January Meme: Hooked on Translations

[selenak]

cahn asked me: What Classics works (to be read in English translation) would you recommend to hook someone who doesn't know anything about it? (Aside from the Illiad/Odyssey/Aeneid -- but would also be open to interesting translations of those!) (And especially for someone who preferred the Aeneid to the Illiad and Odyssey?)

With the caveat that different things work for different people, and also my knowledge of good English translation is limited because I read most of those works in German (and/or had to translate them in school, like Cicero's speeches against Catilina and Sallust's work about the conspiracy), here are some recs I would go with. Note that they aren't literal translations but poetic ones, much like the Faust translation by Howart Brenton I recced to cahn where he had someone do the literal prose translation for him first so he could be sure about the literal meaning and then put it into verse. They're also by terrific poets, which means when you read these works in English, you get something of the visceral excitement and beauty of the originals, not a sense of dutiful bland dictionary (or worse, bowlderized) rendition.

1.) Ted Hughes: Tales from Ovid (i.e. a selection from Ovid's Metamorphoses). Praise, quotes and explanations why I think that's an awesome book to read here.

2.) Ted Hughes: Alkestis by Euripides. The last thing he ever published, shortly before his death, with a theme of personal relevance. Hughes and Euripides were as good a match as Hughes & Ovid. More praise and quotes here.

3.) Roz Kaveney: Catullus. Lots of well deserved praise and buying link here.

Now as I said elsewhere, I've been hearing good things about Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey, so it's definitely on my to read list, but I haven't gotten the chance to yet. And with Cicero's letters and speeches, Suetonius, Plutarch, Herodotus etc. I don't know any English translations, since, see above, I read them in German (or in Cicero's case translated some of the speeches in school and read the rest in German).

The other days

Comments

[mildred_of_midgard]

I think everyone in the US (at least in my generation) read a couple of poems by her in school

I've never even heard of her. And you and I are only a few years apart in age. Did she write anything super famous where I might know the poem but not the author?

Mind you, I don't think I'd heard of Ted Hughes until the last few years. Plath, yes, of course.

[cahn]

Oh, huh, I went and looked and there is exactly one poem that I'm familiar with by her, but I feel like we got it every year in our reading textbooks so I have seen her name a lot of times, even if it was only attached to the one poem :P

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/28112/we-real-cool

It also occurs to me that every year, for Black History Month every year we got a canned set of people we were supposed to learn about, of whom Brooks might have been one?

Though I suppose when I go look at Plath, I think that "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" were the only poems that we either got in school or in general cultural osmosis -- I don't think we ever read them in class specifically, but I think they must have been in at least one of our reading textbooks. I did buy and read all of Ariel in high school, but that was outside of class after being fascinated with those. Oh, and then The Bell Jar was on a bunch of my high school reading lists (as recommended reading, not required reading -- I think I read it in college).

[mildred_of_midgard]

Nope, not familiar with that one!

I'm reasonably sure I've never read anything by Plath either, but at least she was on my radar as a writer from a fairly young age (though I did manage to confuse her with Charlotte Perkins Gilman not long ago and think she wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper").

[mildred_of_midgard]

It also occurs to me that every year, for Black History Month every year we got a canned set of people we were supposed to learn about, of whom Brooks might have been one?

Oh, yeah, I don't think that was a thing at my school.

Also, I don't remember studying poetry in high school except for the one year of AP English, and then I'm not sure we covered anyone more recent than the WWI poets. It was Tudor England through WWI.

I also, come to think of it, remember one poem for Academic Decathlon, and it was a modern black poet, so there may have been others, but obviously not ones that stuck in my memory.

[cahn]

Oh, we never studied poetry in school until I was a junior (a very little bit for American Lit, I remember reading a bit of Whitman, etc.) and senior (Brit Lit, Beowulf through... we did a few 20th C short stories, but I think we only did poetry up to 1900) but every year in elementary school (and possibly the first two years of high school? I forget) we'd have a reader, and the reader had poetry in it, and I'd read the entire thing in the first few weeks of school, including the poetry.

Yeah, we had sort of this nod to Black History Month in elementary school to, well, counteract the rest of the year. I should ask my best friend whether her school district did it too -- I always figured it was a US South kind of thing, but could be just my school district.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Oh, I think we had Black History Month too, it was just in elementary school, and I don't think it affected what we read. I remember mostly lectures and class projects, no Gwendolyn Brooks or any any poetry.

