The Fitzgerald translation of the Odyssey is really fucking beautiful /lit/.
To think I'd almost given up because of the Alexander Pope version.
Any other greek stories where certain translations are miles above the rest?
Waterfield is a damn good translator imo. Not Greek, but Mandelbaum's Ovid's Metamorphoses is damn good.
>>7620137
Is that Vintage Publishing? I can't find it on Amazon in my country. What else did you discard?
>>7620137
Pope didn't even write half of his Odyssey. It's shit.
Fitzgerald's Odyssey is a great work of art in English alone. His Aeneid is excellent as well (not so much his Iliad).
800+ page books, but I guess some are 1,000 pages, 1,200 pages, etc. Books that have a lot of characters, are usually complex, that kind of thing. Examples would be Underworld, Infinite Jest, Against the Day, Gravity's Rainbow, etc.
How do you feel about these books? Do you think very long books are better than regular books, 300 - 500 page stuff, or whatever? Or do you think they're just long for the sake of being long?
Depends on the book.
I've never read a 1,000 page work a fiction where you couldn't have cut 200 pages of fat from it and lost nothing.
Lots of negatives, I know. Think it through, Junior, you'll make it to fifth grade yet.
>>7620066
The novella is my ideal form. You can sit down and read it in one or two sittings, like watching a film.
/lit/ club is happening again this week with another short story by Ananis Nin
If you would to participate in the discussion (skype) go here for invite: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1xQaLISTgFkehNOXsbUSbSFeXTtrIBVcfstsr1yytxJo/viewform
source material/schedule: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c3AxjOz6LQqK_RlROUVHnuC8JiddN0qX7E8DP4dpjbk/edit?usp=sharing
Thanks!
>>7619814
>skype
No webcam discussion I hope
>>7619830
voice/text
bump
Voltaire is an overrated piece of shit
Prove me wrong
>PRO TIP: YOU CAN'T
Keep talking shit, lil faggot. U just jelly cuz u will never b in the western canon
>>7617785
But you're right.
Rousseau is the overrated one t b h
What novels did you read in high school? Was your school patrician? What would you have wanted to read?
>>7616450
We never read anything when i was in HS.
All that I can remember:
Stig of the Dump
Great Expectations
The Crucible
Romeo & Juliet
Hamlet
Lord of the Flies
Of Mice and Men
Pretty standard desu. It was kind of merged into media, so we also analysed some films in the same way we'd do so for a book. We did Shrek & The Fifth Element and something else I forget
And there were a bunch of poems by some British poets I can't even remember the names of. One of them is currently the poet laureate if I recall though. I thought their poems stunk
is Beowulf a novel?
english is pretty kool in my bok
Anyone read the Breivik's manifesto? I really enjoyed reading My Twisted World. Does he tops the autism of Elliot?
>>7620537
IIRC Breivik copypasted whole pages from Unabomber's "Industrial Society and Its Future". Read that instead, I have and don't regret it. Just don't pay attention to the occasional ramblings and you'll be fine.
What does /lit/ think about John Barth? I never hear anything about him around here.
That's because you've been here five minutes. There's at least two threads a day on him.
>>7620477
this
kill yourself OP
recommend me didactic literature about writing, if possible specifically anything that advises on the self-conscious aspects of writing for the neurotically inclined
Ron Carlson Writes a Story
What does /lit/ think of the Garnett translation of Anna Karenina? Would you recommend Maude, etc.? What's the difference?
Quality.
>What's the difference.
>Reviewing the translations by Bartlett and Schwartz for The New York Times Book Review, Masha Gessen noted that each new translation of Anna Karenina ended up highlighting an aspect of Tolstoy's "variable voice" in the novel, and thus, "The Tolstoy of Garnett... is a monocled British gentleman who is simply incapable of taking his characters as seriously as they take themselves. Pevear and Volokhonsky... created a reasonable, calm storyteller who communicated in conversational American English. Rosamund Bartlett... creates an updated ironic-Brit version of Tolstoy. Marian Schwartz... has produced what is probably the least smooth-talking and most contradictory Tolstoy yet." Gessen found Schwartz's translation to be formally closer to the original Russian, but often weighed down with details as a result; Bartlett's translation, like Pevear and Volokhonsky's, was rendered in more idiomatic English and more readable.[15]
Having only read the Garnett translation, I'd say Garnett also approaches from a British ironic point of view, where the narrator is sympathetic to the characters and their experiences but still apart from them and able to critique and patronize. Bear in mind that anyone who posts in this thread has probably only read one version and is relying on hearsay to determine their views on texts they haven't read.
>>7620375
I'm only on book 3 of the CG translation but I completely see what you're saying with the British ironic voice.
>Bear in mind that anyone who posts in this thread has probably only read one version
Hopefully someone who's read two can contribute.
So far I only got The Land Of The Boxers
Pic unrelated
bumping for interest
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
WE TURKEY NOW
>>7619888
Was there ever a more man-crushable writer than Yeats?
>>7620219
Keats desu
>Keats will never tell you what to do when he dies
part VI when
but seriously, it was found in his papers like seven years ago, when (if ever) are they going to release it?
When the Bolano estate runs out of money.
Which translation is better for...
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Simon Armitage or Marie Borroff?
Beowulf: Seamus Heany in verse or Talbot Donaldson in prose?
Any other options worth checking?
Simon Armitage's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is fantastic, stick with it.
>>7619721
And what about Beowulf?
>>7619708
Seamus Heaney's Beowulf is incredible & the only good thing he ever wrote. The introduction is very good too.
Let's try and do something worthwhile for a change.
Lately I've been reading Fear and Trembling by Kierkegaard and it came to me how relevant this book is for any discussion about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Apart from the obvious titular similarity and the fact the book opens with a Kierkegaard quote, its whole theme of the incomunicability of the death of the American Dream and the futility of Thompson's own threnody matches perfectly with Kierkegaard's foray in the outward speechlessness of the faithful, the inability to relate one's story to others.
What do you think about this? I'm partial to the idea it was something Thompson meant to convey.
What about you? Recount times in which you made autonomous connection between works of literature.
My bad, the Kierkegaard quote was at the beginning of Hell's Angels. Still, the reasoning stands.
Anybody who'd like to share?
You're gonna need to work on your OP creation skills. Make it enticing, snappy; make people think: wow, I just gotta post on this.
I'm getting ready into sci-fi and fantasy at the moment and want to use a site which updates frequently on new developments in these genres. Unfortunately, io9 is a SJW sack of shit - is there any site which does SF&F news without pandering to transsexual abominations shilling their latest novels?
>>7619599
This is as good as any source you will find, although its missing Gene Wolfe, Lies of Locke Lamora, Children of Hurin and Joe Abercrombie.
I dont shit on reading for enjoyment and I think pulp has its place, but if there were any new developments in Sci-Fi the /lit/ sci fi place is as good a place as any. the genre is stagnant as fuck, with GRRM on the tippy top, and then hundreds of pounds of manure with a few gems sprinked in.
>>7619619
>any new developments in SF & F
fixed
