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Isn't Hwaet roughly translated into "listen up fuckers"
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Mar 6, 2019 21:43
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Here's an interesting article comparing translations. Edit: That article references this list of translations, which is also worth at least a look. Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Mar 6, 2019 |
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Mar 6, 2019 21:51
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Isn't Hwaet roughly translated into "listen up fuckers" which makes Heaney's "so" pretty apt, tbh
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Mar 6, 2019 22:16
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An Amiercan(?) poet did a translation and published it through "open source" imprint called Punctuum, I remember scrolling through it and thinking it was fun. It is available free on the publisher's website. He even got John Ashbery to blurb him: "Thomas Meyer’s modernist reworking of Beowulf is a wonder."
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Mar 6, 2019 22:20
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Isn't Hwaet roughly translated into "listen up fuckers" I'm still angry that Seamus Heaney visited my college the year before I started there People were still telling stories about it four years later, he got drunk with all the English Lit majors :aargh:
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Mar 6, 2019 22:40
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I'm still angry that Seamus Heaney visited my college the year before I started there I accidentally bought an autographed copy of Opened Ground from my campus bookstore and I didn't realize it until weeks into the class and I had already made tons of marginal notes on the signed page. Needless to say, I did not sell it back to the bookstore.
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Mar 7, 2019 00:39
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A human heart posted:I would like my good friend Gerald Murnane to win the nobel prize. Thank you. Best place to start with him for someone unfamiliar?
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Mar 7, 2019 01:21
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MystOpportunity posted:Best place to start with him for someone unfamiliar? The Plains – it is brief, very funny and exemplary. Then move on to Landscape with Landscape which is a collection of connected narratives which is at points even funnier and more lyrical but IMO more involved.
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Mar 7, 2019 01:24
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MystOpportunity posted:Best place to start with him for someone unfamiliar? The Plains is his most famous and most well liked book although he actually thinks of it as a minor work himself. I like it a lot and it's good but I can sort of see where he's coming from because it is different from the recent books which have been increasingly essayistic(that's not bad but don't go looking for a narrative in them). For this more recent period you might start with Barley Patch although I actually found it a bit too introverted to really enjoy. A Million Windows and Border Districts both look great but i haven't read them yet. Boatswain posted:The Plains – it is brief, very funny and exemplary. Then move on to Landscape with Landscape which is a collection of connected narratives which is at points even funnier and more lyrical but IMO more involved. I thought that Landscape With Landscape was kind of uneven(not a fan of the story with the jack kerouac guys in it) but it does have The Battle of Acosta-Nu which might be the best thing I've read by him.
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Mar 7, 2019 02:31
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A human heart posted:The Plains is his most famous and most well liked book although he actually thinks of it as a minor work himself. I like it a lot and it's good but I can sort of see where he's coming from because it is different from the recent books which have been increasingly essayistic(that's not bad but don't go looking for a narrative in them). For this more recent period you might start with Barley Patch although I actually found it a bit too introverted to really enjoy. A Million Windows and Border Districts both look great but i haven't read them yet. The Plains is different but to Murnane's advantage IMO. I think it is the best introduction because it is brief and concerns similar themes to the rest of his work but without the endless (self-)referentiality, which is a bit of an acquired taste. I'd also agree that Landscape with Landscape (in my Penguin 'with' isn't capitalised) is a bit uneven, but The Battle of Acosta-Nu is one or the best short stories ever written and A Quieter Place than Clun – the Housman story – is the gooniest.
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Mar 7, 2019 03:20
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Moving this discussion down here from "what did you just finish" because I'm sure most reading goons aren't going to be as interested in me obsessing over Blood Meridian (read: nobody cares Bilirubin)Bilirubin posted:Dude, I just found your link to the essay on gnosticism in Blood Meridian on jstor. Heading in This is an excellent essay citing other essays that I will be going to next on the religious and gnostic imagery in Blood Meridian. It's really tying together many things I caught just in passing on my first read through and is, to me, a fairly convincing argument. I mean, I loved Gravity's Rainbow a lot but it seems expansive, and unfocused as a result, thematically whereas Blood Meridian is very narrowly focused but the depth is enormous. And I'm a sucker for this religious symbolism.
