Stories that have been told for centuries can lose their meaning in translation and are very rarely repeated with the same level of feeling or fluidity.

BBC: NEWS | Africa | Are indigenous languages dead?

When embarking on the original, Knopf, thinking the book was about sexual reproduction, assigned the translation to a retired professor of Zoology, Howard Madison Parshley, who possessed no more than college-level French and much less in the way of philosophy.

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