I just finished reading I'm Off Then: Losing and Finding Myself on the Camino de Santiago, by Hans Peter Kerkeling, a German comic. When I walked the camino - now two full years ago - I again and again met Germans who were doing the pilgrimage because of this book, so when it was recently translated into English, I had to add it to my Camino Library.
I read many books that are not originally in English: I love Umberto Eco, Jose Saramago, and I just finished Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. As I am reading these, I seldom think about the fact that they were translated, yet with Kerkeling's book I couldn't think about anything else. If I hadn't felt so incredibly personally connected to his topic I wouldn't have made it past page 10, since the translation is so awful (I felt like I was reading the simple sentences of an elementary student). By the second half of the memoir, though, I was so engrossed in his story - he was so often telling my story - that I was able to mostly ignore his sudden stops and awkward phrases. The story worked in spite of the language, rather than through the language.
Tomorrow marks two years exactly that I walked into Santiago de Compostela, thus finishing my 800-kilometre pilgrimage. It's hard to let that experience go: I feel this strange tension between wanting to hold on to this nostalgia and wanting to move on. I guess in essence, though, the camino is about holding on, letting go, and moving forward all at the same time, so I'm okay for now.
(Next camino-text adventure = going to see Martin Sheen's The Way, which he was filming alongside of us as we walked.)
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