BBC:Reading the world in 196 books

Writer Ann Morgan set herself a challenge – to read a book from every country in the world in one year. She describes the experience and what she learned.

I used to think of myself as a fairly cosmopolitan sort of person, but my bookshelves told a different story. Apart from a few Indian novels and the odd Australian and South African book, my literature collection consisted of British and American titles. Worse still, I hardly ever tackled anything in translation. My reading was confined to stories by English-speaking authors.

So, at the start of 2012, I set myself the challenge of trying to read a book from every country (well, all 195 UN-recognised states plus former UN member Taiwan) in a year to find out what I was missing.

With no idea how to go about this beyond a sneaking suspicion that I was unlikely to find publications from nearly 200 nations on the shelves of my local bookshop, I decided to ask the planet’s readers for help. I created a blog called A Year of Reading the World and put out an appeal for suggestions of titles that I could read in English.

The response was amazing. Before I knew it, people all over the planet were getting in touch with ideas and offers of help. Some posted me books from their home countries. Others did hours of research on my behalf. In addition, several writers, like Turkmenistan’s Ak Welsapar and Panama’s Juan David Morgan, sent me unpublished translations of their novels, giving me a rare opportunity to read works otherwise unavailable to the 62% of Brits who only speak English. Even with such an extraordinary team of bibliophiles behind me, however, sourcing books was no easy task. For a start, with translations making up only around 4.5 per cent of literary works published in the UK and Ireland, getting English versions of stories was tricky.

Small states

This was particularly true for francophone and lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) African countries. There’s precious little on offer for states such as the Comoros, Madagascar, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique – I had to rely on unpublished manuscripts for several of these. And when it came to the tiny island nation of Sao Tome & Principe, I would have been stuck without a team of volunteers in Europe and the US who translated a book of short stories by Santomean writer Olinda Beja just so that I could have something to read.

Then there were places where stories are rarely written down. If you’re after a good yarn in the Marshall Islands, for example, you’re more likely to go and ask the local iroij’s (chief’s) permission to hear one of the local storytellers than you are to pick up a book. Similarly, in Niger, legends have traditionally been the preserve of griots (expert narrators-cum-musicians trained in the nation’s lore from around the age of seven). Written versions of their fascinating performances are few and far between – and can only ever capture a small part of the experience of listening for yourself.

If that wasn’t enough, politics threw me the odd curveball too. The foundation of South Sudan on 9 July 2011 – although a joyful event for its citizens, who had lived through decades of civil war to get there – posed something of a challenge. Lacking roads, hospitals, schools or basic infrastructure, the six-month-old country seemed unlikely to have published any books since its creation. If it hadn’t been for a local contact putting me in touch with writer Julia Duany, who penned me a bespoke short story, I might have had to catch a plane to Juba and try to get someone to tell me a tale face to face.

All in all, tracking down stories like these took as much time as the reading and blogging. It was a tall order to fit it all in around work and many were the nights when I sat bleary-eyed into the small hours to make sure I stuck to my target of reading one book every 1.87 days.

Head space

But the effort was worth it. As I made my way through the planet’s literary landscapes, extraordinary things started to happen. Far from simply armchair travelling, I found I was inhabiting the mental space of the storytellers. In the company of Bhutanese writer Kunzang Choden, I wasn’t simply visiting exotic temples, but seeing them as a local Buddhist would. Transported by the imagination of Galsan Tschinag, I wandered through the preoccupations of a shepherd boy in Mongolia’s Altai Mountains.  With Nu Nu Yi as my guide, I experienced a religious festival in Myanmar from a transgender medium’s perspective.

In the hands of gifted writers, I discovered, bookpacking offered something a physical traveller could hope to experience only rarely: it took me inside the thoughts of individuals living far away and showed me the world through their eyes. More powerful than a thousand news reports, these stories not only opened my mind to the nuts and bolts of life in other places, but opened my heart to the way people there might feel.

And that in turn changed my thinking. Through reading the stories shared with me by bookish strangers around the globe, I realised I was not an isolated person, but part of a network that stretched all over the planet.

One by one, the country names on the list that had begun as an intellectual exercise at the start of the year transformed into vital, vibrant places filled with laughter, love, anger, hope and fear. Lands that had once seemed exotic and remote became close and familiar to me – places I could identify with. At its best, I learned, fiction makes the world real.

