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Burning Rain posted:Hofstadter is super smug and annoying to read, but it's worth it just to see him saying that he'd translate Sagan's "Bonjour, Tristesse" as "Howdy, Blues" because everything else is too literal The Dumbest Thing is that he seems unaware that this is a quote from a poem by Éluard that goes, "Adieu tristesse / Bonjour tristesse", which I guess he would have translated as: code:
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Jan 31, 2018 14:15
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paul auster's the enigma of kaspar hauser sounds like it has the potential of being really bad
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Feb 1, 2018 14:27
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ulvir posted:this has been discussed several times already, but any good recs for The Best Tranalation of The Oddyssey and Iliad? verse, not prose. As far as I know, the Fitzgerald translations are pretty universally acclaimed, especially for the Odyssey. I don't remember much about the Fagles versions, but they're also supposed to be quite good. More recently, I've read good things about Emily Wilson's Odyssey, but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet.
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Apr 5, 2018 17:20
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Huh. I'd read some raving reviews but I've not seen a single verse from it. What's so bad about it?
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Apr 5, 2018 17:42
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Yeah OK I can see how making the Odyssey the theme song from Shaft might not be great
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Apr 5, 2018 17:54
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Making Julius Caesar a really naff allegory for current events is as close to a universal constant as you can get in Shakespeare productions though. I legitimately can't remember seeing a Caesar that didn't wink obnoxiously at modern politics in some regard. Not that that's a good thing, mind you.
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Apr 9, 2018 12:34
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They're no Hamsun but I like Pontoppidan and Karen Blixen 
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Apr 9, 2018 19:29
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Annual Prophet posted:I have Moncrieff and was thinking of picking up Davis’s translation as well. Any observations on how they compare? Scott Moncrieff isn't a bad writer by any means but his Proust is famously unfaithful, although there are revised editions that correct the more glaring embellishments. Davis's is kind of faithful to a fault, and some people have said her adherence to Proust's prose makes for clumsy English, but I think it's the closer experience to the original if you don't read French.
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May 15, 2018 09:27
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Rolo posted:I’m thinking of planning a backpacking trip to Paris and the surrounding area, and I’d love to read some French lit that involves the area and French culture. A little late to the punch but some of the better Zolas give a really good idea of Paris when it began to take its modern shape, Le Ventre de Paris, Pot-Bouille and Le Bonheur des Dames in particular. In the same vein, I can't recommend Maupassant's Bel Ami enough. Aragon's been mentioned I think but Aurélien is a very Parisian (and very good) novel. And for my money, Perec's La Vie mode d'emploi is the best novel about Parisians ever written and one of the best French novels in general, but reading it is admittedly a bit of an undertaking as it's quite long and structured in a very Oulipo way. e: poo poo, La Vie mode d'emploi's been recommended already. Sorry!
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May 20, 2018 22:21
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MystOpportunity posted:Would be fun to survey the fictional reference/compendium/anthology genre. What else is there? Nazi Literature in the Americas, some Borges, maybe Pale Fire depending on the parameters. Perec's A Gallery Portrait is very, very good, probably my favourite in that genre.
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Sep 7, 2018 12:32
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Bandiet posted:I just finished Proust and it's left a bit of a void. I'd like to embark on another massive prose project. I could follow up with a Proust influence like Saint-Simon, but I'm worried that's a bit too fluffy to keep me interested for long. Personally, I filled my Proust hole with The Tale of Genji, The Man without Qualities and The Magic Mountain. The Chinese classical novels are also a good way to waste a few hundred hours but if you like Proust you'd be probably more drawn to say, Dream of the Red Chamber than something like Water Margin (as much as I loved Water Margin!)
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Dec 2, 2018 11:43
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Boatswain posted:M. lost in postation would you recommend me some romans (anything but Camus) I might be able to struggle through with my schoolboy French & some dictionaries and grammars? There's an inexhaustible supply of French realist literature from the 19th century that's usually recommended in these cases, but Flaubert is probably your best bet, because he writes wonderfully and his grammar, style and sentence structure are always impeccable. On a formal level, La Tentation de saint Antoine and Trois contes are probably the best works of fiction French realism has ever produced, although one is a arguably a prose poem and the other is a short story collection. Needless to say, if you haven't read Madame Bovary, you should probably do so as well! For more modern novels, you might want to try Tournier (Le Roi des Aulnes, Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique). He's considered slightly middlebrow in France but his prose is excellent and pretty accessible. "Récit" is roughly equivalent to "narrative"; afaik it doesn't refer to a specific literary form (unlike "roman", a novel or novella).
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Jan 13, 2019 00:25
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V. Illych L. posted:read houellebecq I've just finished his new book, Sérotonine. It's about a depressed civil servant who lives in a brutalist tower with his Japanese girlfriend. It kind of feels like he's just playing the hits at this point, but without the dread, anger and disgust that drove something like Plateforme.
