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Wrageowrapper posted:I'm pretty sure a number of the authors mentioned so far like Chandler are genre writers as well tbh. http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/chandlerart.html
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Jun 18, 2014 13:18
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computer parts posted:All of these are the movie equivalent of "genre books". The reality is probably just that people (read: goons) don't read all that much, and when they do they don't really like discussing it online. It doesn't really help that there's not a coordinated ad campaign for most books so you don't even have a shared experience for a large number of people. This is basically why I've been excluding genre fiction from the Book of the Month selections. There's only so much I can do though -- to mangle Dorothy Parker, I can lead the goons to culture, but I can't make them think. Frankly, it's a minor miracle that goons read books of any kind at all. We do have some threads for discussion of things that aren't warhammer ( http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3608062 ; http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3503637 ; http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3625363 ). The best way to encourage more discussion of things that aren't warhammer or dragons is to make more posts about things that aren't warhammer or dragons.
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Jun 18, 2014 14:25
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Talmonis posted:That's not to say that all "high literature" are boring, but it just seems that way when Twain and Austen are held in such high regard. It doesn't help matters that "popular fiction" is derided for the very sin of being created for entertainment. Twain and Austen can be extremely entertaining, they just take more work. Well, actually, for Twain, he wrote a lot of stuff and some of it really is crap, there's Huckleberry Finn on one hand and Tom Sawyer Abroad on the other, but when he was on form he was brilliant and funny and hilarious and really easy to read, too. Start with The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.My favorite Twain though is actually his nonfiction, especially his autobiographical sketches -- Roughing It and of course the autobiography (though I still need to read the new un-cut edition). Austen is harder to get into and I understand why people have a problem there. She was probably the greatest prose stylist before the 20th century and her stuff is brilliant, But there's a huge but to her work: she was writing exclusively for 18th & 19th-century upper class British aristocrats and spends absolutely zero time explaining setting or context. As a result, if you don't have a detailed knowledge of everything an 18th century British aristocrat would know, if you don't have (for example) a detailed knowledge of exactly what the differences are between a gig, a phaeton, a curricle, a barouche, and a landau, you'll miss three-quarters of her jokes. Hell, Northanger Abbey is *hilarious* -- if you've the read ten or fifteen other gothic novels that Austen was parodying. If you haven't, though, you just won't get the joke, so she'll come across as really boring. Think of it like reading Tolkien if Tolkien never explained what an elf or an orc or a wizard or a hobbit was because all his readers already knew -- you'd have to go read some horrible nerd website to figure all that stuff out before you could enjoy the story. You gotta do the research to get the context of what's going on. There's a neat book that came out recently, What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew, that'll help you get a lot of the necessary context to read Austen and Dickens and enjoy them. Alternatively, don't be afraid to watch a few BBC or film productions of the works first, just to get a sense of the time period and the socioeconomic context of it all, before diving into the prose. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Jun 18, 2014 |
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Jun 18, 2014 16:47
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Big Mad Drongo posted:I'm currently reading and loving Candide, but it's fairly short so I'll be in the market for a new book pretty soon. A Confederacy of Dunces is pretty much my all-time favorite book, so I'm hoping there's other novels out there featuring terrible/naive people in horrible situations while the Just World Fallacy crumbles around them. Oddly enough given the ongoing discussion a lot of Vonnegut's stuff would work for this, at least in the "naive people" and "world crumbles around them" aspects. Start with Cat's Cradle or Slaughterhouse Five.
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Jun 18, 2014 19:26
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Srice posted:You should make a thread for that book! I wouldn't be able to contribute anything because I haven't read it but heck that thread for White Noise convinced me to check it out sometime, and having a thread out there could do the same with The Accursed! Yes, this. One thing to keep in mind though is that since we're a relatively low-traffic forum it might take a while for you to get a response; don't be disappointed if you do a big effort post and don't get a bunch of quick responses, because people take a while to go out and read new things. Sometimes threads in this forum will re-surface once every couple months as people see a book, add it to their list, get around to reading it, and come back and post their comment a month or two later. That's fine. Heck, I've still got Far Tortuga sitting on the top of my to-read pile and the thread for that was over a month ago. I want to have an uninterrupted day to sit and sink into it and I haven't had that kind of time block available yet.