By high school or even junior high, there was one textbook per subject and we went linearly through it. So what we covered in February had nothing to do with black history but had to do with how far we'd gotten in textbook.

we'd have a reader, and the reader had poetry in it, and I'd read the entire thing in the first few weeks of school, including the poetry.

Oh, wow. I liked reading and would read things that weren't assigned, and would read ahead in what we were assigned, but I don't think I read those entire giant hulking tomes that were our readers through *ever*, much less every year!

Btw, you commented in salon, with reference to my alien brain, about how I dislike the fact that we read literature linearly in school and were expected to talk about one chapter at a time without having ifnished the book. I want to point out that a lot of my objection to this had to do with the fact that the literature they assigned us was way over our heads. I didn't have this problem when we were reading things I could understand: I could engage in a discussion going one chapter at a time. (Although I rarely did, because I was the kid who read ahead--I don't think that made a huge difference.)

It's just that we went in 6th grade that we went from having From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler read to us aloud by the teacher, with discussion as we went, to in 7th grade being assigned adult books to read alone at home, and worse, come to class prepared to talk about and have opinions about them.

Opinions! I ask you! I was light years ahead of the rest of the class in my love of reading and reading ability, and I could not follow the plot or keep track of the characters when we switched on a dime from reading Mixed-Up Files as a group to reading Great Expectations alone. Neither could anyone else!

So what we learned about literature was that it is stressful and incomprehensible.

In ninth grade, when I got a reprieve because I had a teacher who assigned books that were challenging without being incomprehensible, like To Kill a Mockingbird or A Separate Peace, and we read aloud in class and discussed what was happening, I liked the assigned literature a lot better! I could discuss it one chapter at a time! This cannot be a coincidence.

When I got to grad school and was the TA for undergrad literature courses, we were assigning students material that was above their reading level and expecting them to come to class with opinions, then criticizing them for having bad opinions based on their poor understanding of the text. I.e. using the same method that had been used to teach us. I was advised by one of the Classics professors to start from the premise that the students didn't understand the assigned reading. And yet to hold them responsible for reading it on their own and expressing opinions on it. (??!)

So while I definitely have an alien brain, some of this is not my fault! We were assigned Great Expectations in 8th grade! (selenak, I promise you, any preface was equally over our heads. Oh, except that one time in senior year AP English when there was one preface that was actually helpful, and we all remembered its content better than the actual text. So when it came time for the closed-book final exam, several of us remembered the material in the preface but forgot it came from the preface. So we covered material from the preface in our essays that were supposed to be on the text itself--since we didn't have the material in front of us, we were relying on our memories of what was part of the text proper and what wasn't--and thus we got Ds and Fs on the exam. Yours truly included. But for the most part, a preface was just one more confusing piece of material to inflict on yourself.)

cahn, I maintain that you're learning more in salon from us giving you the information you need to follow a book first, then recommending you a text that is challenging but not incomprehensible, like Blanning or Massie (and even allowing you to choose texts that are of interest to you, gasp!), than you would if we'd assigned you The War of the Spanish Succession in the first month of salon. Then had you read one chapter at a time, and made you come to salon after each chapter prepared to express your opinions about the battle tactics in the chapter you'd just read. Then explained to you why your military opinions were wrong and told you to try again. <-- How I (didn't) learn to write essays analyzing literature in school.

[cahn]

Maybe we didn't do Gwendolyn Brooks in Black History Month, maybe I just kept getting that one poem in successive reading books. It's short and punchy and by an African-American author so you can feel good about being inclusive, what's not to like if you're an editor.

Heh, I really enjoyed reading the readers through and I knew we were never going to get to even half of it in class, and none of the poetry. Though it did mean I was always bored for the rest of the year in reading class.

Ah, interesting. I did read Great Expectations at around that age (on my own, not for a class... I don't remember reading any novels in middle school in class, only short stories, though we did get To Kill a Mockingbird in 9th grade and started reading novels in class thereafter), but I suspect I didn't understand it really. (I remember reading Pride and Prejudice a year or two earlier -- I must have been in fifth or sixth grade -- and understanding the love story plot perfectly well, but completely not understanding anything about the wit or the societal examination, and being super surprised when I read it again in my 20's and found it was hilarious.)

But don't you still want spoilers for things like Ash (I thought I had remembered something along those lines) or am I totally remembering incorrectly?

