What makes a translated classic shine even more than the plot or the themes is the quality of the translation itself. That, I'm convinced, strips away the intimidating sense that we have about any classic, and especially any foreign classic. Remember, authors' in the main write because they want to be read, it's about accessibility, and not deterrence; your name is on the list, and you can come in.

I've bailed out of innumerable classics simply because the translation was opaque or fussy; impenetrable, even impossible to understand; or just dry, bone dry, starved of any love, the writer's intent sucked off the bone, indigestible.

However, when the translation is light, modern, but not estuary English, and stream-lined, then a foreign classic is pure joy, as it is right now, with this superb translation of Dostoyevsky's "The House of the Dead" I'm reading, or more to the point doling myself a portion every day to prolong the joy.

It's a fabulous - so starkly illuminating it's as if someone has flipped a switch and turned on the purest strip lighting - lightly fictionalised account of the author's four years in a Siberian prison camp in the early 1850s. Contemporaneous and yet universal, I've not come across anything that depicts the existential drudgery of imprisonment better than this.