Moderator:Forum Administrators
Yasna wrote:Schoenhof's Foreign Books of Cambridge, MA, apparently the oldest foreign-language bookstore in the US, closed for good last week. I will miss it.
linguoboy wrote:Yasna wrote:Schoenhof's Foreign Books of Cambridge, MA, apparently the oldest foreign-language bookstore in the US, closed for good last week. I will miss it.
I won't. I'm pretty sure they're the ones which pioneered the mark-for-dollar pricing that put German-language books out of reach for me when I was young. (The local foreign bookstores all got their stock through Schoenhof's.)
Yasna wrote:I hope the Nobel prize in literature goes to an author writing in Hindi soon. Hindi speakers could use a reminder of what Hindi is capable of and also a reminder that English is not the only road to greatness.
vijayjohn wrote:It already went to a Bengali writer over a hundred years ago. That doesn't seem to have helped Bengali much. (To be fair, he did also write in English...).
linguoboy wrote:I dunno, from where I sit Bengali seems to have a more celebrated literary scene than Hindi.
some of his seeming attempts to justify sexual violence against them just squicked me out. I would definitely hesitate before picking up another one of his novels.
vijayjohn wrote:This reminded me of the bizarre comments that Indian men sometimes make about women. "Well gee, if I can't beat my wife up, what else am I supposed to do with her? Worship her like a goddess or something?"
linguoboy wrote:For me the worst part is the number of times he praises a woman's sexual attractiveness with "what man wouldn't want to rape her"? There's also surprisingly little in terms of consequences for men who rape, which may just be a reflection of Indonesian society
In any case, I feel a need for a real palate-cleanser now, but I'm not sure what to turn to. I tried picking up The bone people again and was put off by the "poetic" prose. I also feel like I really should be reading something in not-English but I can't decide what.
vijayjohn wrote:Or what about Farid? Or do you mean before the copy you ordered arrives?
linguoboy wrote:Who would you nominate?
I haven't read much translated from Hindi or any Indian language. I remember vowing to do something about this a few years back and not finding much at all which spoke to me.
vijayjohn wrote:I don't think the lack of Nobel prizes for Indian literature has much to do with whether Indian literature has worthy candidates for one or not or even how many speakers the language in question has. Nobel prizes in general seem to reflect the political interests of the West at the time rather than actual quality (how else do you explain Barack Obama of all people getting a Nobel prize but not, say, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi or Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar?).
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 13 guests