But yes, thank you for not inflicting that style of teaching on me :) I think at least one difference for me is that I get enough intrinsic enjoyment from novels (partially because of the predetermined structure) that I'm willing to go along with being confused while I don't understand what's going on, especially if I know it'll pay off in the end. With history I don't necessarily get that intrinsic enjoyment (unless it's a skilled writer, including both of you :P ), and I'm pretty sure it is not going to pay off narratively in the end anyway :PP But also I wonder if it's the context thing again: when I consume fiction, especially SF, I do have a certain context of tropes and shared literary history (so e.g. if you toss me a Biblical or Shakespearean reference, I'll usually dutifully catch it), so it is that I have some context, too.

if we'd assigned you The War of the Spanish Succession in the first month of salon. Then had you read one chapter at a time, and made you come to salon after each chapter prepared to express your opinions about the battle tactics in the chapter you'd just read.

Hee. I'm imagining the AU where I was invested in the War of the Spanish Succession, and came to salon after each installment and capslocked at you guys about WHAT JUST HAPPENED AND WILL THIS SHOW UP IN CANON LATER. (kinda makes me wish I was invested in the War of the Spanish Succession, ngl)

[mildred_of_midgard]

Ah, interesting. I did read Great Expectations at around that age (on my own, not for a class...

You also read poetry on your own, not for a class :P, and I'm clear on the fact that you are way, *way* more into literature than I am. Mind you, if I was the only one in my class struggling, I'd write it off as my brain and a perfectly valid teaching method, but if I was the only one scraping a pass and everyone else was failing and hating every minute of reading and refusing to read *except* for class...pedagogy problem.

But don't you still want spoilers for things like Ash (I thought I had remembered something along those lines) or am I totally remembering incorrectly?

Ah, yes, but different reason. Basically, getting the big picture first or generally approachings non-linearly makes things easier for me, so I want it in cases of

a) Difficult material.
b) Material I'm less motivated to read.

Fiction falls under "less motivated" these days. My brain started being veeeery reluctant to engage with new fiction around 2010. So spoilers these days make it possible for me to go from "not even going to read" to "will read" with fiction. That wasn't really a thing before 2010, because I was motivated to read fiction.

For new fiction that I'm really enjoying, which is really rare, I'm perfectly capable of linearly reading without spoilers, such as Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which I discovered in 2016. I was loving every page, and I didn't need it to be made easier to motivate me.

Whereas the two things that really brought it home to me that a non-linear approach works a MILLION times better for me were: abstract algebra in college, and a molecular chemistry textbook I was reading on my own several years ago. Aka difficult things where I *really* needed it made easier. In both cases, I banged my head in vain against trying to internalize concepts, and it became immediately obvious and effortless once I got to the chapter where I saw how the concepts were *used*.

That's when I learned not to bother banging my head against something (and taking notes is a way of banging my head) until I've seen whether I can internalize it effortlessly by just continuing to read. That's why I won't take notes until the second readthrough: it slows me down and I don't know what to take notes *on* until I've seen how and whether it's used.

I get enough intrinsic enjoyment from novels...With history I don't necessarily get that intrinsic enjoyment

Whereas I am the exact opposite! I don't get intrinsic enjoyment from novels, and I suspect a great deal of my desire to read novels every waking moment of my life as a child and teenager (and even early 20s) was because I was *learning* from them. Once I got to the point where far, far more nonfiction was accessible to me, and to the point where my vocabulary, reading speed, and understanding of how the world works were advanced enough that I learn very little from reading fiction, I think that's when and why my motivation to read fiction dropped off.

The payoff of amount I learn is way higher in nonfiction than fiction, so I'm willing to put in the effort to read 10-20 books on 1720s diplomacy and sort out what happened from the confusion in my head. But give me an easy-to-read novel like The Queen's Thief, and odds are I'm like, "I would rather be studying Greek and learning more about *actual* ancient Greece, then I would feel rewarded at the end."

I'm willing to go along with being confused while I don't understand what's going on

Whereas, as you know, I am not willing to be confused, not even a little bit. It's fine if I don't know what's going on up front, like with Piranesi (which I read without spoilers), but I can't be actively *confused* about what's going on. But note that the *only* reason I made it past page 1 of that book was trusting the author; I wouldn't have given it a second thought if it was by someone I didn't have reason to trust. In that case, I would have wanted spoilers. (I might try The Queen's Thief someday again with spoilers, but not right now.)

I'm imagining the AU where I was invested in the War of the Spanish Succession, and came to salon after each installment and capslocked at you guys about WHAT JUST HAPPENED AND WILL THIS SHOW UP IN CANON LATER.

Ha! We won't tell you, you'll have to wait to find out! But please tell us what you think of Marlborough's decision to mix cavalry and infantry units. Once you've done that, we'll tell you why you're wrong.