我一度认为自己算是个世界主义者，但从我的书架来看，这头衔我可能还戴不上。除却寥寥几本印度小说，零散几册澳大利亚和南非的书，我的藏书全部是英美作家的作品。更糟的是，我基本上不看译著，看过的书全是英语作家写的。

所以，在2012年开年时，我决定给自己定个有挑战性的目标，一年时间内，每个国家读一本书（全部195个联合国承认的国家以及前联合国成员台湾），看看我到底错过了什么。

除了觉得要在我们当地书店买到近200个国家的书籍有点不太可能之外，我全然不知道该如何着手，于是我决定向全世界的读者求助。我开了一个博客，名字就叫“一年读遍世界”，希望看到博客的人能够给我推荐已译成英文的外国书目。

我得到了惊人的反馈。还没回过神，来自世界各地的人就开始通过各种方式联系我，想要给我提供建议和帮助了。有些人给我寄来了他们国家的书，有些花数个小时，替我做调研。除此之外，几位作家，比如土库曼斯坦的Ak Welsapar和巴拿马的胡安·大卫·摩根（Juan David Morgan） ，还给我寄来了他们未发表的译著，是他们给了我机会去阅读62%只会英语的英国人都没机会读到的书籍。尽管有这样一个出色的寻书团队在背后支持着我，寻找各国书籍仍然不是个简单的事情。我面临的头一个问题，就是在英国和爱尔兰出版的书籍中，译著只占到4.5%，要找到英文译本并不轻松。

小国难题

这一问题在寻找法语和葡萄牙语非洲国家著作时最为明显。类似科摩罗、马达加斯加、几内亚比绍、莫桑比克这些国家，英译的著作少之又少——我不得不数次阅读未发表的手稿。在寻找小岛国圣多美普林西比的著作时，要不是欧洲和美国的一个志愿者工作组翻译了圣多美普林西比作家Olinda Beja的一本短篇小说集，我的计划就无法实现了。

此外，还有一些地方故事多为口授。在马绍尔群岛，要是你想听个好故事，那更好的办法可不是读书，你应该去找当地的IROIJ（即首领），让他批准你听当地的说书人给你讲故事。同样的情况还发生在尼日尔，在那里，传说历来是GRIOT的专利，他们从七岁左右开始接受训练，学习尼日尔传说故事，能说能唱，都是专业的从业者。他们的表演十分精彩，但落在文字上的内容却寥寥无几——而且最终的文字难以概括现场观看表演感受的万一。

要说这些困难还不算什么，那就看看政治原因让我绕的弯路吧。对饱尝数十年内战之苦的南苏丹共和国人民而言，2011年6月9日南苏丹共和国建国显然是值得额手相庆的大事，对我，则又是新的挑战。道路建设落后，医院、学校等基础设施建设匮乏，在这样的情况下，这个成立仅六个月的国家似乎不太可能出版自己的作品。最终，我通过一位当地的熟人联系上了作家朱莉娅·杜阿尼（Julia Duany），专为我写了一篇短篇小说，若非如此，我可能不得不搭上去朱巴（Juba）的飞机，找人给我当面讲故事了。

总而言之，这一年我花在寻找故事上的时间几乎和阅读与写博客相当。在工作之余要做这样的事情非常困难，多少个夜晚我睡眼朦胧，就是为了坚持要完成1.87天看完一本书的目标。

思想之旅

然而，这一年所有苦我没有白吃。在我沿着全球文学地图一步步推进自己的旅程时，神奇的事情发生了。阅读这些作品不仅仅是在扶手椅中的旅行，这中间，我更拉近了和作者的思维距离。不丹作家Kunzang Choden作旅伴，我仿佛僧人，神游异国庙宇。跟随Galsan Tschinag的想象，我好似牧童，漫步蒙古阿尔泰（Altai）山。有Nu Nu Yi作向导，我体验了变性人视角下的缅甸宗教节日。

这些才华横溢的作家用他们手中的笔带我领略了真实旅行中鲜能感受的经历：他们领我进入远方人们的思想，在我眼前展现了他们眼中的世界。一千篇新闻报道也无法胜过这样的阅读体验。我不仅开放思维，看到各地人们生活的点滴，也开放心灵，感受各地人们的感受。

我的思维方式也在这样的阅读中逐渐改变。读着全世界陌生读者和我分享的书，我意识到我并不是一个孤独的个体，而是这覆盖全球网络的一员。

年初，我罗列的国家名只为这一年的智力挑战而存在，而现在，它们已成为一个个鲜活生动的地点，哭与笑、爱与恨、希望与畏惧，都交织在一起。那些曾经遥远的异国土地如今于我竟如此熟悉——可近可亲。更可贵的是，我已经知道，正是虚构的小说，让世界变得真实。

这是中翻英的AD Corner吗？