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Jan 13, 2019 01:14
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Yeah, of all the things you could level against Houellebecq, accusing him of liking academia and sex is comically off the mark
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Jan 13, 2019 01:39
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Boatswain posted:Is there a French equivalent of KJV? Whence would, for instance, Proust quote Revelations? Well, no single French translation has a cultural impact equivalent to the KJV. Since the 16th century there's also the added difficulty of competing Protestant and Catholic translations, with Swiss Bibles like the Segond having a lot of spread in the wider francophonie but not being read all that much in France. Liberal Catholics and more generally intellectuals in the 19th century would have read Lamennais' gospels and probably directly the Vulgate if they bothered to read the Old Testament at all. The janséniste translation of the Bible was also very influential if only because of how angry it made people for two centuries afterwards.
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Mar 18, 2019 10:33
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J_RBG posted:That sounds like the most boring possible angle on child murder The book actually isn't bad, although it's pretty firmly middlebrow. Translating the original title (Une Chanson douce) as The Perfect Nanny seems an unbelievably bad choice though, unless there's a specific cultural reference I'm missing.
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Mar 20, 2019 15:43
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Mel Mudkiper posted:*smashes desk with both fists* It's useful shorthand for books written with an adequate level of craft that explore popular themes in a competent but not very challenging way, which Chanson douce absolutely is in the context of French publishing
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Mar 20, 2019 18:36
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Middlebrow is a term developed by people whose sense of merit disproportionately values exclusivity Honestly I kind of agree but it can also be useful to point out when a book sits comfortably in a literary establishment that doesn't reward formal innovation or things that genuinely question the social order, like pretty much every book that won the Prix Goncourt in the last thirty years
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Mar 20, 2019 18:56
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Gwendolyn Brooks posted:Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love. rupi kaur posted:they should feel like home Anyway I'm sure you're taking a real important political stand and not just being lazy and conceited
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Jul 13, 2019 16:38
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I didn't read that guy's robot book but I read his book about Nazi salamanders conquering the world to turn it into a Lebensraum of brackish creeks and that was great
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Nov 9, 2019 03:24
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Mrenda posted:I still remember you thundering in demanding to know who wrote real literature. And being told to gently caress off. Simple days. On the plus side there was a post in that thread that started with something like, "Well I don't know who this 'Bill Gaddis' but he sounds like a seasoned author" and it's still funny to me after all these years
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Nov 27, 2019 09:55
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Ras Het posted:I've read one of the Proust short story collections and it was very insipid Yeah, that's the consensus here too. I'd love for there to be more stuff on par with the Recherche but his juvenilia aren't very interesting except to Proust scholars.
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Jan 3, 2020 20:23
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The North Tower posted:I’m reading Gargantua and Pantagruel and it’s like a cartoon. I wish the Ren & Stimpy guy wasn’t a sex-pest and had made this into a 100 episode series, instead. The scene-to-scene changes in size and scope of how big things are, the absurdly large and specific numbers (six hundred thousand and fourteen dogs peeing on some lady), the debate which is 4 pages of people sticking their fingers into their faces and making gestures, etc. I finished Don Quixote not too long ago, next is Simplicius, and after will be Tristram Shandy. Any other recommendations for this kind of work? Water Margin reminded me strongly of Rabelais. The unabridged text is a little intimidating but it's loads of fun throughout. Heath posted:How about Ferrante? I don't have a scale for how big she is there vs. how big she is on the internet She's really huge in France. Each novel in her big trilogy sold 1 million+ copies which barely ever happens for contemporary lit over here.
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Jan 23, 2020 23:14
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Safety Biscuits posted:Which translation did you read? I've got the FLP edition cos it was cheap, but I don't know how good it is. I read it in French, sorry! That said, the Shapiro translation is pretty highly regarded afaik.
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Jan 24, 2020 08:48
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It wouldn't really occur to me to compare it to The Master and Margerita; it's very much of a piece with A Young Doctor's Notebook, being a fairly realistic fictional journal based on Bulgakov's experiences as a young country doctor during the revolution. Honestly, I'd read A Young Doctor's Notebook first if you haven't already, but both are well worth reading.
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Feb 7, 2020 14:47
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One thing the article doesn't make fully clear is that Matzneff has been regarded as a huge piece of poo poo for as long as I can remember and this only the latest (and the most successful) attempt to bring him to justice. At this point, it can be assumed that every French intellectual who didn't speak out against him since the late 70s is cowardly or complicit e: Yeah, what Tree Goat said
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Feb 11, 2020 22:33
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ulvir posted:the twist that the muslim brotherhood gains political power in france Houellebecq's exploration of that fantasy isn't unreflexive or unironic but it's either naive or uninformed to see it as an incidental element in a country obsessed with the idea that its significant Muslim population is a devious fifth column plotting to destroy its way of life
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Feb 12, 2020 00:14
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:We did The Plague n 2017 so my current plan is the Decameron. If you wanna do French plague novels again some time, Giono's The Horseman on the Roof is very good and probably the second best romance featuring cholera in modern literature
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Mar 12, 2020 12:00
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Yeah it's very strange to assume that there aren't people who derive genuine aesthetic pleasure from formal innovation and instead imagine that readers of avant garde literature just engage in a long exercise of eating their greens
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Apr 7, 2020 15:35
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Heath posted:It's difficult for me to parse out how much of it is really that or how much of it is due to the culture, since so much of the intricacies of late 19th century French aristocratic social navigation are lost on me. I know what you mean but the narrator is pointedly not moving in aristocratic circles until he meets Saint-Loup. It's going to become a really important distinction in later novels with the eventual twilight of the Guermantes' circle and the rise of bourgeois salons.