While we're here, selenak, please solve this differential equation. When you're done, cahn and I will tell you why you're wrong.

After several years of guessing and being corrected, I will have learned to analyze literature, cahn will have learned military tactics, and selenak will have learned diff eq. Or we'll be turned off for life. Who knows!

[cahn]

Ha, I was thinking about my English classes and realized something I'd apparently mostly wiped out of my memory, which is that we read Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston) when I was a junior in American Lit -- and we did not have the technical skills to follow it at all. I still didn't completely hate it, because it was a book, but I remember being baffled, and we'd go to class and be asked to discuss it and no one would say anything because we didn't understand it at all! However, what seems to have been different from your experience is that we were not told we were wrong about anything; as far as I remember we weren't told much at all. (My American Lit teacher was a very nice lady, and I think intelligent too, but wow she was not a great teacher.)

(In fact, I think this was a theme -- I had more than my fair share of good, sometimes great teachers, but the ones who were not good were generally not good in the way where they just didn't seem to do very much, so I guess passively rather than actively pedagogically bad? Like my US history teacher who just sometimes didn't come to class and told us to write outlines of our history book chapters which as far as we know she never looked at.)

The payoff of amount I learn is way higher in nonfiction than fiction

Yeah, I tend to retain a lot more from fiction. Like, a month after having read them both at approximately the same time, I am retaining a lot more about Jemmy and Charles from The King's Touch than I am about the queens in A Game of Queens. But that of course is also a function of not knowing very much history :)

I wouldn't have given it a second thought if it was by someone I didn't have reason to trust.

I mean... that's fair, and approximately how I feel about TV/movies at this point (although I still like them/consume them more than you do fiction).

After several years of guessing and being corrected

...Oh man, this phrasing hit a bell in my head: this is the Rozetta Stone style of learning languages! Aka the program that made my kid think she was terrible at languages, even though she had done perfectly well in a more conventional classroom before that.

(Although in a social, non-academic context I do like guessing about what's going to happen next in media, which I've always been wildly bad at and which is entertaining to those around me. When I read Prisoner of Azkaban in grad school, I'd read about a chapter every day and then entertain the friend who had lent me the book by each afternoon describing my current theories about what was going on while we walked home. He laughed pretty hard at me, because I was not right even a little bit :) But I never -- I almost wrote I fortunately never had to do that in school, but I suppose it would be rather more accurate to say that I was never any good at waiting however long they expected me to wait to read the whole thing. They probably did expect me to guess what happened next, but I couldn't!)

[selenak]

Yeah, I tend to retain a lot more from fiction. Like, a month after having read them both at approximately the same time, I am retaining a lot more about Jemmy and Charles from The King's Touch than I am about the queens in A Game of Queens. But that of course is also a function of not knowing very much history :)

I'm in the middle: I used to remember much more from fiction than from non-fiction during my first 20 years of life, but once I started to do research in earnest, this changed, and now it's even - though I retain less from dull sources of either variety. :)

Btw, am glad to hear Charles and Jemmy remained with you, as I'm curious about your take on the novel, the relationship etc.!

[mildred_of_midgard]

I still didn't completely hate it, because it was a book

Whereas I am perfectly capable of hating a book if I don't understand it and I'm supposed to have Deep Thoughts about it, and my GPA is riding on my ability to convince my teacher/professor I have Deep Thoughts. :)

However, what seems to have been different from your experience is that we were not told we were wrong about anything;

Our essays would come back in a sea of red ink! I still remember my draft of a 5 paragraph essay in which the 3 middle paragraphs were entirely scratched out by the teacher and the first and last were heavily annotated. This shows you I was trying to do something that I didn't know how to do, not even a little bit, because I had never seen it done!

I learned to write literary criticism when I, gasp, started reading literary criticism.

passively rather than actively pedagogically bad? Like my US history teacher who just sometimes didn't come to class and told us to write outlines of our history book chapters which as far as we know she never looked at.)

Omg. I had one math teacher who phoned it in as best she could, but even she never did that! All my teachers were at least *trying*. Wow.

The flip side of all that trying is that they were constantly frustrated and we were constantly stressed.

Yeah, I tend to retain a lot more from fiction. Like, a month after having read them both at approximately the same time, I am retaining a lot more about Jemmy and Charles from The King's Touch than I am about the queens in A Game of Queens. But that of course is also a function of not knowing very much history :)

Exactly! Like Selena, I remembered *way* more from fiction until I was about 20. That's why I read historical fiction avidly as a teenager! But now that I can read nonfiction and follow along, the information per page is a whole lot denser, and thus I have a more rewarding experience and thus my brain is willing to put in the effort.

