>>9800771>Exactly which books did you want to learn German for, if you had any in mind?Some poetry, mostly. Even if translation alters prosaic text's features in one way or another and therefore slightly distorts author's initial idea, these distortions are still far from crucial. But when it comes to poetic texts there's hardly any point in translating them at all other than just to acquaint a reader with the poet since aesthetics usually play much bigger role there than they do in prose, and therefore not a single word must be changed, which is impossible to do during translation. And I wanted to read some stuff by Heine, Liliencron and Rilke
>I found it very impressive how well he could portray such a character in NotesI'd say he consciously put more emphasis on that in the Notes, but since this style can be traced in pretty much anything by him that I've read, I still think that it was his general manner of writing
>I can see how that can backfire. If you overdo it it will seem forced instead of truly tragic.Fortunately, most of the time Dostoyevsky keeps it on the edge so he rarely gets to this point, but it's still extremely annoying if you ask me.