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derp
Jan 21, 2010

when i get up all i want to do is go to bed again

Lipstick Apathy
Shirley Jackson

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Vogler
Feb 6, 2009
The Haunting of Hill House? It was pretty good I guess.

Vogler fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Aug 15, 2020

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Just as much Shirley Jackson as you can handle. If nothing else, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is well worth your time.

Famethrowa
Oct 5, 2012

Vogler posted:

What does this thread recommend re: horror? I think the genre got great potential but I'm always disappointed in what I read. The only exception in recent years is the terrific Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin.

Thomas Ligotti has some incredible short stories. "Songs of a Dead Dreamer" has some so creepy that they still flash through my brain and make me wince. He's like a much less hacky Lovecraft.

If you can find "The Frolic", it's a pretty good intro. The story itself is nothing special, but the creeping dread throughout is A+.

Vogler
Feb 6, 2009
I have read plenty of Ligotti and I do like him much better than Lovecraft. Boy do I wish that I could feel the same as Houellebecq feels when he reads Lovecraft.

Octopus Gregory
Jul 3, 2004
Hey

Vogler posted:

What does this thread recommend re: horror? I think the genre got great potential but I'm always disappointed in what I read. The only exception in recent years is the terrific Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin.

"The things we lost in the fire" by Mariana Enríquez has a couple of pretty good short stories.

hope and vaseline
Feb 13, 2001

The Obscene Bird of Night is the best horror book I've read

Finicums Wake
Mar 13, 2017
Probation
Can't post for 8 years!

Vogler posted:

What does this thread recommend re: horror? I think the genre got great potential but I'm always disappointed in what I read. The only exception in recent years is the terrific Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin.

the golem by meyrink

Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


North American Lake Monsters

fez_machine
Nov 27, 2004

Vogler posted:

What does this thread recommend re: horror? I think the genre got great potential but I'm always disappointed in what I read. The only exception in recent years is the terrific Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin.

Brian Evenson's work, particularly his short stories.

blue squares
Sep 28, 2007

Has anyone read Ducks, Newburyport? I read a kindle sample of it and it was very well written, but I just can’t imagine reading hundreds of pages of that. It’s not even really a novel, is it?

TrixRabbi
Aug 20, 2010

Time for a little robot chauvinism!

I finished Infinite Jest and ran full steam ahead into Gravity's Rainbow. I have way less of an idea of what's going on but am enjoying the prose way more.

Finicums Wake
Mar 13, 2017
Probation
Can't post for 8 years!

TrixRabbi posted:

I finished Infinite Jest and ran full steam ahead into Gravity's Rainbow. I have way less of an idea of what's going on but am enjoying the prose way more.

https://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/rainbow.htm might help you figure out what's going on

apophenium
Apr 14, 2009
Imo don't sweat it too bad if you've got a loose grip of the plot. I'm most of the way through part 3 and have found a lot of enjoyment just letting things wash over me. It was weird though when Slothrop hosed a child

but maybe that was just a hallucination

Megabound
Oct 20, 2012

Just let it wash over you, at some point you'll get the life raft of Franz Pökler but then it's straight back in.
His prose is fantastic, there's a description of the electronics of a guidance system that's like poetry for engineers that I still think about a lot.

almost there
Sep 13, 2016

Can any french goons recommend novels for an intermediate speaker (I'm able to read Zola more or less) with an emphasis on, like, word play or something specific within the language?

Also, should I even attempt more archaic forms of French like rabelais at this point?

I always hear French is extremely difficult to translate but, besides Baudelaire, I haven't really encountered anything like that.

Lex Neville
Apr 15, 2009
Extremely difficult how?

CestMoi
Sep 16, 2011

almost there posted:

Can any french goons recommend novels for an intermediate speaker (I'm able to read Zola more or less) with an emphasis on, like, word play or something specific within the language?

Also, should I even attempt more archaic forms of French like rabelais at this point?

I always hear French is extremely difficult to translate but, besides Baudelaire, I haven't really encountered anything like that.

i'm not actually french but la disparition by perec, exercices de style by queneau, maybe impressions d'afrique by roussel but you might also have to read comment j'ai ecrit certains de mes livres to understand why that's wordplay. oulipo baby.
there's a pretty recent cool en face old french/modern french rabelais with a sick cover http://www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/Quarto/Les-Cinq-Livres-des-faits-et-dits-de-Gargantua-et-Pantagruel if you can get it

ulvir
Jan 2, 2005

I wish I could read french, because I have a feeling that la disparition will read very differently in translation and it would be cool to compare

knox
Oct 28, 2004

I've had Dostoyevsky's The Devils for a very long time, before I ever bought and read The Brothers Karamazov or Crime & Punishment, but I've never read it. Always seemed like had it more negative reviews and even though Brothers Karamazov is probably my favorite novel of all time I wasn't as big on Crime & Punishment. Probably will choose between different translation of Karamazov or finally read The Devils, to try and get back into reading regularly.

