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hackbunny posted:I'm horribly tone deaf + my spoken English is awful, but, it looks like it sounds good, too, doesn't it? At least, it's made of parts that sound good It's really easy to make something sound at least serviceable in reading, which is why you get lots of stupid people who are like "poetry is prose with line breaks when i was 14 i gave a teacher a thing that was prose with line breaks and they, the eternal arbiters of The Poetic, said it was poetry" because generally anything you write it'll sound fine. Honestly inserting line breaks in prose gets you something that at least sounds better than a lot of modern poetry written by people deliberately trying to make poems because it's really easy to gently caress up the sound of something if you're thinking hard about it without actually knowing what you're doing. Someone like Steve Roggenbuck is an example of this where his poetry sounds dreadful because he's trying to be Walt Whitman without any understanding of the sound of poetry that Walt Whitman achieves. Writing generic "poetry" (something that sounds fine and has nice images) is fairly easy so long as you're not dumb, writing poetry that deserves to be called poetry because of the way sound interlaces with meaning is unbelievably difficult.
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Jan 27, 2018 03:40
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Nanomashoes posted:“This guy is the best,” she says, noticing an edition of Kafka’s complete stories; she’s referring to Peter Mendelsund, the book’s designer. “The dream is to have him design my next book." I'd bet serious money that she owns every Murakami book with a cover designed by Chip Kidd, because they're pretty dope, though maybe don't include enough minimalist pencil sketches and empty space for Instapoets
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Jan 27, 2018 03:44
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CestMoi posted:Moscow to The End of the Line by Venedikt Erofeev is ludicrously good and I've heard people call it prose poetry really there's a lot of good books by obscure europeans that get called that
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Jan 27, 2018 03:47
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CestMoi posted:Moscow to The End of the Line by Venedikt Erofeev is ludicrously good and I've heard people call it prose poetry amazon says thats like 150 pages at which point it definitely just becomes a novel
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Jan 27, 2018 03:55
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There's loads of good prose poetry. Mercian Hymns kicks absolute rear end
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Jan 27, 2018 04:57
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Poetry as an art form peaked when the guy from Black Sabbath wrote the line "people think i'm insane because i am frowning all the time"
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Jan 27, 2018 08:31
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personally I'm a fan of Soya's 1960s "A Love Story": hand in hand that in hand hand in that that in that
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Jan 27, 2018 08:58
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The travelogue mention reminds me. A while ago someone posted in here about a travelogue of the Balkans and when the guy got to Slovenia he said something like "I don't belong here, it's too happy here like a western European country." Anyone have an idea what the name of the book is? (that's funny as hell)
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Jan 27, 2018 12:06
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DisDisDis posted:The travelogue mention reminds me. A while ago someone posted in here about a travelogue of the Balkans and when the guy got to Slovenia he said something like "I don't belong here, it's too happy here like a western European country." Anyone have an idea what the name of the book is? (that's funny as hell) I'm reading Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which is an extremely cool travel book about the Balkans, however I don't think that's the one you want because the author is a woman but also because she doesn't go to Slovenia. It's really good and worth reading though!
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Jan 27, 2018 13:32
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Douk Douk posted:this is a great story actually, lol I love hearing stories of huge miscommunication between teachers and students that leads to this poo poo I swear at first I thought the line referred to the hotdogs, I missed that they were eating them cold, and I thought "that's an original way of describing the whistling sound hotdogs sometimes make when you grill them". Maybe I would give it a low grade because the other descriptions of mundane things weren't as vivid. So there you have it, a second way to misunderstand the poem based on that line
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Jan 27, 2018 13:39
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A human heart posted:I'm reading Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which is an extremely cool travel book about the Balkans, however I don't think that's the one you want because the author is a woman but also because she doesn't go to Slovenia. It's really good and worth reading though! This sounds really really good to me but I'm not feeling up to a 1k page tome right now
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Jan 27, 2018 13:43
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DisDisDis posted:This sounds really really good to me but I'm not feeling up to a 1k page tome right now I just finished reading a part that talked about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, and there's a very cool passage that imagines the hotel he was in before he left to get shot being filled up by all the thousands of animals he killed in his life time.
