Reading the World Differently: an alternative approach to world literature
A guest post by Jake Penny
In 2015, Ann Morgan’s TED talk ‘My year reading a book from every country in the world’ was released, which detailed her project of reading something from every ‘independent country’. I had been previously unaware of Morgan’s 2012 blog and so when I discovered this idea the gears started turning as I began to think about what a personalised version of this project could look like.
One option was to read a book from every country in Iberoamerica in its original language, but at the time the idea of facing a novel entirely in Portuguese or in some of the Spanish dialects less familiar to me, such as Nicaraguan, seemed impossible. Moving away from original language texts as Morgan does, there was another opportunity to redefine what reading ‘the world’ looked like. I realised that while nation states are familiar divisions of the world as we know it, there is a huge diversity in literature and language that is not reflected by the use of ‘independent countries’ as the bounds. Language has been a special interest of mine since I started learning Mandarin Chinese aged 8, and so for a personalised approach to reading the world, I decided to try and read the world in translation, one language at a time.
One example of the differences between the lists lies in the world’s largest countries. India has 22 ‘scheduled languages’, many of which are spoken by as many people as the population of a large country. Marathi, for instance, is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in Maharashtra, a western Indian state encompassing the city of Mumbai. While it is relatively unheard of in the UK, Marathi boasts as many speakers as the population of Turkey or Iran (approximately 83 million, as these statistics vary) and yet India as a whole sees one title in Morgan’s list, and using languages rather than countries as the criterion, the total number of South Asian writers comparatively triples from four to twelve.
Having decided on my categories, I then set about creating a list. A friend had recently decided to do an A-Z of authors, and so 26 books by language seemed a reasonable task. A is for Arabic, B is for Bengali, C is for… Cebuano? I admit I was not as systematic as I could have been regarding my classification of a language, but ‘Chinese’ encompassed too many different ‘dialects’ to be able to follow this classification, despite the lack of publishing in many of these unofficial languages. Cebuano, spoken across the south of the Philippines was to be the answer for C. Unfortunately, I have been unable to purchase any translated Cebuano literature, so I went with José Rizal’s foundational work Noli Me Tángere, often considered the Philippines’ national epic. The only letter I could not find a language for was ‘L’, no languages having more than eight million speakers. As such a little detective work was necessary to calculate Lao as the most widely spoken language I could find, at 4–5 million first language speakers.
This initial list was somewhat manageable, but a look through the list presented an overwhelming Eurasian bias, which although it is to be expected, did not read easily to me as reading ‘the world’ without a single sub-Saharan African language, despite making up around 16% of the world population. Hausa, as the 30th most spoken language according to Wikipedia, brought me to the decision to include every language up to that point, to compensate for variation in romanisation of many of the languages’ names. As such we have as an extreme five entries for P (Pashto, Persian (Farsi with Dari and Tajik), Polish, Portuguese and Punjabi) and 4 for both M and T, unsurprisingly for anyone aware of phonetic distribution across languages.
When it came to authors, in many cases it was a case of choosing who was available, and I drew from lists such as Ann Morgan’s, as well as Reading Across India for the many South Asian entries. I made a conscious decision to go with a Brazilian author for Portuguese, Machado de Assis being hailed as one of the founders of Latin American literature and someone of mixed heritage. Whenever possible I looked for female authors and translators, with women making up approximately a third of the 45 authors. Some of these names were well known, Banana Yoshimoto and Han Kang both achieving international success, while others, like Lesya Ukrainka, I had never heard of previously.
Following the creation of the list, my next task was to read these books and having taken a year out between going to university and the end of sixth form I had plenty of time on my hands. Almost two years later I’m only a third of the way through, so I can’t begin to approach the claim of having read ‘the world’. Since 2017 I’ve gone through an array of novels, a Ukrainian play, Polish poetry and Quechua songs, and supplemented along the way with Yoruba and Igbo novels (both from the unrepresented Niger-Congo language family), Guaraní short stories read in the original (with a lot of help from my tutor) and course materials which have to greater and lesser extents influenced my feelings towards what world literature has come to mean personally. Wisława Szymborska’s Maps inspired me to give learning Polish another shot and I am now working my way slowly through Schulz’s Cinnamon Shops.
Within the few years I have been working on this project I have seen a large expansion in the availability of books from less translated languages, especially as audiobooks. I would suggest that you pick up a book from outside of the anglosphere and take in the work of both the author and translator, shift your perspective to that of somewhere you have never been and take in some of an alternative literary tradition. The works I’ve mentioned here are only a few, but take people’s recommendations. Don’t be afraid to go on a personal literary exploration of your own.