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Jun 18, 2014 23:14
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Pessimisten posted:
Sortof depends on which Steinbeck you like; Cannery Row is very different from East of Eden. I'd echo the suggestion of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Start with The Long Goodbye. Probably also worth looking at Hemingway. Maybe try Camus' The Plague. For the classics, my standard recommendation is Xenophon's Anabasis,. Basically, Xenophon was a student of Socrates who ends up in charge of a mercenary Greek army after the real generals all get killed under a flag of truce while deep inside enemy Persian territory. Then he and his army have to fight their way home, battling external enemies and internal political divisions. Basically the first nonfiction war story and also a decent picture of golden age Greek society and politics. Very easy to read, lots of adventure and action, lots of food for thought. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Jun 20, 2014 |
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Jun 20, 2014 02:59
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Iamblikhos posted:Herodotus would like to have a word with you War story, not history :P. Herodotus is the first historian, but Xenophon is the first first-person narrative war story. Speaking of which though Herodotus is awesome, I recommend the Landmark edition (http://www.amazon.com/The-Landmark-Herodotus-Histories/dp/1400031141 _. Still waiting for a Landmark Xenophon's Anabasis though =(
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Jun 20, 2014 03:16
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Effectronica posted:"There are others of the Indians who are neighbors of the city of Caspatyrus and the Pactyic country, north of the rest of India, and these live much like the Bactrians. They are the most warlike of the Indians, and it is they who go in quest of the gold; for in these parts all is desert because of the sand. In this desert, and sand, there are ants that are in bigness lesser than dogs but larger than foxes. Some of them have been hunted and captured and kept at the palace of the Persian king. These ants make their dwelling underground, digging out the sand in much the same fashion as ants do in Greece, and they are also very like them in form. The sand that they dig out has gold in it. The Indians start off into the desert to get at this sand. Each of the hunters harnesses together three camels, a male on either side, on a trace, and the female in the middle, on which the rider is mounted. He takes care that this mare camel should have offspring as young as possible, from which she has been taken away for the ride. Among these people, camels are every bit as quick as horses, apart from being far more capable of carrying burdens." The funny thing about Herodotus is that the more research people do the more it turns out there was (or at least may have been) some grain of truth to even his craziest stories. quote:In Histories (Book 3, passages 102 to 105) Herodotus reports that a species of fox-sized, furry "ants" lives in one of the far eastern, Indian provinces of the Persian Empire. This region, he reports, is a sandy desert, and the sand there contains a wealth of fine gold dust. These giant ants, according to Herodotus, would often unearth the gold dust when digging their mounds and tunnels, and the people living in this province would then collect the precious dust. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold-digging_ant Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 03:26 on Jun 20, 2014 |
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Jun 20, 2014 03:20
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Iamblikhos posted:holy poo poo, gold-digging ants are my favorite part! That's one reason I really like the Landmark editions, footnotes on every page explaining all the modern scholarship behind the crazy poo poo. There's a 2500-year-history of people dismissing poo poo in Herodotus as crazy fabrications only for him to later be proved right after all. Same thing happened to Marco Polo (who is similarly worth reading). For several hundred years after his death Marco Polo's name was a synonym for "colossal liar." Then of course it turned out he'd simply recorded the exact truth of what he saw. Paper money! That's just ridiculous!
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Jun 20, 2014 03:34
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Smoking Crow posted:Dragons exist. Hah! That made me go "whaa?" so I just went and cross-checked against my edition (Komroff, 1926) and yeah there they were just translated as "snakes and huge serpents (crocodiles)." Part of the problem with Polo is that he didn't actually write his stories down himself -- he told them all to a dude named Rustichello, who may have added embellishments of his own, and it seems likely that most later copyists and printers re-embellished and re-embellished because they thought it was all fakery anyways. Still many, many things he reported, that werent' believed at the time by anybody, have later proved to be surprisingly accurate.
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Jun 20, 2014 03:58
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Graves also wrote a sequel that's pretty good too, Claudius the God.
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Jun 20, 2014 23:35
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Wait, Harold Bloom wrote a fantasy novel? Michael Chabon wrote a barbarian-sword-buddies novel that's kindof interesting, Gentlemen of the Road. Apparently the working title was "Jews with Swords."