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Jan 27, 2018 13:48
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shiiiit I'm gonna buy this book
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Jan 27, 2018 14:17
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DisDisDis posted:The travelogue mention reminds me. A while ago someone posted in here about a travelogue of the Balkans and when the guy got to Slovenia he said something like "I don't belong here, it's too happy here like a western European country." Anyone have an idea what the name of the book is? (that's funny as hell) thats from On the Road to Babadag by Andrzej Stasiuk
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Jan 27, 2018 20:27
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If I want to be less of a heathen and read The Iliad, is there much consensus on a best translation/edition of it? I'm planning on reading it on my Kindle (though if this is a bad idea, I can buy/borrow a hardcover copy). I've got the version off Project Gutenberg, which was translated by Samuel Butler. Amazon has the the Richmond Lattimore version for free, and a newer one by Caroline Alexander for a price. I'm sure I'd benefit from easily-accessible footnotes and such so I'm leaning toward one of the two Amazon ones. Japanese Dating Sim fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Jan 27, 2018 |
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Jan 27, 2018 21:46
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Japanese Dating Sim posted:I've got the version off Project Gutenberg, which was translated by Samuel Butler. no quote:Amazon has the the Richmond Lattimore version for free, fine quote:and a newer one by Caroline Alexander for a price absolutely not under any circumstances. Read Lattimore or Fagles. I like Fagles. I think mel likes Lattimore
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Jan 27, 2018 23:32
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speaking of poetry, I found a copy of June Fourth Elegies by Liu Xiaobo which I’m eager to get into
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Jan 28, 2018 01:43
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Japanese Dating Sim posted:If I want to be less of a heathen and read The Iliad, is there much consensus on a best translation/edition of it? I'm planning on reading it on my Kindle (though if this is a bad idea, I can buy/borrow a hardcover copy). I've read parts of Lattimore's Iliad and all of Fagles', and by far had a lot more fun with Fagles. if you just want to choose between lattimore and butler definitely go with lattimore. I can see Lattimore being the standard in most universities because it's very direct and specific, but when read aloud as the Iliad should be, Fagles' words really bounce off of each other and create such passionate imagery. both are excellent though and so it comes mostly to preference, if you like literalness or flowery prose more. here's Lattimore's translation of early on in book I: quote:'Smintheus, if ever it pleased your heart that I built your temple, and here's Fagles': quote:"Smintheus, god of the plague! Fitzgerald is also a good translation. Caroline Alexander can suck a fat bronze spear. Alexander Pope's translation is a mangled bastard mongrel version of the original Iliad that might as well rewrite the entire story, but an extremely well-written and gorgeous bastard mongrel that you might want to check out if you're still interested after finishing one of the actually good translations. hackbunny posted:I swear at first I thought the line referred to the hotdogs, I missed that they were eating them cold, and I thought "that's an original way of describing the whistling sound hotdogs sometimes make when you grill them". Maybe I would give it a low grade because the other descriptions of mundane things weren't as vivid. So there you have it, a second way to misunderstand the poem based on that line to his credit he wrote the poem in like 10 minutes and pulled some fairly clever rhymes out of his rear end in that short span of time and that's the most I can say about it lol Douk Douk fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Jan 28, 2018 |
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Jan 28, 2018 01:47
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How can anyone argue that the first version is better... Is the second guy playing fast and loose with the meanings or something?
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Jan 28, 2018 02:39
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derp posted:that dinosaur example of poetry is what has always confused me about what poetry actually is. I remember i had a creative writing class in like, 10th grade and i couldn't get my teacher to explain to me what makes something a poem. so for a poem i had to write for an assignment, i just wrote out a paragraph about how i didn't understand what poetry was, spaced it out to have the shape of a poem, and turned it in and got full credit for it. I was kind of hoping he would explain to me why it wasn't poetry but i guess it was. bukowski might be more your thing then i'm not crazy about him but sometimes he doesn't give a poo poo about anything so hard it wraps back around and becomes incisive
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Jan 28, 2018 03:41
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derp posted:How can anyone argue that the first version is better... Is the second guy playing fast and loose with the meanings or something? pretty much. both translations are much more faithful to the original dactylic hexameter that the poem was written in than Pope or Butler. I think Lattimore's translation is only as popular as Fagles' mainly because Fagles' wasn't published until 40-ish years later and is still the university standard, and yeah Fagles plays pretty loose with the beats sometimes, but makes up for it with stellar visuals. Pope's version straight-up buttfucks the original poem's beats, but god drat is it beautiful. quote:Patroclus mark'd him as he shunn'd the war,
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Jan 28, 2018 03:54
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Aside from the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid, the poems I'm most interested in reading are the works of William Blake.
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Jan 28, 2018 04:38
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william blake was a wonderful goofy lunatic. his poems are the only ones I've read that manage to instill in my blackened poo poo heart a nostalgic sense of childlike awe and wonder. I recommend The Portable Blake for 2 reasons: one is that it has an absolutely phenomenal 60-page write-up of Blake's biography, giving you a great background as to who he was and what his life was like, and two is that it has Songs of Innocence and Experience in their entirety, which is unquestionably his best work. the rest of the book are some of his illustrations and the rest of his major works, which will give you a great perspective on just how crazy Blake really was.
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Jan 28, 2018 05:04
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Appreciate all the info on Iliad translations. I think I'll go with Fagles probably. What's so bad about Caroline Alexander's version? Just wondering.
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Jan 28, 2018 05:36
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While you're on about translations, I don't need anything for Greek or Latin because I wasted my time taking classical languages in school, but where should I look for a good translation of the Divine Comedy? Not just Inferno, I want the whole thing. I don't want it to take too many liberties with the original Italian, but if a direct translation can't sound florid enough, I'll permit a bit of creative interpretation.
