>>7700692>Soviet stuffI lived & worked in Latvia for a while. Met a lot of Russians and ex-Soviets. Most were assholes, some were cool. One guy that was alrite collected a lot of Soviet-era "stuff" (for lack of a better word). In his collection were about 5,000 sci fi books, especially from the 1950s & 1960s. Basically, none of it was translated, just pulp-sci fi published in Russian, very little of which exists anywhere outside of Russia today, and most of which is out-of-print and only ever existed in physical books. He was trying to find time to scan it all so that digital versions would be preserved, maybe translated some day. We talked a bout a lot of weird shit, he was pretty deep and loved sci fi. One of my great regrets in life is I will never be able to read those books. I'm sure many were terrible, but so is a lot of sci fi from around the world. Thing is, even some of the worst sci fi still has a gem or two of an idea in it. No matter the propaganda in the Soviet stuff, there was still a lot of really interesting concepts (from what I gathered talking with him).
>>7700698>Jap stuffSimilar thoughts here. There is so much that has never been translated. I'd love to start a publishing house just to publish translations. If I could do that with Soviet/Russian stuff and German books, it'd be worth it just to have 20,000 or so new books to read.
Fun thing is that lots of it pre-1980 isn't protected by copyright anymore, so it's just sitting around waiting to be picked up, no legal entanglements. And, if you create unique translations, those can be copyrighted in the modern world under the latest copyright laws, which protect those translations for 99 years now. Wish I had the resources to do it.