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Jun 26, 2014 19:34
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E1M1 posted:I'd just skip Gentlemen and send everyone in the forum directly to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Chabon is a big proponent of the intersection between genre and literary fiction, and even in what is probably his most high-minded novel he still manages a breezy pace and plot. Yeah, all of Chabon is good, I just thought it funny that even when he's writing a sword and adventure novel, it's still all about gay Jews.
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Jun 27, 2014 01:11
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TheFallenEvincar posted:I'd also recommend Robert Graves' Count Belisarius, not quite as recognized as his Claudius novels but I really enjoyed reading it after I, Claudius and Claudius the God. The history behind its historical fiction isn't quite as meticulously accurate from what I can tell but it's pretty thrilling well-written Byzantine historical action/adventure/intrigue and some of the descriptions of his battles against the Persians and Vandals and so on are really quite epic. If you like Robert Graves enough to read the Belisarius books, you should also check out Mary Renault's stuff (and this is, yes, a shameless plug for the Book of the Month poll going on right now!)
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Jun 28, 2014 22:05
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TheFallenEvincar posted:Thanks for the recommendation, I'll give her a vote in the monthly poll and start reading The Last of the Wine and some of her other stuff, for some reason Colleen McCullough hasn't quite caught on with me yet so maybe this'll be something I dive into. Glancing over her work, Renault's Alexander the Great trilogy also looks really intriguing so maybe I'll get started on that as well. I'd also highly recommend her first Theseus book, The King Must Die.
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Jun 28, 2014 23:35
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ulvir posted:is Doris Lessing worth a read? it just occurred to me that the only female authors I've read are Mary Shelly, Agatha Christie, and some assorted children's book authors like Astrid Lindgren and so on The BotM poll we just did has five different female authors that are good in different ways (thread here: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3646297 )
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Jul 2, 2014 18:48
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Threads about older authors are welcome but they have a few problems. The first is that this is a low traffic forum to begin with. The second is that SA as a whole isn't exactly the Algonquin round table. The third is that a lot of what drives the big threads is speculation about upcoming books. If Dickens were publishing a serial right now a thread on it would probably be a lot more popular. I'd suggest doing any older classic author threads as "let's read" type things.
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Jul 15, 2014 20:33
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Mescal posted:Do you think? If I did, it couldn't really be a certain length per week just because of the nature of the book. It'll take you either a few days or a year to read it--I bought my copy three years ago, actually. Anyway, there's no way to keep a group on the same page. If TBB isn't picky about OPs I could throw one up real quick for general discussion. TBB is not picky about OP's.
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Jul 25, 2014 02:32
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Smoking Crow posted:The best Absurdist theater is Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. The closest war novel to Catch 22 is Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Instead of Nineteen Eighty-Four, read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, it's better. If you like Frankenstein, you will like Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte and Dracula by Bram Stoker. Which Bronte sister did you read in high school? There were three of them. Beat me to most of my suggestions, with the exception of Wuthering Heights, which is what Twilight wants to be when it grows up (WH is a great novel about horrible people behaving horribly to each other, and best avoided imho). You could also try Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. For detective fiction I'd say start with The Maltese Falcon; Chandler was building on Hammet in a lot of ways so I think there's a benefit to starting with the earlier author. For aburdist theater, I'd add in Tom Stoppard also; start with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and then maybe try Arcadia if you want to get some 18th-century vibes into your reading.
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Aug 8, 2014 18:36
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Mr. Squishy posted:Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner is good (if you get bored, just skip half of it to the actual confession, where the devil shows up), BTW I just want to say the discussion of this book recently is the first time in a long while I've seen someone on this forum mention a 19th-century author I hadn't even heard of before, much less read. 
