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https://twitter.com/effimai/status/1219010655677812737?s=21
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# ? Jan 22, 2020 17:40 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 21:27 |
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Thanks for making me snortlaugh on the Hell Bus.
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# ? Jan 22, 2020 17:55 |
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Read Crime and Punishment when I was 18 the summer before starting college and LOVED it. David Magarshack translated that version in the 1950s. That goodness it wasn't Constance Garnett... Since then I've wanted to get back into Russian lit via Pevear & Volokhonsky, but have not. I did read Peaver's 3 Musketeers, it was very exciting! I have Count of Monte Cristo that maybe I should read if just for the inspiration onto personal creative projects. This past year, I have the habit of, when watching a series or reading a book, writing down passages in a text document (that I do not share.) I have read/watched so much media, and having nothing to show for it except a fond memory tinged by a feeling of guilt. I read Moby Dick, but this is nothing but a fond memory, details mostly forgotten. This text file of quotes and personal reactions of all the fictional work that I've consumed for the past year allow me some reasoning to read/watch and enjoy fictional works without feeling that I am wasting time.
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# ? Jan 22, 2020 20:00 |
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excellent bird guy posted:That goodness it wasn't Constance Garnett... (Magarshack is magnificent.)
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# ? Jan 22, 2020 22:05 |
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I want a book of lists. Not kooky lists like Presidential dressing flubs or famous shoe incidents (see Uncle John’s/mental_floss for that nonsense). Just pure lists of facts. Kings of England. Chinese dynasties. No explanations, just data. My father used to own one. I cannot find anything like it. I don’t really know where to ask if anyone is familiar with a book (or the exact book my father used to own) like this, so I’m asking here.
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# ? Jan 22, 2020 23:31 |
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Do you mean like this, or still too trivial? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Lists
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# ? Jan 22, 2020 23:36 |
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I read a sample and, yeah, it’s too trivial. The book I am thinking of is simply just lists with no preamble or explanation. Presidents. Shakespeare plays in chronological order. Things like that. My dad claims that's correct, so maybe I'm wrong. I just downloaded a Kindle sample and it didn't seem right. I'll see if my library carries it. Alec Eiffel fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Jan 23, 2020 |
# ? Jan 22, 2020 23:45 |
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Alec Eiffel posted:I read a sample and, yeah, it’s too trivial. The book I am thinking of is simply just lists with no preamble or explanation. Presidents. Shakespeare plays in chronological order. Things like that. Good luck on your Jeopardy appearance
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# ? Jan 23, 2020 01:03 |
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regulargonzalez posted:Good luck on your Jeopardy appearance
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# ? Jan 23, 2020 01:15 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Garnett is perfectly decent, and Pevear and Volokhonsky are awful. Controversial opinion... do they dumb it down? I have never read P&V anything, other than the one peaver translation of a not so deep book.
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# ? Jan 23, 2020 02:58 |
excellent bird guy posted:Read Crime and Punishment when I was 18 the summer before starting college and LOVED it. David Magarshack translated that version in the 1950s. That goodness it wasn't Constance Garnett... cool Did you cut it in half?
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# ? Jan 23, 2020 06:20 |
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tmi i know.. One time I read The Plague by Albert Camus and it scared me so i hope this virus thing doesn't take off. I like how in the Plague this one character was going to write a book and spent the entirety of his time rewriting the same sentence over and over and trying to make it perfect.
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# ? Jan 23, 2020 06:50 |
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excellent bird guy posted:Controversial opinion... do they dumb it down? I have never read P&V anything, other than the one peaver translation of a not so deep book. The bottom of the barrel itself is probably Rosemary Edmonds, whose version of Anna Karenina's opening line actually made me laugh out loud, but she isn't clogging the shelves of every Barnes & Noble. As for translators who "dumb it down", MacAndrew really smooths things out for the casual reader, but I would recommend him over Pevear and Volokhonsky any day (and have, as it happens) because he at least has a spine. Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 07:17 on Jan 23, 2020 |
# ? Jan 23, 2020 07:06 |
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I just bought The Brothers Karamazov last weekend and didn't even consider the fact that there would be different translations of different quality. My experience with translated literature has pretty much always involved books with only one translation so that stuff isn't on my radar at all.
