Quote:
Originally Posted by SameOldStory
If I told you a translated Yiddish joke from a pre WWII saccharin party would you even understand the "saccharin party" part? Don't bother looking it up. It's not in a Wiki. And if you never knew any big city east European Jews from that time you would never have heard of a saccharin party.
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You're going to leave us in the dark, and not explain a "saccharin party"?
It doesn't take a translation for a book's nuances to be lost to the average reader, even books written in the reader's native language. Topical references and even an immensely changed world view make it hard, if not impossible for the reader to "get" a novel the way a reader from the author's time would understand it.