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Aug 8, 2014 19:30
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rasser posted:Can I ask for some Mark Twain advice: That description could be like a third of everything Twain wrote, but my guess is that it was probably excerpts from Roughing It, which was Twain's first collection of autobiographical essays. If that's what it was, it's brilliant and among the best of his work. It also was later republished as part of / became the core of his Autobiography, which exists in a couple of different editions. I've read one of the 1920's editions and it's extraordinarily interesting. Right now they're publishing a complete, unexpurgated edition of the Autobiography in three volumes, with only two published so far -- Twain had apparently left instructions not to publish various sections until 100 years after his death. I've got the two first volumes and they're HUGE, though, so you might want to start with something lighter, and if so, Roughing It is probably the best place to start. His best short story is "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County". Huckleberry Finn is his most important work because it's where he directly tackled race and slavery issues, but in terms of narrative structure it's a hot mess, to the point that when it's taught classes will sometimes skip the last third. Technically, in terms of narrative structure, his best book is probably The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, or maybe Connecticut Yankee (though of the two Tom Sawyer is more positive, Yankee darker and more cynical). If you want books to read to kids you probably want the general recommendations thread rather than this one (see: thread title). Maybe D'Aularies' Book of Greek Myths and D'Aularies' Book of Norse Myths. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Aug 25, 2014 |
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Aug 25, 2014 19:39
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Tenacious J posted:Help me stop being a book-manchild. I have a strong desire to read the classics or, at least, books written by the masters. However, every time I pick one up and start in on it one of two things happen and I am unable to keep going. I would love some insight about my disability. Ok, this is a really interesting set of questions. For the first one, try asking yourself what this author is doing with this iteration of the story. Sure, say, The Stars My Destination is in some sense a sci-fi rewrite of The Count of Monte Cristo, but it's also its own original story, too. What's different? What's changed? For the second type of problem, yeah, sometimes you just need to work out your reading muscles. The way to do that is by challenging yourself with stuff that's on the edge of what you can handle. Old Man's War and Forever War are actually both pretty good starts in that direction. (They're also both re-writes of and responses to the same basic story Heinlein told in Starship Troopers). What I'd suggest is to try reading some more literary, high-brow science fiction to get yourself warmed up. Try Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick, Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, and A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter Miller. (Maybe also The Stars my Destination by Alfred Bester, mentioned above). Those all have very distinct authorial voices and if they aren't quite Nabokov or Joyce they'll help you prepare for that kind of thing and practice your ability to handle unusual language. Once you feel ready for something more serious, I'd say at first try authors like Steinbeck or Hemingway that wrote in a relatively plain, straightforward style. Maybe Steinbeck's Cannery Row, or better yet, Tortilla Flat, where Steinbeck was deliberately retelling the Arthur stories as if they took place among a group of American vagrants, so you can practice enjoying a new variation on an old story. If you want something more philosophical that will force you to really do some self-evaluation, try The Plague by Camus. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Sep 7, 2014 |
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Sep 7, 2014 22:47
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Stravinsky posted:Magical realism is pretty different from fantasy imo. Magic realism tends to deal with well fantastical things people believe in/believe and are tinged in the fear/suspicion of the unknown and how it relates to the real world. Sometimes these elements are metaphoricle in nature. Fantasy deals in known imaginary elements in a purely constructed world and has no real connections with the real. Yeah, the threads we had on Marquez convinced me that Magic Realism really was its own separate movement; it's not just "South American Fantasy." All the "magic" Marquez reflects a cultural viewpoint; it's all "real"in the way that a village rumor is "real" even if it isn't "true" (who can know what the "real" truth was?). Western fantasy relies on the willing suspension of disbelief; Marquez almost ignores your belief or lack thereof and simply asserts his own narrative reality. The authorial voice is approaching the reader from an entirely different direction. Tolkien sits you down and says "I'm going to tell you a story". Marquez comes up to you and tells you about a thing that happened in his village. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Sep 12, 2014 |
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Sep 12, 2014 19:57
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stepeight posted:Is Proust's In Search of Lost Time a worthy endeavor? Yes. Reading it for me is always a somewhat sisyphean task though. I've made three or four attempts and I get further and further in each time but never actually make it to the end. Still a worthwhile endeavor though! I believe that the sisyphean reader is happy.
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Oct 27, 2014 15:24
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Earwicker posted:Actually it's a real pain in the rear end to hold all those books with one hand while trying to push the boulder with the other Maybe if he pushes with his back he can use both hands for reading. Also he only needs to hold one volume at a time, he can leave the others at the base of the hill.
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Oct 27, 2014 15:28
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amuayse posted:I'm starting to try and get a crack at the Mabinogion again. Anyone know a good translation for it? This is from the last page, but I've read a few different versions of the Mabinogion and honestly the one I liked best was Evangeline Walton's near-total rewrite -- basically she adapts it into "Clan of the Cave Bear" style historical fiction, with fantasy and magical elements. It's a neat treatment.
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Oct 27, 2014 15:33
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LaughMyselfTo posted:I personally preferred The Penal Colony, but I'm aware I'm in the minority. No, you had the correct opinion. Penal Colony is Kafka's best story.
