Welcome back to Hardcore Literature, your favourite book club.

Deep dives into the greatest books ever written.

Provocative poems, evocative epics, and life-changing literary analyses.

We don't just read the great books. We live them.

Together we'll suck the marrow out of Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy and many more.

We'll relish the most moving art ever committed

to the page and stage from every age. Join us and me, your host, Benjamin McAvoy, on the

reading adventure of a lifetime with hardcore literature. Welcome back to hardcore literature,

and today we're talking about a topic that's very near and dear to my heart.

We're talking about how to read world literature in translation.

How do you pick the right translated work?

Indeed, should one learn the language in order to read its literature?

This is a very precious topic to me because my love of

literature is a love of world literature. I love all the literature. You might already know that I

studied English language and literature at Oxford University. I got in off the back of my deep discussions of German books, French books,

all the different Russian writers. That's what got me in. And I don't know why I thought this. I suppose

I was young, the folly of youth. I thought that English literature would be an avenue to all

the writers that I loved. And what I found was actually the course basically forbade you to go and

broach outwards and read anything that wasn't English through and through. They were telling you

you had more than enough on your plate becoming an expert in English literature. And what I found was, although there were many great writers in English, that cannot surely be denied. What I found was, apart from Shakespeare, who I loved through and through, who I've always loved, ever since I was little, ever since I first picked up

a book who I love dearly today, who I seem to love more and more each day, apart from him,

there weren't that many authors that I was excited about. Whenever I thought, oh, I'm going to do a

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