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May 3, 2020 01:06
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Heath posted:Yeah, the social castes are completely lost on me, especially because he speaks of the Swanns in such reverent tones that you would think everyone is immensely wealthy and prestigious (which is kind of the point, of course.) There are so many layers to society that were probably implicit among the audience of his day. The naivety of the narrator makes it maybe a little more obscure than it really is, but the big categories to keep in mind are the Gentile bourgeois (the narrator and his family), the Jews (Swann and Bloch, who represent a kind of dichotomy between integration and pride in one's heritage), and the nobility (Guermantes, Saint-Loup, Charlus, etc.). The nobility still has a degree of prestige (especially in the eyes of a fairly impressionable teenager), but their star is rapidly fading after several decades of the Third Republic and an increasing sense that the Ancien Régime will never return.
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May 3, 2020 18:22
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It is in fact an especially irrelevant notion in epic poetry, where characters are inexorably driven by their essential nature towards their triumph or, more frequently, destruction. Indicating the (unchanging) essence of the characters, peoples, gods, etc. is one of the most important uses of epithets in the form
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May 12, 2020 13:35
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Tbh it's very funny to imagine subliterate "traditionalists" suffering through a lovely 19th c. translation of the Anabasis or whatever so they can extract self-help lessons about masculinity
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May 12, 2020 23:43
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derp posted:I've been wanting to read some history lately, because I'm uneducated. Any subject other than American history. But I want stuff with top notch prose. Any standouts in the non-fiction / world history area that shouldn't be missed? The more focused and obscure the better. Marc Bloch's The Royal Touch (or, to use the much cooler French title, Les Rois thaumaturges) deals with a completely bizarre part of the royal mystique in Western Europe and is one of the first works of modern history. It's very good.
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May 13, 2020 22:26
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Ras Het posted:Montaillou Have you read any Alain Corbin? Based on this list I think you might dig him.
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May 13, 2020 22:39
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nut posted:Okay after sleeping on it I get why the protagonist in the Stranger has to have a revelation and accept the absurd (since it appears central to Camus’ philosophy). Being wildly ignorant of philosophy, what is the school of thought where the need to understand and characterize life is eschewed? It seems everything I was reading is rooted in humans having a need to know the unknown. Maybe people have decided it is always there? Or is it nihilism? The Myth of Sisyphus is usually considered a semi-mandatory philosophical companion piece to The Stranger (so much so that they're often bundled together in French editions) but I'd tend to agree with Ras Het: Camus's philosophy isn't really why the novel has been so popular
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Jun 1, 2020 19:08
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anilEhilated posted:Some (possibly?) lit I've tried and liked: Borges, Eco (minor horny bits vastly overshadowed by the story), Moby Dick (ditto - I think it's only got one homoerotic moment?), Hugo (a possible exception to the romance rule, but I really enjoyed The Hunchback, Les Misérables and The Laughing Man). Modern would be preferable but I suspect the closer to the present you go, the hornier it gets due to shifting conventions. Any tips? Old-timey novels of ideas like Cyrano de Bergerac's A Voyage to the Moon, Cabell's Jurgen, Voltaire's Candide, Zadig, etc. might be up your alley, depending on how hung up you are on modernity. All very inventive, obviously foundational for later genre fiction and thoroughly unromantic.
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Jun 4, 2020 11:44
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Heath posted:So, in Proust, how do you pronounce the name of the character Bloch? In my mind I read it like "blockh" but I'm not sure that's right People of that era would have said "Blok" (or more rarely "Blosh"). It would have been seen as rudely pointing to someone's Jewish origins to say it with the German "ch", essentially a way of alluding to the supposed foreignness of Jewish people (same for Swann/Svann).
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Jun 10, 2020 06:29
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To be honest, the best stuff in Campbell and Frazer (esp Frazer) is when they go out on an absolutely wild limb based on bad or outright fabricated evidence. It has zero anthropological value in the modern sense but the result is kind of poetic imo
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Jun 11, 2020 12:42
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ToxicAcne posted:I've got suspicions that it's just another shibboleth to indicate that one is college educated. What is true about this is that, in my experience, it's basically taught as a heuristic to free students from trying to find a discrete authorial "meaning" for any element of the text. In the process it's often bizarrely reduced in a way that doesn't do justice to the essay itself or to Barthes, which a lot of non-French students seem not to read beyond that. I would recommend at least reading S/Z, a practical example of (early) Barthes' critical method being applied to an actual text, before judging the approach's worth
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Dec 28, 2020 05:21
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