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Nov 22, 2014 02:21
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Moacher posted:I just finished Catch 22 yesterday. While I enjoyed it alright, thought it was quite clever in parts, and I feel like I "got" the various commentaries and absurdities that Heller was trying to present, I didn't love it the way everyone else seems to. This is a novel that appears on every "Top 100 novels of All Time" list you'll ever see, often in the top 20 or even top 10, and is many peoples' favorite book ever, and I only thought it was good. For these reasons, I face that dilemma of wondering if I'm the problem here, which I'm open to accepting as entirely possible. Like a lot of other books, it's one that will speak a lot more to some people than others. For me it was life changing, but mostly because it was my first exposure to that degree of cyncism, to absurdism, and to modernist writing generally. If you're younger it might make less of an impact just because that kind of tone is so much more a part of the zeitgeist now: this is the era of irony, and catch-22 situations are normal, and milo minderbinder seems like he stepped out of Haliburton's corporate files. Sortof like the problem with cyberpunk. When the writers for deus ex human revolution started doing market research, it turned out kids these days didn't know what the term 'cyberpunk' was, and all the parts of the genre -- evil corporations, cybernetics, etc. -- just seemed like everyday reality, not sf. I think catch-22's literary value is that in a way it crystallized the new normal, gave us a new way of looking at the world. If you've already been exposed to that viewpoint via other media, it won't strike you as being so new a viewpoint, just remember those other things you saw were in turn drawing on catch-22's influence..
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Nov 26, 2014 01:36
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BeefSupreme posted:
I think Faulkner's characters speak for themselves so well that he kindof inherently explodes racist concepts, just by showing how equally human all of his characters are, regardless of their race.I'd argue that "showing the reality of the time" is inherently an attack on racist attitudes; to depict racism accurately is to attack it. That said race is definitely a theme he was working in a lot of his stories. It's been too long since I read Sound and the Fury but look at something like Go Down, Moses, particularly the short story Delta Autumn.
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Dec 4, 2014 14:34
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Seldom Posts posted:I was going to say this. Race is a huge theme in Go Down, Moses. Which also happens to be one of the few Faulkner books that I've actually read. I think it's the best place to start with Faulkner. It's probably his most accessible single-volume work that still has the Faulknerian writing style (Rose for Emily is practically hemingwayesque by comparison), you can break it up into short stories, you can fit all the shorts together into a whole. It's like he was deliberately writing something that could be assigned in Introduction to Southern Literature.
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Dec 4, 2014 14:56
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I have a pet theory/ question on Faulkner and Steinbeck, actually. When I read Faulkner's Sanctuary and Steinbeck's The Wayward Bus I couldn't help but think "whoa, Faulkner and Steinbeck are parodying the poo poo out of pulp lust novels." How much critical support is there for that reading? They both just seemed so over-the-top, but that doesn't seem to be the standard critical view of either of them (though I may just be too far out of the critical loop).
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Dec 5, 2014 19:10
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V. Illych L. posted:Yo Hieronymous, whatever happened to that Pride and Prejudice readalong? I loved that thread dude Basically I got excited, read ahead, finished the book, and lost my drive, then other tasks got ahead of it in the queue and I got distracted. I still intend to get back to it and have the annotated edition sitting right here on my desk.
