Inferno.
About the only things I’ve read in both English and the original are some works by Gogol, since I was using parallel texts to write a paper. Except for some Asterix comics, all of the other Russian and German stuff I’ve read has been in the original only.
The entire works of Saint-Exupery.
Several short stories by Guy de Maupassant.
Callahan’s Crosstime Salon in both the original English and a French translation, which title was, if I recall correctly, “Le Bar Sur Le Coin De Temps”
I read Cyrano de Bergerac both in French (for high school French and a college theater class in English).
I also read Alfred Bester’s The Computer Connection in both languages. The French title, for some reason, was Les Clowns de l’Eden; it’s a line in the book, but the choice of title is inexplicable.
Does Middle English count? I took a couple classes of medieval literature, and some of the older ME texts I had to use side-by-side texts to get through.
I’ve read a number of books in both English and French, including The Red and the Black, The Counterfeiters and The Plague. Also a number of works by Ionesco (The Bald Soprano, Rhinoceros) that are unintelligible in any language.
For perhaps the most unusual nominee, I own (and have read) a copy of Les aventures de Tom Bombadil with facing-pages French translation and original English version.
I’m a big fan of improving foreign-language reading knowledge by reading works you’re already familiar with in your own language, so the list continues with practically every language I’ve taken a stab at over the years.
Also in both French and English, I’ve read Dumas’ Three Musketeers novels, a couple by Andre Gide (Immoraliste/Immoralist, La porte etroite/Strait Is the Gate) and some of the Asterix comic books. Oh, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
German/English: Nietzsche’s Also Sprach/Thus Spake Zarathustra and the first part of Goethe’s Faust.
Dutch/English: A few of Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver mysteries, and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
Hindi/English: Got partway through the Hindi version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
And for pretty much anything I’ve read in a classical language (Latin, Greek, Arabic or Sanskrit) I’ve either read an accompanying English translation or written one.
I read a number of Maigret stories in French and then in English and a few Asterix graphic novels too (notably, En Bretange). That was in days that I still thought I could learn French.
The Harry Potter series in English (all 7 books), French (first four), Italian (first one), and Welsh (first one). The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in English, French, Spanish, Italian. Quite a few other children’s books written in English and then translated into French or Italian—I find it’s a great way to build vocabulary with minimal effort. For things written in something other than English, generally if I have read both it’s been to help with my own translation for a class, or it’s been a very short excerpt.
I read Canadian statutes and Supreme Court judgments in either language, as needed.
Of course, neither one is the original or translation; just different versions.
I’ve also read Agatha Christie en français.
I’m surprised no one has read Don Quixote in both English and Spanish.
Most of Haruki Murakami’s work in both Japanese and English. The only title that came close to encapsulating the original was, IMHO, “Norwegian Wood”.
I read a lot of Disney Comics growing up, and when I lived in Brazil for a couple of years in high school, I read a lot of comics there as well. Some of them were Portuguese translations of stories I had read before. I actually read Carl Barks’s famous *Lost in the Andes* in its Portuguese translation first, and didn’t read the original English version until a couple of years later. Some of the differences were interesting, most notably the Portguese translator’s completely ignoring the punny name “Plain Awful” (It was translated as “Quadrópolis,” or “Square City”) as well as the residents’ phonetic Southern accents (they instead spoke standard Brazilian Portuguese), which took away a lot of the humor.