Just started The Gods Themselves by Azimov. That's the first novel of his that I am reading, and I've only read a dozen or two of pages, but damn that's good. I'm a linguist-translator myself (that's my education, at least), and deciphering an unknown language (from another universe, apparently) and means to do so; now I haven't worked with dead or lost languages myself, but from what I've been told during my studies, I can tell that stuff's written in those chapters is pretty accurate: a starting point, which can be a similar language, for example, is one of the essentials in translating something unknown, and without that reference or resemblance in any neighboring languages, it can be pretty close to impossible to understand the text. Not to mention that the language described in the book belong to - I guess - a civilization from a parallel universe.
The book I am reading is actually a short story collection with a novel in the end of it. Most of the short stories are translated by different people, and the book is from 1991, when good literary (or at least literary sci-fi) translators weren't as abundant, which does impact the quality of those translation (I can see a lot of English style and syntax put into Russian shell, which never feels right); reading the novel, though, feels really different, as if the author himself has improved his skills... immensely. That might be because of the translator, too, though, but it feels great to read something that feels much more well-written.
I like Azimov, really. I don't always see what he means in his works, but I always have that feeling I had as a kid, when I first read some quality sci-fi books. It feels so... accurate? I mean, sci-fi in literature is mostly a tool that an author can use to highlight or exaggerate something they're trying to show us about the modern or upcoming problems, and I could see exactly that in the ends of his short stories - a culmination that casts a massive shadow over the sci-fi elements of the story, leaving the idea to think in the end.
I may have mediocre taste, though. Still, feels great.