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Mar 7, 2019 22:36
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Bilirubin posted:Moving this discussion down here from "what did you just finish" because I'm sure most reading goons aren't going to be as interested in me obsessing over Blood Meridian (read: nobody cares Bilirubin) Quoting this post so I can find it later.... Blood Meridian is good as hell. Been a while since I've read it, but I'm planning on going back through it soon + reading (in full this time) Notes on Blood Meridian by John Sepich.
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Mar 7, 2019 22:58
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I loved Blood Meridian when I read it the first time. Now I can't get into it at all, I completely bounce of the language. I'm not sure what happened.
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Mar 8, 2019 01:12
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Blood Meridian was okay just okay
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Mar 10, 2019 18:37
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So I just finished The Bakkhai, Anne Carson's translation of one of Euripides' last plays (400BCE-ish). Quick tl;dr: Dionysus comes to Thebes, inciting local women to abandon their infants and run to the hills to engage in drunken orgies. Local ruler Pentheus is skeptical of Dionysus's divinity and worries broken-window style that Thebes' structural integrity is threatened by the cultish transgressions; hoping to tamp down on the unraveling, he tries to lock up Dionysus and his followers in prison. Dionysus, predictably enraged, foments ("ferments"??) the women to destroy local villages and burn down Pentheus's home. (What a universal pattern, Jesus, maybe the moron Crichton in Farscape was actually on to something with his diplomacy LARPing.) Pantheus is fully Apollonian to the point of authoritarianism, trying to maintain order and force the world to submit to his personal conception of "common sense" and rationality. A total episteme guy, no sense of humor. But this oppressive, overbearing attitude turns out to be an exact mirror of the Dionysian oppressiveness, the chaos that swallows the world whole, the cultural-meme equivalent of a black hole. What seems at first like Dionysian fun n' games, drunken revelry and casual sex, is revealed to be vengeful, controlling — the Bakkhai, the local horde of women who've run off to the hills to suckle wolves and scissor, are absolutely obsessed with policing the unpure, beseeching Dionysus to punish anyone who's not adequately Bacchic. And no one in this play is capable of moderation! They're either throwing people in jail for having sex or they're ripping off farmers' heads with bloodlust. Except the old guys Teirisias and Kamos, who are just normal, reasonable human beings who don't feel the need to draw a fanatical hard-line on everything. At one point they're like, "Dionysus might be real, might not be, who even cares? The revelry does no harm, and it would bring honor if people thought we had a god in our family." (Dionysus is supposedly Pantheus's cousin; grandfather Kadmos gave birth to two daughters who gave birth to Pantheus and Dionysus.) (Therefore, I assert, Euripides was the First Pragmatist. William James had nothing on Kadmos.) Meanwhile the Bacchic horde is just begging Dionysus to "crush the hubris of wayward men" who don't show adequate respect for Dionysus. But the thing about the Bacchic horde is that, when men aren't around — my understanding of the Greek symbolic logic : men are structure, women are chaos, only chaos can give birth to new structure — when men aren't around, the Bakkhai women sleep "calm as buttons," completely at rest. And then some local cowherder is unlucky enough to stumble upon their camp, or they smell a man from afar or whatever, and pretty soon the Bakkhai have ransacked two local villages and ripped the farmer's entire herd to pieces with their bare hands. Pentheus, an arrogant macho guy whose solution to literally every problem is grabbing his sword, pisses them off more than anything; they rip a pine tree out of the ground to get to him. Which makes me feel there's some sort structural symbolic logic at play — absolutism breeds absolutism, maybe, or mutual disarmament beats preemptive suspicion. (Again, Crichton.) Or maybe it's just that chaos, the Bacchic, are merely negations — of structure, of order — and without structure (i.e. men, following the Greek symbolic logic) to convert to raw fuel, the Bacchic/Bakkhai would burn out quickly on their own, the way a parties dies down as soon as the drugs run out and the high starts wearing off. The Bacchic is freedom in its most literal sense, which again is just negation, liberty from any rule