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# ? Jan 23, 2020 15:02 |
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pig slut lisa posted:I just bought The Brothers Karamazov last weekend and didn't even consider the fact that there would be different translations of different quality. My experience with translated literature has pretty much always involved books with only one translation so that stuff isn't on my radar at all. Translation criticism is great! I'm personally a little wary to take what goons say as gospel though. It's all very pre-, rather than descriptive, much more eager to judge its quality (based only on individual, micro-level word choices, no less) than to observe or distill strategies - though I must add that no one does it better than Sham. Speaking of which, regardless of the difference in meaning of the individual words, Sham, "a remarkable/extraordinary surge of energy" and "a surge of remarkable/extraordinary energy" differ significantly. For what it's worth, the Dutch copy I own - the translator of which, for whatever that's worth, is held in very high esteem - is much closer to P&V's: "Toen hij zijn ogen opende, voelde hij tot zijn verbazing opeens een golf van ongewone energie" (emphasis obviously mine - note that "ongewoon" here too refers to the energy). "Ongewoon" is even less remarkable than both "remarkable" and "extroardinary"; typically meaning as much as "unusual", which seems to be in line with what you're saying about the Russian in the source text. Anyway, being in no way hindered by any knowledge of the Russian language and basing this entirely on my admiration for the Dutch translator, I'm inclined to favour the descriptor being attached to "energy" rather than "surge" and actually like P&V's use of "some" in this instance. As a side note, I think much of these tendencies in translation, as well as in translation criticism, both as a whole and on these forums - by which I mean, for the English translator to opt for what appears the least "flat", for the reader to critique translations on that basis and for the publisher to not think twice about altering the entire tone or plot of a novel, to spice things up, to tone things down - stems from the literary capital the English language has in general: more dominant national fields tend to be more liberal in their assimilation of works originating from more peripheral languages. A good example of such a tendency in recent times is US publishers asking translators of relatively little known languages to scrap or change entire passages which could be construed as not-PC, something which generally wouldn't happen the other way around, simply because marketability to the vast (only-)English-speaking audience is paramount. (Which I suppose could make for an interesting discussion on what constitutes "having a spine" ) Lex Neville fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Jan 23, 2020 |
# ? Jan 23, 2020 16:23 |
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Lex Neville posted:Translation criticism is great! I'm personally a little wary to take what goons say as gospel though. It's all very pre-, rather than descriptive, much more eager to judge its quality (based only on individual, micro-level word choices, no less) than to observe or distill strategies - though I must add that no one does it better than Sham. Lex Neville posted:"Ongewoon" is even less remarkable than both "remarkable" and "extroardinary"; typically meaning as much as "unusual", which seems to be in line with what you're saying about the Russian in the source text. Lex Neville posted:I, being in no way hindered by any knowledge of the Russian language, actually like P&V's use of "some" in this instance, based on these three translations. Lex Neville posted:for the English translator to opt for what appears the least "flat", for the reader to critique translations on that basis, and for the publisher to not think twice about altering the entire tone or plot of a novel, to spice things up, to tone things down [...] (Which I suppose could make for an interesting discussion on what constitutes "having a spine" ) Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Jan 23, 2020 |
# ? Jan 23, 2020 17:39 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I barely do it at all! It's all relative Sham bam bamina! posted:It's the opposite of what I'm saying. The Russian Wiktionary entry for the word defines it as "из ряда вон выходящий [...] очень сильный по своему проявлению", which is its own can of worms to translate but which loosely means "out of line/standing out [...] very strong in its manifestation". It is "not ordinary" by being beyond it – extraordinary. Right. That's how I parsed what you wrote at first but then edited it because I misunderstood "stronger", my bad. The Dutch translator I quoted doesn't appear to agree, then; do you think this could've been subject to a semantic shift over the years? Sham bam bamina! posted:"Some" is actually more accurate ("kakoy-to"), as is the placement of "surge". I could have picked a more flattering example for Magarshack, but I don't have time for anything lately and don't have my copy of the Magarshack handy to find a better line right now. Pevear and Volokhonsky do tend to follow the original syntax more closely, but that doesn't necessarily make them more accurate or better because there are things in Russian that just don't work the same way in English. Again, dialog comes off the worst for this. Too often, P&V do a kind of find-and-replace translation that preserves constructions with no business being in English prose, and the English words they slot in will work lexically but not tonally. Fair enough. You'll understand I can only go off your initial quote. What you're saying about dialogue, I'll take at face value. I see that you quoted an earlier version of my post, that I since edited. