I've been quietly growling at my library app for the last hour because I came to a really irritating realization, and now I need to gripe about the state of Danish literature.
Every now and again, I get it into my head that I should read some more books in my native language - I read so many stories, but they're all in English, and I wouldn't want my native to atrophy. And then I actually try to read something written in Danish and immediately remember why I hate it.
About half the books on our shelves are translations from an original text written in English, and each and every translation fucking sucks. I think the problem is that English and Danish are just similar enough that the translator thinks they can just translate words and phrases directly, because they mean roughly the same in Danish and they do try to stay as true to the original text as possible. Only that does not. Fucking. Work.
English uses a bunch of phrases that sound deeply off when you translate them directly, even though the meaning is quite clear. It also uses a bunch of words that, yes, do mean roughly the same in Danish, but we would never ever use them in that context. The result is a text that sound like it was written by a space alien, and it does the original text a disservice by making it sound like it was written by someone who couldn't write. This has been a problem for a long time, and hasn't gotten any better.
But that's not the most grievous problem with Danish books. The most grievous problem is that THE FUCKING DANISH AUTHORS HAVE STARTED WRITING THAT WAY TOO NOW.
Because English media is so popular, Danish authors have English books as their main source of inspiration. So if they want to phrase something cool like they read about in that book one time, they reach for an English phrase and try to mentally translate it.
And I can hear it when they do that every goddamn time. Whenever I see a sentence where I go, "huh, that's a weirdly clumsy way to phrase that", I mentally translate the sentence into English and go "ah. That's why."
So now even the books that were written IN DANISH by a DANISH GODDAMN AUTHOR sound like a bad translation. It is blindingly fucking frustrating.
There are genres where it's more of a problem than others. Romance and fantasy are the most heinous for it, and there are indeed some genres that are completely free of it. They're just not my cup of tea either.
Denmark has a whole genre of books that all fall under the heading of "I've had a mediocre life and am being philosophical about it". It's all uniquely Danish flavored navel gazing published by literature graduates, it's all very well written, and it's so tedious I can never get through a single one of them.
We also publish a crapton of crime novels, and while they're also heavily inspired by English language literature, their translations are a lot better for some reason. I just don't like crime novels.
I like speculative fiction and magical realism, so I've resigned myself to the fact that this genre will remain garbage in my native language for as long as all the Danish authors only read English books.
As a result, I, too, will only read English books.
Fuck.
