196本書帶你看世界

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 In addition, several writers, like Turkmenistan’s Ak Welsapar and Panama’s Juan David Morgan, sent me unpublished translations of their novels, giving me a rare opportunity to read works otherwise unavailable to the 62% of Brits who only speak English.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precious little on offer for states such as the Comoros, Madagascar, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique – I had to rely on unpublished manuscripts for several of these.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.作家安娜-摩根給自己設下了一個挑戰-----在一年的時間裏從世界上每個國家的文學作品中選出一本進行閱讀。 她講述了自己的這段經歷以及她的收穫。

我曾經認爲自己是一個見多識廣，海納百川的人，但我的書架表明這並非事實。 除了幾本印度小說，零散的一些澳大利亞和南非的書之外，我的藏書全是英美文學。

更糟糕的是，我幾乎從來沒有嘗試過閱讀譯本。我的閱讀侷限於以英語爲母語的作者的作品。

所以，2012年伊始，我給自己設定一個挑戰，在一年的時間裏讀完來自世界上195個國家的195本小說，看看我在過去的閱讀中錯過了什麼。

開始時，我根本無從下手，因爲我暗自懷疑我是否能在當地的書店找到來自近200個國家的出版物。於是，我決定向全球讀者求助。我創建了一個名爲“一年讀遍世界”的博客， 請網友們推薦我能夠用英語閱讀的作品。

我的博客收到了意想不到的迴應。世界各地讀者很快給我提供了各種點子和幫助。有些人給我寄來來自他們國家的書，有些人花費幾小時的時間幫我做調查。而且，一些自己是作家的人，像是土庫曼斯坦的Ak Welsapar,巴拿馬的Juan David Morgan,把他們還未正式出版的小說譯本寄給我，讓我有機會閱讀62%只會英語的英國人根本沒機會閱讀的作品。即便有一羣如此出色的愛書者默默支持着我，尋找這195本書仍非易事。首先，在英國和愛爾蘭，只有4.5%的世界文學作品被翻譯並且最終出版，要得到一些英文版的圖書並不容易。

小國尋書

這一問題在尋找來自說法語和葡萄牙語的非洲國家的作品是尤爲明顯。類似科摩羅，馬達加斯加，幾內亞比紹，莫桑比克這些國家，譯成英文的作品少之又少------- 我不得不數次依靠閱讀沒有發表的手稿來完成任務。在尋找來自小島國聖多美普林西比的作品時，要不是一羣來自歐洲和美國的志願者幫我翻譯了聖普作家Olinda Beja的一本短篇小說合集，我的讀書計劃就很難完成了。

此外，還一些國家的故事很少用文字記錄下來。比如在馬紹爾羣島，如果你想聽一個的好故事，你應該去請求當地IROIJ（即首領）的准許，讓當地說書人給你講故事，而不是去書店買本書。同樣的，尼日爾，傳說歷來是由GRIOT（專業的說書人兼音樂家，從七歲開始接受本國神話傳說方面的訓練）負責，他們的表演十分精彩，但是落在文字上的內容寥寥無幾，而且難以傳達現場聆聽表演帶來的感受。

如果這些困難還不算什麼，政治問題可是給我出了個大難題。南蘇丹在2011年7月9日才正式建立，對飽嘗了幾十年內戰之苦的蘇丹人命來說，這無疑是一個大喜訊，但同時也帶來了一個問題。這個六個月前才成立的國家缺乏一切諸如道路，醫院，學校的基礎設施，更別說有出版機構出版圖書了。如果不是一個當地人幫我聯繫上了作家Julia Duany, 給我專門寫了一個短篇小說，我可能就得搭上飛到Juba的一班飛機，找個人當面給我講個故事了。

總而言之，我花在尋找這些作品的時間和我花在閱讀，寫博客的時間差不多。要在工作之餘做這些事實屬不易，多少個午夜,我睡眼惺忪，就是爲了堅持在1.87天內讀完一本書的目標。

思維轉變

然而這一年的努力都是值得的。當我在這個星球的文學版圖上步步前行時，神奇的事情發生了。這些閱讀不像是坐在躺椅上被動地前進，我感受到我是在作者的精神世界裏探索。有不丹作家Kunzang Choden作伴，我彷彿化身僧侶，拜訪異國的廟宇。隨着Galsan Tachinag的想象， 我好似山間牧童，漫步於蒙古的阿爾泰山。有Nu Nu Yi做我的嚮導， 我體驗了一位變性母親視角下的宗教節日。

在這些才華橫溢的作家的筆觸之下，我發現閱讀能讓我領略到在真實旅行中鮮能體會到的經歷：閱讀帶領我進入千里之外人們的思想，然後將他們眼中的世界展現在我眼前。一千篇新聞報道也無法勝過這樣的閱讀體驗，因爲這些故事不僅開放我的思維，讓我接觸到世界各地人們生活的點滴細節，而且敞開我的心靈，讓我切身體會他們的真實感受。

我的思維方式也在這個過程中改變。通過閱讀世界各地書蟲和我分享的故事，我意識到我不是一個孤立的人，而是一張覆蓋全球網絡中的一員。

年初，這195個國家的名字只是爲一個智力的挑戰而存在，現在，這一個個名字已經成爲鮮活生動的地點，承載着愛與恨，希望與畏懼。曾經如此遙遠陌生的土地現在如此得貼心熟悉，他們是我可近可親的地方。最重要的是，我明白了，恰恰正是虛構的小說讓這個世界更加得真實。