To our gracious hostess, writer of much historical fiction outside of Fritz and siblings that I have not read: it's not you, it's me.

I will say that tying what I'm reading to a fanfic, even one I'm almost certainly never going to write, helps with long-term retention. There's a reason I'm still focused on plotting my fix-it fic: I remember far more of the nonfiction I worked into my abandoned novel twenty years ago than the nonfiction I just read without using.

...Oh man, this phrasing hit a bell in my head: this is the Rozetta Stone style of learning languages

Oh right, I remember that! Ugh. I'm glad you found her a way of learning that worked better for her!

Although in a social, non-academic context I do like guessing about what's going to happen next in media

Oh, that's fine, I have no problem with that. See below.

Ironically, I'm also fine with guessing what a German word means, because I know it's okay if I'm wrong, because I'm learning the language. This is the exact thing we weren't allowed to do in language studies: we had to know every word in every sentence perfectly before we could move on to the next sentence...which is the exact wrong way to learn a language. *headdesk*

Being wrong was also not okay in literature: it meant red ink and a lower grade, which meant risking scholarship money, etc. (My parents were sure as hell not paying for my college, so my ability to go and then to stay was riding on my GPA in high school and then in college.) Which is why I was perfectly capable of hating a book that was stressing me out this much.

He laughed pretty hard at me, because I was not right even a little bit :)

Lol, that's funny!

They probably did expect me to guess what happened next, but I couldn't!

Oh, sorry, I wasn't clear. We weren't ever expected to guess what happened next. We were expected to guess how to do literary criticism, and how to write an essay on literary criticism, without ever having seen it done. Not knowing what happens next was only a small part of the problem (basically it made it even harder to follow a work that was over our heads and to develop insights as we went). Even once we'd finished what we were reading, or if it was a short story that we read in one go, we still didn't know how to do literary criticism at the level we were expected to.

(It wasn't that hard once I had READ SOME LITERARY CRITICISM, omg. Ditto how I learned to write an academic article. Not in grad school, when I was expected to write and publish academic articles and revise according to advisor and peer reviewer feedback, but afterward, when I was an independent scholar doing research projects that involved reading a bunch of other people's work. Suddenly all the things my profs had been trying to get me to do made sense, because as a consumer of academic articles, I now understood the reader's needs and could judge for myself how well I was meeting them. Previously, I had been writing as a student whose need was to please the professor or peer reviewer, and a lot of guessing was involved. It's very backwards, making us producers before consumers.)

A perfect example of the kind of thing we were expected to do is in Lois Duncan's YA novel Killing Mr. Griffin, about a bunch of high school students who kill their English teacher because they are fed up with exactly this:

"Mechanics okay," Griffin had written on one paper [that got a C]. "You have a grasp of grammar and punctuation, but the writing itself is shallow. There's nothing to it. Don't parrot back my lectures. Get under the surface. Tell me something about Hamlet I don't already know."

"Something he doesn't know!" David had exclaimed in frustration when that paper was returned to him. "He's supposed to be the expert. I'm just a student."

This was us! We were expected to have Deep Original Thoughts about literature and to articulate them in a scholarly manner, without a) understanding the works we were reading, b) having ever seen what literary scholarship looked like. By guessing. And being corrected. And guessing some more. And being corrected. I learned how to fake it for the grade, until I actually encountered examples in the wild and then started to *understand* how it all worked.

This is the exact equivalent of me asking you to analyze military tactics when all you've encountered is one description of a battle and you have never actually studied military tactics and you possibly never wanted to, and even if you did, also aren't invested in the War of the Spanish Succession and would rather be studying a different war. (A key part of me learning to do literary criticism was when I started doing it on works I wanted to read and think about, like the Aeneid, and not the stuff I was assigned, which I would never in a million years have read on my own and was bored by).

[cahn]

Langston Hughes? Not super modern maybe, but I am actually familiar with a fair number of his poems, probably more than other black poets. Probably also mostly from elementary school readers. (They tried!)

[mildred_of_midgard]

Hey! Yes, I googled it and the poem I'm remembering was Langston Hughes. As modern as it got for poetry and us in high school. :P Good guess.

