What would happen if all works in all languages were universally readable? New forms of thinking, new colors for the literary palette, and ultimately, the possibility of atypical influences. To put an old trope on its head, everything has been invented, but not every invention has been discovered.

Some of the best novelists in the Americas and Europe have written about chess—yet one of the best chess novels, Chess Story (published in German as Schachnovelle; also known as The Royal Game) by Stefan Zweig, was written by an otherwise less than superlative author.