【文章內容簡介】 rganamp。39。s website and I sent him a message, asking if any of his Spanishlanguage novels had been translated into English. And he said that nothing had been published, but he did have an unpublished translation of his novel amp。quot。The Golden Horse.amp。quot。 He ed this to me, allowing me to bee one of the first people ever to read that book in English.
　　Morgan was by no means the only wordsmith to share his work with me in this way. From Sweden to Palau, writers and translators sent me selfpublished books and unpublished manuscripts of books that hadnamp。39。t been picked up by Anglophone publishers or that were no longer available, giving me privileged glimpses of some remarkable imaginary worlds. I read, for example, about the Southern African king Ngungunhane, who led the resistance against the Portuguese in the 19th century。 and about marriage rituals in a remote village on the shores of the Caspian sea in Turkmenistan. I met Kuwaitamp。39。s answer to Bridget Jones.
　　And I read about an orgy in a tree in Angola.
　　But perhaps the most amazing example of the lengths that people were prepared to go to to help me read the world, came towards the end of my quest, when I tried to get hold of a book from the tiny, Portuguesespeaking African island nation of S?o Tomamp。eacute。 and Pramp。iacute。ncipe. Now, having spent several months trying everything I could think of to find a book that had been translated into English from the nation, it seemed as though the only option left to me was to see if I could get something translated for me from scratch. Now, I was really dubious whether anyone was going to want to help with this, and give up their time for something like that. But, within a week of me putting a call out on Twitter and Facebook for Portuguese speakers, I had more people than I could involve in the project, including Margaret Jull Costa, a leader in her field, who has translated the work of Nobel Prize winner Josamp。eacute。 Saramago. With my nine volunteers in place, I managed to find a book by a S?o Tomamp。eacute。an author that I could buy enough copies of online. Hereamp。39。s one of them. And I sent a copy out to each of my volunteers. They all took on a couple of short stories from this collection, stuck to their word, sent their translations back to me, and within six weeks, I had the entire book to read.
　　In that case, as I found so often during my year of reading the world, my not knowing and being open about my limitations had bee a big opportunity. When it came to S?o Tomamp。eacute。 and Pramp。iacute。ncipe, it was a chance not only to learn something new and discover a new collection of stories, but also to bring together a group of people and facilitate a joint creative endeavor. My weakness had bee the project