Also, what are the go-to translations for Dostoyevsky? I thought I had this settled when I read up on it and bought a new version to read, but then when I looked back into it it was more "this is NY Times/bignames pushing a lovely translation" as the reason for Pevear/Volokhonsky being popular.

knox fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Aug 27, 2020

Shibawanko
Feb 13, 2013

i read ogai's sansho the bailiff, it's really a very moving story, surprisingly because it's written in such minimal prose. i'd seen the movie before but i didn't suspect the whole bit where zushio becomes a governor would just take up one paragraph or something in the story

Ras Het
May 23, 2007

when I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child - but now I am a man.

knox posted:

Also, what are the go-to translations for Dostoyevsky? I thought I had this settled when I read up on it and bought a new version to read, but then when I looked back into it it was more "this is NY Times/bignames pushing a lovely translation" as the reason for Pevear/Volokhonsky being popular.

A lot of people have made convincing arguments for why P&V suck poo poo, but my personal vibe is roughly that while they can be clunky, they're not clunky in a way that ruins a book for you, but rather makes it seem weirder than it actually is, and flattens the different voices of different authors. For Demons, it's more likely to be Dostoyevsky's authorial voice and intentions that sell it to you or don't

almost there
Sep 13, 2016

Lex Neville posted:

Extremely difficult how?

Lots of ways. What comes straight to mind to me is that scene in the English translation of Molloy that interrupts with "this should be written in the plus-que-parfait tense".

The French are such beautiful bastards that they have tenses that only apply in literature. And, aside from that, its grammar is weirdly circular (I don't know how to explain this any better than its kinda more similar to the English in the King James than modern English, "Forgive them Lord for they know not what they do" versus "Forgive them Lord because they don't know what they're doing") and their exclusively Latinate vocabulary just sounds sharper.

CestMoi posted:

i'm not actually french but la disparition by perec, exercices de style by queneau, maybe impressions d'afrique by roussel but you might also have to read comment j'ai ecrit certains de mes livres to understand why that's wordplay. oulipo baby.
there's a pretty recent cool en face old french/modern french rabelais with a sick cover http://www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/Quarto/Les-Cinq-Livres-des-faits-et-dits-de-Gargantua-et-Pantagruel if you can get it

Oh cool, I actually picked out a book by Perec (title, La boutique obscure) from one of those bird box libraries while I was in montreal, I'll finally give that a shot.

Impressions d'Afrique sounds cool as well. One thing I'm noticing since learning the language is just how significant Africa seems in french culture versus than in English. Thanks.

Lex Neville
Apr 15, 2009

almost there posted:

Lots of ways. What comes straight to mind to me is that scene in the English translation of Molloy that interrupts with "this should be written in the plus-que-parfait tense".

The French are such beautiful bastards that they have tenses that only apply in literature.


I'm sorry, care to elaborate on this a little more? I've never heard of this before

Lex Neville fucked around with this message at 16:54 on Aug 27, 2020

CestMoi
Sep 16, 2011

i mean the pluperfect absolutely exists in english but yeah french uses the past historic/past simple in literature and never uses it for anything else

almost there
Sep 13, 2016

CestMoi posted:

i mean the pluperfect absolutely exists in english but yeah french uses the past historic/past simple in literature and never uses it for anything else

ya you're right my bad. I thought it was weird too when I read it but looking into the French version of molloy I see it's also written ""Il faudrait réécrire tout cela au plus-que-parfait". Representing more a struggle to communicate accurately at all than a cheap dig at the lack in english translation. This is what I mean! Beyond having to return to an older type of english I don't understand why people talk about its difficulty for translation (I'm thinking mostly of this book, which I have yet to read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot) . I assume it has more to do with the chance coincidences that come out of the organic development of the respective languages , kinda like how so many of the deep puns in shakespeare are simply untranslatable in other languages.

And from what I can tell those tenses can be grafted into english somewhat, but always come across sort of wooden and pedantic. I'm thinking of something like: "No chance of finding him sober now; he'll have been drinking all day," ( from my experience this mostly just gets glossed into "he's been" in english) versus "Aucune chance de le trouver sobre maintenant ; il aura bu toute la journée."

I maybe too out of my depth to have a nuanced conversation here but that's what I'm more-or-less trying to develop with my request. I also hear Proust is kind of like French Joyce so, one day, I hope to be able to read it.

seravid
Apr 21, 2010

Let me tell you of the world I used to know

Ras Het posted:

A lot of people have made convincing arguments for why P&V suck poo poo, but my personal vibe is roughly that while they can be clunky, they're not clunky in a way that ruins a book for you, but rather makes it seem weirder than it actually is, and flattens the different voices of different authors.

Didn't know about this. Got any links? That's the translation I have for both Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina.

