From the News-You-Can-Use About Narratology Department

Forwarded from Sarah.

"In an English narrative, the action, the bare bones of the plot, are rendered with the perfective tenses, while the background is filled in with imperfective tenses. This development in European languages seems to have begun at the same time as the introduction of spatial and mathematical perspective into European art: verbal tense and artistic perspective divided reality into foreground and background. Thus, a piece of fiction usually begins with an imperfective verb by way of introduction ('I was sleeping'); then, shifting into a perfective verb, the narrative launches into the plot ('I woke')."

--Joachim Neugroschel, on the problem of translating german to english.