A Great Advantage of Being Competent in Another Language

My cousin was over from France this weekend. She speaks fluent French, though she’s got to do that through living there not through a formal education like I have. It doesn’t actually matter what route you get there by. But we’re both fluent and can read as easily in French as we can in English.
Being able to read like that means that there is some literature we can access that other people can’t. Not much is translated into English. Those who only speak English therefore, see very little of the forms of literature, different form our onw, which are available in other languages.
For example, Olivier Adam in his book “On Ira Voir la Mer », Paris, Médium, 2002, really gets into the mind of a delinquent like nobody else does. Hervé Jaouen’ s “Mamie Mémoire”, Paris Gallimard, 1999, explores what it is like living with a relation who has Alzheimer’s . Then there is the format of book produced in Belgium which is just not known here : the hard-back picture book / graphic novel written for young adults which contains a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, for example: Guibert, Emmanuel and Didier Lefèvre, « Le Photographe Tome1 ». Dupuis: Fleurus, 2003. All of Amélie Nothomb’s work is extraodinary and also unfortunately not translated.
There are of course also examples in Spanish and German and no doubt in several other languages I don’t speak. What a wealth of thought we miss out on by being monoglot, and monglot at that in such a dominant language.
See also my Ph D thesis « Peace Child, Towards a Global Definition of the Young Adult Novel ».