I work with a translated version of Treasure Island. It was translated in 1910 and has archaic terms. RL Stevenson is not nearly as compact as Old Man in the Sea. So google has twice the load. I have to work closely with Spanish Dictionary, the official, current version of the language, but it will translate about have the archaic terms. The other half I have to derive by stem word. However, after two chapters I had a sufficient word list in my flashcards that I could go ahead and read fairly comfortably. After a few days I have them ready to sale.
About half the old stories and children stories and good stories seem to be near the sea, Hemingway, Stevenson, Steinbeck and more.
And all of them, including the old Spanish short stories, have a small village with an inn and weird people show up and start adventures. It is much different than reading the newspapers. In the case of Treasure Island, I never really read it, just skimmed it well enough to fake it. Now I go through it in detail, back to word roots; even reading the first two chapters three or four times.
Reading in Spanish provides much more insight because Spanish has a complete grammar, it is not a compact, and has all the tenses and persons and orientations needs to map into most of the other languages. So, after a good translation it becomes quite clear who did what to whom with what and when and are they still doing it. I have the knowledge of that part of Spanish grammar that has not been filled in, like I can tell right away no one is planning something in the future, the spots are obviously not filled in. The reader can see the path, she can observe all the possible actions that might come next, it is in the structure and the structure must be made whole.
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