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the placement of the descriptor in this instance. To me, that is by far the most interesting variation and I don't think that can be brushed off as a matter of syntax. Not that I think that's what you're saying, but I'd argue that descriptor placement goes well beyond simply a syntactic shift. I'm all too familiar with syntactic differences between languages and would only ever comment on them in regards to a translation if I grasped the source language. "More accurate" isn't something I'd say in the first place Sham bam bamina! posted:Translation is all about compromise. You cannot not change anything. But what you can do is own your changes. MacAndrew's translation of The Brothers Karamazov is liberal, but it's focused. There is a design to it; it is deliberately tuned for a casual English-speaking reader. Frankly, these first three sentences are platitudes (I don't mean that as harshly as it probably appears on the page, excuse me!) that I'm all too familiar with as a literary translator, but that don't really have anything to do with my main point, namely what you elided. As for the latter two, I understand, and that's what I was hinting at: it's obviously a virtue for a translation to be consistent with certain maxims, but my point is that those maxims vary greatly - particularly between the English-speaking field and the rest of the world, but also between zeitgeists, translations, translators, publishers and indeed readers - and I think there's value in being aware of them being maxims, of there being variation and of their ephemeral nature, preferably even going as far as not taking them as a given, being able to see beyond them. (Tangentially related, and meant to be tongue-in-cheek: take those last two sentences, swap out MacAndrew's name, the book's title, and change one or two words around, and you've more or less put into words why I take issue with goons' glib criticism of Wilson's Iliad ) (Also, please excuse the endless edits. It isn't very helpful...) Lex Neville fucked around with this message at 18:34 on Jan 23, 2020 |
# ? Jan 23, 2020 18:13 |
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excellent bird guy posted:tmi i know.. One time I read The Plague by Albert Camus and it scared me so i hope this virus thing doesn't take off. Just found a copy of this behind a shelf the other day. And a lot of dead spiders. Maybe the book carries the plague?!?
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# ? Jan 23, 2020 18:15 |
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Lex Neville posted:I see that you quoted an earlier version of my post, that I since edited. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the placement of the descriptor in this instance. To me, that is by far the most interesting variation and I don't think that can be brushed off as a matter of syntax. Not that I think that's what you're saying, but surely you'll agree that this goes way beyond that. Lex Neville posted:Frankly, these first three sentences are platitudes (I don't mean that as harshly as it probably appears on the page, excuse me!) that I'm all too familiar with as a literary translator, but that don't really have anything to do with my main point, namely what you elided. Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Jan 23, 2020 |
# ? Jan 23, 2020 18:33 |
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With descriptor placement I meant the difference in what is said to be "remarkable/extraordinary": the surge or the energy.
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# ? Jan 23, 2020 18:35 |
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Lex Neville posted:With descriptor placement I meant the difference in what is said to be "remarkable/extraordinary": the surge or the energy.
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# ? Jan 23, 2020 18:37 |
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Surely you lean one way or the other? I didn't catch that, apologies if you did address it. My asking for your thoughts on it got lost in all the edits, I'm afraid.
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# ? Jan 23, 2020 18:38 |
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Lex Neville posted:Surely you lean one way or the other? I didn't catch that, apologies if you did address it.
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# ? Jan 23, 2020 18:39 |
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You'd think I'd be better at reading between the lines. My bad!
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# ? Jan 23, 2020 18:41 |
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I was reading dostoyevsky maybe 10 years ago, The Possessed. i put it down and never finished, but lately the name changed and is marketed as The Demons. Interesting, I like the name Possessed better. Seems less boisterous of a word.