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Jan 28, 2018 09:44
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Alvarez IV posted:While you're on about translations, I don't need anything for Greek or Latin because I wasted my time taking classical languages in school, but where should I look for a good translation of the Divine Comedy? Not just Inferno, I want the whole thing. I don't want it to take too many liberties with the original Italian, but if a direct translation can't sound florid enough, I'll permit a bit of creative interpretation. Allen Mandelbaum does a stylish pentameter one, Robin Kirkpatrick's for Penguin is also good and is facing page with notes, so as a book is probably better.
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Jan 28, 2018 11:00
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Alvarez IV posted:While you're on about translations, I don't need anything for Greek or Latin because I wasted my time taking classical languages in school, but where should I look for a good translation of the Divine Comedy? Not just Inferno, I want the whole thing. I don't want it to take too many liberties with the original Italian, but if a direct translation can't sound florid enough, I'll permit a bit of creative interpretation. If you have Latin then Italian shouldn't be too hard for you to pick up.
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Jan 28, 2018 11:10
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Douk Douk posted:william blake was a wonderful goofy lunatic. his poems are the only ones I've read that manage to instill in my blackened poo poo heart a nostalgic sense of childlike awe and wonder. poo poo I was gonna say exactly that. It's especially great for someone new to Blake.
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Jan 28, 2018 19:41
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portable blake is going on my list
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Jan 28, 2018 20:22
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i put a blake collection on my kindle a while back but i was going through a real bad depressive episode at the time and was fixated on the idea that i was getting too old to accomplish anything meaningful in life and i read the intro to the e-book and it said some of the poems were written when he was like 16 and i turned my kindle off and havent touched it since
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Jan 28, 2018 21:01
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Whenever I feel like that I think of Laurence Sterne who wrote his first published works when he was 46 and went on to pretty much transform all of English-language literature (I hope you're not over 46, Tim)
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Jan 28, 2018 21:07
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Forktoss posted:Whenever I feel like that I think of Laurence Sterne who wrote his first published works when he was 46 and went on to pretty much transform all of English-language literature Saramago first gained success at the age of 55 and went on to enjoy universal acclaim and a Nobel Lampedusa wrote his only novel at 58 but sadly didn't get to enjoy the fruits of that
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Jan 28, 2018 21:30
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Alvarez IV posted:While you're on about translations, I don't need anything for Greek or Latin because I wasted my time taking classical languages in school, but where should I look for a good translation of the Divine Comedy? Not just Inferno, I want the whole thing. I don't want it to take too many liberties with the original Italian, but if a direct translation can't sound florid enough, I'll permit a bit of creative interpretation. Durling and Martinez are good translators but unpoetic, Clive James did a worthy job but restricted himself to couplet rhyme and took lots of liberties (for the better in most cases, IMO). Try the James, but the Durling & Martinez set has incredible annotations and essays if you're interested in studying further.
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Jan 28, 2018 21:33
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Alvarez IV posted:While you're on about translations, I don't need anything for Greek or Latin because I wasted my time taking classical languages in school, but where should I look for a good translation of the Divine Comedy? Not just Inferno, I want the whole thing. I don't want it to take too many liberties with the original Italian, but if a direct translation can't sound florid enough, I'll permit a bit of creative interpretation. Robin Kirkpatrick dammit!
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Jan 28, 2018 21:57
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Japanese Dating Sim posted:Appreciate all the info on Iliad translations. I think I'll go with Fagles probably. Alexander's, like literally 4 other translations released this decade, are pretty much lovely copies of Lattimore's translation where she gives her own "personal touches" at the cost of completely ruining the flow. she gets bonus poo poo points for marketing her translations literally on the sole fact that it's A WOMAN TRANSLATING THE ILIAD????? and not the merit that it's actually a good translation. which it isn't.
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Jan 29, 2018 01:44
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she's also convinced that the poem is essentially an anti-war polemic and adjusts the wording to conform to that interpretation
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Jan 29, 2018 02:21
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Remains of the Day was pretty good. I wasn't expecting the sentimental turn near the end.
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Jan 29, 2018 03:02
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Finally got a hold of Lincoln in the Bardo and it's so good, finishing makes me want more. Then I remembered I've only read an abridged copy of Gogol's Dead Souls. Tracking down a more complete version of that should satisfy nicely. Anyone know of a good translation for that? E. gently caress while looking it up I realized I was actually thinking of Bobok by Dostoyevsky, but reading more Gogol would also be good. VV Thanks Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 03:47 on Jan 29, 2018 |
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Jan 29, 2018 03:32
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Guerney was the only translation that Nabokov thought was worth a drat fwiw
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Jan 29, 2018 03:37
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Epitaph of a Small Winner is another fun corpse book.
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Jan 29, 2018 08:16
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