or any restraint whatsoever — teenage ontology, maybe — including freedom from the (disapproving, social) sober mind (hence, ekstasis). What Euripides seems to be pointing at, or understands, is that this kind of teenage edgelord anarchism only exists because society's there, or school, or parents or whatever, and it's probably failing too — there'll always been discontentment and the desire to shed responsibility, but good structure at least minimizes or controls this rebellious urge, and Pantheus's authoritarianism is definitely not good structure. You need a (The) Man to rail against or you'll have to actually start thinking about your beliefs positively, instead of as negations of whatever values regime you're under. Fanatical belief is a social condition. There aren't any fanatics on a desert island; only pragmatists; the ideology enters when other people do. (Thus the unfortunate shepherd and his dismembered herd.) I don't know the answer to the whole apollonian/dionysian proble, but I think pragmatism Euripides gets at is (for starters) a basic acknowledgement of reality rather than its denial: Pentheus's protestant suppression/literal prohibition only rouses ("arouses," ha ha) the Bakkhai. Teirisius and Kadmos the elders are the only ones smart enough to know when you see a wild animal, you look it straight in the eye and back away slowly. The really wild parts though were the cross-dressing sections, which I still don't know what to make of. Pentheus, perhaps psychically influenced by Dionysus, thinks perhaps a little bacchanalia — you know, dipping his toe, using irony as an excuse to justify it to himself — dresses up as a woman to spy on the Bakkhai women in the hills, perhaps even catch them in the act of cunnilingus. And this fissure does, this personal allowance to let a bit of Dionysus and the womanly in, does in fact destroy him — he's literally ripped apart by it, what classicists love calling sparagamos, in a literal destructuring / of the symbolic order. (And only from chaos can a new structure emerge, as only from woman can man. Anyway, this play has had a lot of scholarship and I'm sure I'm merely retreading existing interpretations or missing key historical points that undermine my reading, but at the very least I think this is a reading Carson's translation deserves, despite its silly and trendy surface suggestion that Pentheus the conservative is secretly a crossdresser, like the old joke about homophobic Republicans being in the closet. (I don't know about you, but I always found those suggestions offensive to both conservatives and the gays.) Things end with Agave, Pentheus's mother, marching down the streets of Thebes with her son's head impaled on a stake, shouting "Bakkhos! Partner in the hunt!" A servant remarks, "The trophy in her hands is her own tears." They know not what they do.
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Mar 10, 2019 19:21
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Just finished Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. Enjoyed it
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Mar 12, 2019 10:42
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check out my goodwill haul yall 2$ or less each
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Mar 12, 2019 15:32
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Ah yeah I like the Musa Dante
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Mar 12, 2019 15:34
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good selection there. my previous snags was vol 2 of in search of lost time, a buncha essays from umberto eco, a collection of stuff from Saadi, and a collection of tennyson
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Mar 12, 2019 15:41
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The Bell Jar is so sad
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Mar 12, 2019 16:04
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 Hmm.  Hmmmmm.  Hmmmmmmmmm.
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Mar 12, 2019 16:07
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My recent Goodwill haul: The Decameron (Norton Critical edition) Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol. C Stories by Doris Lessing (Everyman’s Library hardcover) The Visit by Friedrich Dürrenmatt (translated by Patrick Bowles Crash by J. G. Ballard A Short Introduction to Literary Theory All for $4. There was some Japanese lit collections there when I went last, which I didn’t pick up. Someone snagged them before I came back.
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Mar 12, 2019 16:10
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derp posted:check out my goodwill haul yall Please immediately throw away the Coelho and replace with a Lispector of your choosing.