We did some poems in elementary school, some of which I can still recite, but only a few that I remember, all of which were printed out on handouts, and my impression was that they were ad hoc selections made on the basis of the teacher liking them. (A variant on "Ladles and Jellyspoons", for example.) I don't remember anything as formal as reading poetry in a reader (short stories and novellas, yes). Though I do remember carrying really thick hardcover readers that weighed almost as much as I did :P, so surely there was some poetry in there??

[mildred_of_midgard]

we got a canned set of people we were supposed to learn about

It occurs to me that our canned set of people were all African-Americans (I use this term advisedly, to make a point), to the point where if black people have ever existed outside of the United States (where they have a chance of being named individuals) and Africa (home of the origin race of Americans worthy of names), you would not guess it from my formal education.

I'm quite sure that's not just me: a surprising number of Americans, including at least one bestselling author, think Europe has historically been all white and that black people are an American phenomenon. I learned differently even as a kid, thanks to my mother teaching me this (no thanks to school!), but I admit that even though I've known this practically my whole life and can now name black individuals in historical Europe, I still need more of a conscious effort to *remember* this than I really should.

Speaking of problems with our educational system/cultural milieu.

[cahn]

YEP, same here.

Uh, now I can name at least one black individual in historical Europe, but because of you and selenak :P

[selenak]

Guys, I must admit that back in the 70s and 80s, I learned zilch about black people in Europe in school pre 20th century and certainly as a child I tended to equate "black" with "American", too. I should hope it's better now in terms of the curriculum, not least because we have far more ethnicities in our classes but also in general, but personally, I found out about black people in European history post school and partly via historical novels, partly via non-fiction books in areas of my interest.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Omg. I thought it was a feature of Americans being shaky on the fact that other countries exist! Wow. I join you in hoping it's better now, because eek.

(But seriously: my mother said to me once, when I complained* that I didn't get to learn a second language as a child (despite living in Japan for 4 years!), that I should just be grateful that I was ahead of the curve in learning as a child that other languages existed. "Most kids in this country don't know that!")

* Me, complain about my education? ;)

[selenak]

Omg. I thought it was a feature of Americans being shaky on the fact that other countries exist! Wow. I join you in hoping it's better now, because eek.

Basically, what we learned about black people in European history in the 1970s and 1980s at school: Slave Trade evil, all European nations involved. Colonialism evil, Germany a late comer to the scene and mainly trying to get colonies because Willy had a hang up about his British relations. (BTW, a ridiculous simplifaction, and one that I know is taught differently these days, not least because the genocidal actions towards the Herero by German colonists in the early 20th century became a big subject in Germany in the 1990s (I actually know the publisher who published the first extensive study of the Herero genocide in German), but I was in my 20s then and no longer anywhere near school.) And that was it. People like the first African-German attendant of and lecturer at a German university (18th century, Anton Wilhelm Ano, who taught at Halle), or Angelo Soliman (Austrian-African valet, teacher and leader of the Vienna Free Masons, also chess partner of Joseph (II), but after his death Franz II (reactionary nephew who was Emperor by then) ordered his body was to be mummified and exhibited as an "African Savage"), or Alessandro de' Medici, or the fact that the Alexandres Dumas (grandpère, pére et fils) or Pushkin were mixed race, or that Joseph Bolougne, the Chevalier St. Georges was one of the most successful fencers and composers of the 18th century and the son of a slave, that was all something I learned about after school.

(In fairness: the other reason why kid!me tended to associate "African" with "-American" was that my hometown had one of the largest US garnisons in Bavaria. So the black people I saw as a child in rl, not on tv, were all either Americans or children of Americans. Again, that was a middle sized provincial Franconian town in the 1970s - it would have been already different in larger cities like Berlin, Munich or Hamburg, and by now it's very very different.)

Otoh, different languages are something that's self evident (and self evidently useful) when you live on a continent where lots of them are spoken and where if you don't go on holidays to Austria or the German speaking part of Switzerland you have to speak a different language. The US is so gigantic and continent-spannig that you can live our your life there, experience very different climates and sceneries and still never leave the country and its linguistic sphere. I remember how shocked I was when I participated in a German/American student exchange program and found out a lot US people not just my age but way older didn't have a passport, because they never needed is. this was before the EU came up with the Schengen agreement, so I had needed a passport at the latest when we did one week skiing trips at school, and later at 11th grade the trip to Berlin (still a divided city, which meant you had to cross GDR territory, which definitely meant a pass port). (I had one before because my parents had travelled with us outside the country before. What I mean is that even if you had parents who never holidayed outside of Germany for economic reasons, you would have needed a passport at seventh or eigth grade when school trips across the borders started.)