[throwaway290]

Made me check and Google translated it about the same. No unexpected comma or awkward driven into the woods (by whom?), punch is a punch (blow is more generic), but awkward duplication of "one".

> I believe that one should only read books that bite and sting one. If the book we are reading does not wake us up with a punch to the head, why do we read the book? So that it makes us happy, as you write? My God, we would be happy even if we had no books, and if necessary we could write the kind of books that make us happy ourselves. But we need books that affect us like a misfortune that hurts us greatly, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like if we were to venture into the woods, away from everyone, like a suicide; a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

[dmurray]

I liked the ChatGPT version better. The repeated "one" is paticularly jarring and not a stylistic feature of the original (which has man...einen, two different words reasonably translated as "one"). "Misfortune" is a more literal translation than "disaster", but in the context that it greatly hurts us, I prefer the latter. And I'm pretty sure "wir in Wälder vorstoßen würden" is closer to being cast out or driven away than just going for a nice sylvan walk. The passive voice there is faithful to the original. The comma after "disaster" is the only part I don't like in modern English.

[throwaway290]

Cast out vs going out into the woods can tip it over I suppose. Don't know German well enough myself to say but checking word by word it didn't have the being driven out vibe. But it's interesting that the difference is almost nonexistent.