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# ? Jan 24, 2020 17:35 |
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excellent bird guy posted:tmi i know.. One time I read The Plague by Albert Camus and it scared me so i hope this virus thing doesn't take off. quote:We gather that Tarrou was agreeably impressed by a little scene that took place daily on the balcony of a house facing his window. His room at the hotel looked on to a small side street and there were always several cats sleeping in the shadow of the walls. Every day, soon after lunch, at a time when most people stayed indoors, enjoying a siesta, a dapper little old man stepped out on the balcony on the other side of the street. He had a soldierly bearing, very erect, and affected a military style of dressing; his snow-white hair was always brushed to perfect smoothness. Leaning over the balcony he would call: "Pussy! Pussy!" in a voice at once haughty and endearing. The cats blinked up at him with sleep-pale eyes, but made no move as yet. He then proceeded to tear some paper into scraps and let them fall into the street; interested by the fluttering shower of white butterflies, the cats came forward, lifting tentative paws toward the last scraps of paper. Then, taking careful aim, the old man would spit vigorously at the cats and, whenever a liquid missile hit the quarry, would beam with delight.
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# ? Jan 25, 2020 06:22 |
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yea it's a pretty reasonable length too. i never looked into all the depth of his existentialism or whatever, but i'd reckon there are lots of essays that would go into depth. I ran into it at a used book store and just liked the cover. Let us know what you think, I forgot a lot except it's a book about death and loss lol, i think it was the author's response to world war if i recall. Also: very cool bird
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# ? Jan 25, 2020 12:38 |
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excellent bird guy posted:Also:
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# ? Jan 26, 2020 01:02 |
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Jerry Cotton posted:Just found a copy of this behind a shelf the other day. And a lot of dead spiders. Maybe the book carries the plague?!? Aptly enough just started reading this on the way to work, and also coughing a lot.
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# ? Jan 27, 2020 18:19 |
Is there a book collecting thread? Didn't see one. I finally have a little disposable income and have started to expand my small library. Today, I got a Easton Press leatherbound collector's edition of Double Helix signed by James Watson. So stoked.
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# ? Jan 31, 2020 02:25 |
D-Pad posted:Is there a book collecting thread? Didn't see one. I finally have a little disposable income and have started to expand my small library. Today, I got a Easton Press leatherbound collector's edition of Double Helix signed by James Watson. So stoked. There's kind of one over in GBS, but it focuses more on weird stuff rather than limited edition stuff. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3842135 Nothing really here, though. Start one if you want, I'd contribute with all my questionable purchases .
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# ? Jan 31, 2020 04:06 |
https://twitter.com/alloy_dr/status/1223203562194395137?s=20
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# ? Feb 1, 2020 02:45 |
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Did you just get your drivers license?
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# ? Feb 1, 2020 04:47 |
Furious Lobster posted:Did you just get your drivers license? idgi (please don't troll re: book of the month, I take it seriously) quote:[*]Is your post about a book, or is it about something that is not a book, such as one of the other posters on the forum? Think hard. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3875825 (forum rules thread!) Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 09:31 on Feb 1, 2020 |
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# ? Feb 1, 2020 09:06 |
bit of an overreaction to an extremely mild prodding there hieronymous
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# ? Feb 1, 2020 18:49 |
chernobyl kinsman posted:bit of an overreaction to an extremely mild prodding there hieronymous The funny response here would be "no, this is an overreaction" as a probation message but I really don't want this derail to go further if people want to take a swipe at me that's fine but do it on twitter or somewhere else in the forum, not in the stickied threads in this forum -- those are the gateways to the forum, not the bathrooms, if you can't learn to poo poo in the right place oh well Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Feb 1, 2020 |
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# ? Feb 1, 2020 19:22 |
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i am the gatekeeper of this forum. one of my breasts is tattooed with the truth; the other, only lies
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# ? Feb 2, 2020 03:19 |
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thinking about buying an Ipad, they are<$300 i see. I end up with a lot of pdf files. I have a job where it hopefully is quiet from 10pm to 6am of my shift. I'm going to bring "The I Ching for Teens," and a little notebook to take notes. it's an actual paperback book so when I put it in my lunchbox to carry i hope chicken grease doesn't get all over the pages.
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# ? Feb 3, 2020 00:03 |
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Can I get a link to the discord?
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# ? Feb 9, 2020 06:03 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 21:27 |
PsychedelicWarlord posted:Can I get a link to the discord? https://discord.gg/5K3RHH
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# ? Feb 9, 2020 17:51 |