The experience of reading a novel in a language you're learning is more interesting than it is efficient. The comprehension is partial. You're getting enough to follow the plot and the characters but missing the texture — the wit, the idiom, the specific connotations of words that a native speaker would catch automatically.

I read a short García Márquez story in Spanish recently, having read several of his novels in English. The experience was of recognizing the voice I knew — the matter-of-fact tone, the magical elements described in ordinary terms — through a filter that simplified everything. The story was still itself. I was a less complete reader.

The lesson is that translation is an incredible gift and also a kind of loss that you can only understand by reading in the original language.