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Dec 6, 2014 18:38
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jonnykungfu posted:Heinlein is seriously one of the most dated, crap writers I've read. I can get down on some sci-fi once in a while, but I've never understood why Heinlein is so regarded. The positive spin on Heinlein is that he was a technically competent pulp sf writer (harder and rarer than it sounds) who broke a lot of ground at the time. He was the first major American SF author to have non-caucasian protagonists (Starship Troopers), one of the first to write sexually liberated female characters, and among the first to use popular, pulp SF to explore controversial political ideas. He had a really big influence on the 1960's hippie and free-love movements (this is documented -- Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters all read Stranger in a Strange Land) and was a huge part of why libertarian ideas became so prevalent in 20th century SF. That said he was also more than half crazy especially in the latter half of his career. Falstaff Infection posted:Be that as it may, I agree with everyone who's said he's insufferable. Starship Troopers is fascist propaganda that somehow manages to be *boring*, while Stranger in a Strange Land feels like a transparently cynical attempt to cash in on the flower-child era. Check your publication dates -- Stranger pre-dates the flower child era and is arguably responsible in part for engendering it. If you read Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test he talks in there about Heinlein's and specifically Stranger's influence on the early hippie movement. All that said there are still a lot of horrible things about Heinlein! At root, he's a children's book author who decided to write things that would challenge the conventional assumptions of the average precocious male American twelve year old, but he's still fundamentally an author of children's books. I'm not even really intentionally knocking him when I say that, his first twelve or so published novels were all written explicitly for the 12 year old boy demographic, and all his later work is still fundamentally aimed at that same audience. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 05:36 on Dec 9, 2014 |
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Dec 9, 2014 05:28
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CestMoi posted:I'm a strong vegetarian and cannot handle books with meat based themes, any recommendations? I tried reading Life of Pi and when he said something about how the tiger might eat him I had to put it down in disgust. http://www.amazon.com/Still-Life-Adventures-Melissa-Milgrom/dp/B005DI9QK4
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Dec 19, 2014 21:39
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StashAugustine posted:at what point did the thread title change? Title? Change?
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Feb 14, 2015 05:25
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V. Illych L. posted:I particularly admire his first sentences. It is entirely possible that nobody in the history of literature has made as good first sentences to their novels as Hamsun. They're not even particularly fancy most of the time, they just fit the book perfectly. Even in his shittier novels (Redaktør Lynge, in particular) the first sentence is absolute gold. Norway certainly has no other novelist that can compete - possibly Ibsen with his plays, or someone's poetry, but the only novelist that I can think of that I'd rate anywhere close to him is Undset, though I've only read Kristin Lavransdatter by her. And Hamsun is in a whole other league. It's really hard to beat the first sentence of Charlotte's Web. quote:"Where's Papa going with that axe?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
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Feb 18, 2015 16:16
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Barlow posted:Book buyers seem to have ruined book sales forever. In the old days they needed to know the value of the books they were hunting but now wireless internet access means they just grab a cellphone scanner and scan everything. There is a disappointing lack of skill in that. If it's really interesting (i.e. before old) it won't have a scan bar anyway. That said shopping for bargains at used bookstores has gotten harder. I used to be able to get things like a first edition Silmarillion hardback for $5 because the store owner didn't read fantasy.
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Feb 19, 2015 14:10
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Ras Het posted:So in a way he owned you. She, you gender presumptivist!
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Feb 19, 2015 16:03
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Ras Het posted:I'd say the key thing with translations is that when you have one older than, say, 50, 60, 70 years, there's a good chance a lot of the tone of the original is lost to the modern reader. Like, if the earthly wisdom of the 19th century Russian muzhik is conveyed with Cockney chimey sweeper rhyming slang, at best it's inadvertently comic and at worst unreadable. As a policy I tend to avoid cheapo paperback English translations of classic works, because they always use these utterly awful late victorian translations whose copyright has expired. Victorian translators also tend to make lots of weird cuts and bowdlerizations, even in books where you might not expect it. For example, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and its sequel The Mysterious Island originally had some anti-british-imperialism content that got cut in contemporary English-language translations (Turns out, Captain Nemo was a displaced Indian Rajah!). Similarly just about every English language version of The Count of Monte Cristo prior to the 1990's cut out references to lesbianism and drug use. Literary merit of differing translations is another big issue but it's harder to resolve. I prefer the Mardrus and Mathers translation of the Arabian Nights, for example, even though I know it's less accurate than other versions. Really I think choice of translation is something that you can't make a general rule for, it's case-by-case. But yeah it's really important and you're usually best off researching translation options beforehand. When we pick a book in translation for the BOTM I always try to get good info on translation options first.
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Mar 6, 2015 17:59
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Smoking Crow posted:There are rhyming translations of Beowulf and they're just as bad as any of the Dante translations Well you wouldn't be focusing on rhyme there you'd be focusing on alliteration. Seamus Heaney's translation does a decent job of communicating the sound. Didn't a Tolkien translation get published recently? It's not *that* hard to read Beowulf in the original though, it just takes a week or two of study and some audio recordings to get the sound in your ear. What really pisses me off? "Translations" of Chaucer. Why not "Translate" Shakespeare while you're at it? Hell, Wordsworth? Walt Whitman?
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Mar 6, 2015 21:39
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