Eugene V. Dubstep
Oct 4, 2013
Probation
Can't post for 8 years!
https://twitter.com/AChillGhost/status/1299056117352411136

Jrbg
May 20, 2014

gently caress!! gently caress!!!!

e: that is legitimately an insane thing to publish. How do you commit to that as a writing project. How do you see that and go 'yes that's fine'

e: the twitter thread's deleted so here's the article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/31/a-beowulf-for-our-moment

quote:

Maria Dahvana Headley’s revisionist translation infuses the Old English poem with feminism and social-media slang.

quote:

Headley’s version is more of a rewriting than a true translation, reënvisaging the poem for the modern reader rather than transmitting it line for line. It is brash and belligerent, lunatic and invigorating, with passages of sublime poetry punctuated by obscenities and social-media shorthand—Grendel is “hosed by fate,” Wealhtheow, “hashtag: blessed.” Not everyone will admire all the linguistic and stylistic choices she has made; that crunching noise in the background is the sound of her predecessors rolling in their burial ships. Hrothgar’s thanes are his “fight-family,” Wealhtheow admires Beowulf’s “brass balls,” treasure is “bling.” But the over-all effect is as if Headley, like the warrior queen she admired as a child, were storming the dusty halls of the library, upending the crowded shelf of “Beowulf” translations to make room for something completely new.

...

Headley’s version opens:

Bro! Tell me we still know how to talk about kings! In the old days,
everyone knew what men were: brave, bold, glory-bound. Only
stories now, but I’ll sound the Spear-Danes’ song, hoarded for hungry times.

Bro? In Headley’s vision, the “Beowulf” narrator is “an old-timer at the end of the bar, periodically pounding his glass and demanding another.” Indeed, the poetic tradition from which the poem arises is an oral one, in which poetry may have been sung by bards—called “scops”—who entertained the kings and their entourages after feasts. Headley’s intervention is not only humorous and attention-grabbing but also historically justified. The poem, she points out, was probably composed by a man for a largely male audience. But she also hears a satirical quality in the boasts and pledges that constitute much of the characters’ speech. The men of “Beowulf”—not least the protagonist—are preoccupied with definitions of masculinity: what makes a man, or how a man can make himself.

The narrator is at once looking back and looking forward; the poem may have been composed as early as the eighth century A.D., but it describes, with fantastic touches, a world that existed a couple of hundred years earlier. He interrupts himself to comment on the action, to foreshadow events to come, or to add a Christian gloss. “I mean, personally?” he says after Beowulf’s defeat of Grendel, as Hrothgar rains gifts down like “pennies from Heaven” on the hero. “I’ve never seen anything / like it, so many treasures. . . . No fighting? No fury? Nope, bro, this was / a certain type of night.” (Cue “Oh What a Night” on the jukebox.) “Anyone knows how fair it was: / bro, more than fair” is his assessment of Beowulf’s reward. (For comparison, Heaney: “A fair witness can see how well each one behaved.”)

Jrbg fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Aug 27, 2020

Eugene V. Dubstep
Oct 4, 2013
Probation
Can't post for 8 years!
Bro!

Shibawanko
Feb 13, 2013


i feel gross even replying to this

ulvir
Jan 2, 2005

well that’s one more thing I didn’t know I hate

Eugene V. Dubstep
Oct 4, 2013
Probation
Can't post for 8 years!

ulvir posted:

well that’s one more thing I didn’t know I hate

Women?

ulvir
Jan 2, 2005

lol, but no, that new translation there

fridge corn
Apr 2, 2003

NO MERCY, ONLY PAIN :black101:
You never did the Kenosha… Kid…
You never did the Kenosha, Kid.
You never did… the Kenosha Kid
You. Never, did the Kenosha, kid!
You? Never did… The… Kenosha Kid?

Carly Gay Dead Son
Aug 27, 2007

Bonus.
She should’ve titled it Baeowulf. Or Beyowulf.

Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


Ras Het posted:

A lot of people have made convincing arguments for why P&V suck poo poo, but my personal vibe is roughly that while they can be clunky, they're not clunky in a way that ruins a book for you, but rather makes it seem weirder than it actually is, and flattens the different voices of different authors. For Demons, it's more likely to be Dostoyevsky's authorial voice and intentions that sell it to you or don't

I have the revised Garnett translation, this fine or garbo?

e. for the Bros, for C&P its the Coulson

Bilirubin fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Aug 28, 2020

Bilirubin
Feb 16, 2014

The sanctioned action is to CHUG


Bilirubin posted:

I have the revised Garnett translation, this fine or garbo?

e. for the Bros, for C&P its the Coulson

lol holy crap https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/11/07/the-translation-wars

blue squares
Sep 28, 2007

I just finished The Last Samurai. It is a very good novel but I don’t know about calling it the best novel of the century (as someone did ITT and so did New York Magazine).

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derp
Jan 21, 2010

when i get up all i want to do is go to bed again

Lipstick Apathy

blue squares posted:

I just finished The Last Samurai. It is a very good novel but I don’t know about calling it the best novel of the century (as someone did ITT and so did New York Magazine).

i think they probably mean THIS century, as in, the 21st century, even though it came out last century. people don't know how centuries work.

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