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Mar 12, 2019 16:14
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oh is that a bad one? i don't even know what it is i just heard the name enough times that i thought i'd grab it
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Mar 12, 2019 16:15
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derp posted:oh is that a bad one? i don't even know what it is i just heard the name enough times that i thought i'd grab it
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Mar 12, 2019 16:18
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One my classes I teach has The Alchemist as required reading and I no joke petitioned my supervisor to allow me to use a different book because "I won't teach poo poo"
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Mar 12, 2019 16:19
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Goondolences.
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Mar 12, 2019 16:20
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Sham bam bamina! posted:It's The Secret but a novel. oh god
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Mar 12, 2019 16:25
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Dr. S.O. Feelgood posted:Please immediately throw away the Coelho and replace with a Lispector of your choosing.
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Mar 12, 2019 16:30
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one of my pupils used a Coelho novel in her lit. project work a couple of weeks ago, where the subject was suicide. that was ... a choice
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Mar 12, 2019 16:33
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ulvir posted:one of my pupils used a Coelho novel in her lit. project work a couple of weeks ago, where the subject was suicide. that was ... a choice was the coelho novel explored as a motive?
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Mar 12, 2019 16:36
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Mel Mudkiper posted:was the coelho novel explored as a motive? it was in combination of some other book, which was non-fiction IIRC, she was attempting to explore representation of suicide in relation to mental illnesses and such, but the whole thing fell flat she was all "yeah, see, here suicide was just an active and neutral choice! it doesn't have to be difficult", and I was nodding on auto-pilot just to not throw the whole presentation off
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Mar 12, 2019 16:41
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Does anyone have recommendations on good translations of Borges? I was reading Collected Fictions in a bar and some random guy told me that Andrew Hurley wouldn't recognize a gaucho if one stabbed him, which is probably why the prose was functional but the poetry came off as flat. Still loved the collection but now I've got the sense that I'm missing out on something.
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Mar 12, 2019 17:56
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I've never read Coelho but here in Latin America he's the equivalent of bad bestselling genre fiction. I also remember in high school a bunch of classmates got hooked up on this Cuauhtemoc Sanchez guy and they behaved the same way you fellas describe high school fantasy readers. In short, self-helpish fiction are our elfbooks
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Mar 12, 2019 18:09
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I get the feeling that the publishers just accidentally printed a million copies of The Alchemist a few years ago and offered B&N a huge discount on their overstock.
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Mar 12, 2019 18:17
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idk if it qualifies for this thread but i'm about 3/4s of the way through Wolf Hall and i'm enjoying it a lot. After reading through several books in a row with unconventional narrative structures over the last couple of months it's been a nice palate cleanser at least also since i went to catholic school it's a fun twist on thomas more being the good guy lol
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Mar 12, 2019 21:57
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It's kind of the border. Could do with less Thomarysue Cromwell.
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Mar 12, 2019 22:14
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I'm pretty sure at one point Cromwell briefly recalls his old friend Niccolo Machiavelli, which is just too much.
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Mar 12, 2019 22:16
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Pacho posted:I've never read Coelho but here in Latin America he's the equivalent of bad bestselling genre fiction. I also remember in high school a bunch of classmates got hooked up on this Cuauhtemoc Sanchez guy and they behaved the same way you fellas describe high school fantasy readers. In short, self-helpish fiction are our elfbooks Yeah, I read one Coelho thing -- maybe it was the Alchemist, don't remember -- but it came across as a hallmark card masquerading as Littrachaw.
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Mar 12, 2019 22:17
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:I'm pretty sure at one point Cromwell briefly recalls his old friend Niccolo Machiavelli, which is just too much. so far it only mentions cromwell owning one of his books but maybe that happens later on from what bit of side-reading i've done it looks like mantel was far from the first to suggest they might have at least crossed paths fwiw
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Mar 12, 2019 22:27
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