Reading To Do List

[mōdgethanc]

K. What's the last book you read?

Deutschland schafft sich ab by Thilo Sarrazin

Hopefully not this.

[KingHarvest]

I'm usually reading several books at the same time, but the last book I finished was Parrot and Olivier in America.

[globetrottersara]

I stopped writing down a "to read" list. I want to read so many books and I never complete the list. Now I write a "books I've read" list. It's less depressing

[Lada]

I stopped writing down a "to read" list. I want to read so many books and I never complete the list. Now I write a "books I've read" list. It's less depressing

I solved this problem in such a way: until I read the planned books I don't buy and don't plan anything new and it works

My list:
Fiction:
- Ursula Le Guin - to complete Hainish cycle (Rocannon's World, The Word for World is Forest, Four Ways to Forgiveness, The Telling)
- Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow (in English)

Non-fiction:
- Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister - Peopleware. Productive Projects and Teams.

[Tonic]

Ultimately I want to read everything written by Roberto Bolaño, by Dostoievsky and perhaps everything by David F. Wallace. But here is a representative list of what I will actually be reading this year:

Manual de literatura para caníbales, by Rafael Reig
2666, by Bolaño
Infinite Jest, by David F. Wallace
Ulysses, by Joyce
[to be chosen] by Witold Gombrowicz (in Spanish)
Karamazov brothers by Dostoievsky (in Spanish)
Un homme qui dort, by Georges Perec (hopefully in French)
Exploradores del abismo, by Enrique Vila-Matas
Farewell, my lovely, by Raymond Chandler
O banqueiro anarquista, by Fernando Pessoa

[alois]

You should probably just avoid Coelho. Just...yeah.

Why? What other Brazilian writers are more worthy of my time?

I somewhat enjoy him, but his detractors would call it "pseudo-spiritual bullshit." If you want to read something of his, read Veronika decide morrer not, for the love of God, O Alquimista. I really liked João Guimarães Rosa, his stuff is really trippy. He's called the Brazilian James Joyce (I'm not sure I'd go that far, but he's good). His pièce de résistance is Grande Sertão: Veredas. Don't read it in English, please.

Paulo Coelho is barely considered literature at all by most Brazilian critics (it is true he was somehow appointed a chair in the Academia Brasileira de Letras, but that annoyed many many people...).

The only Brazilian writers worthy of being placed side by side with any other giant of world literature are Machado de Assis and João Guimarães Rosa. Rosa's masterpiece, though, Grande Sertão: Veredas, is absolutely untranslatable (beginning by its title). It's extremely difficult to read even by native speakers (or, more precisely, even native speakers who, like me, are familiar with the dialect he more or less mimics in the book). He invented an entirely different language, not only in this work, but in his oevre, generally speaking. An English translator gave it up in the first sentence (the reason why below). It's a pity, though, because it is one of the greatest works of art ever written. If foreigners could read it, it would be at the same place as La Divina Commedia, Goethe's Faust and the Complete Works of Shakespeare among the greatest works of the Western world.

Assis, on the other hand (whom Harold Bloom called the greatest black artist of all time, although he would here be best described as mulato) is perfectly translatable, for he uses rather straightforward language. I'm sure there are good translations of Dom Casmurro, Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas and Quincas Borba, his best works, into English.

“This close knowledge of the language works in an inward fashion as well, and there, too, it defies the skills of the translator. I know of an outstanding example and one that I really think impossible to render into any other language. It is the epigraph that follows the title of the Brazilian João Guimarães Rosa’s novel Grande Sertão: Veredas (absurdly translated into English as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, although I don’t know what else could have been done with it). The epigraph states, “O diabo na rua no meio do redemoinho” (The devil in the street in the middle of the whirlwind). Rosa has put the devil not only in the middle of the whirlwind in the street but also in the very word for whirlwind: re-demo-inho; one of the words for devil (demon) in Portuguese is demo, and there he is in the middle of the word as well. Thomas Colchie has received a Guggenheim grant to produce a new and proper version of this great novel and I do not envy him as he faces this particular problem.

[KingHarvest]

You lose something in any translation, and the description of what's going on in that sentence really shouldn't stop a translator.

If Finnegan's Wake can be translated, I'm pretty sure this can be.

[alois]

I believe the difficulties with Finnegans Wake and Grande Sertão: Veredas are more or less of the same order. Both authors employ highly experimental/idiossyncratic language with great originality. Rosa's prose moreover has an oniric stream of consciousness flow which is also why he is oftentimes compared to Joyce. Furthermore, Rosa bases his unique language on the regional variety of Brazilian Portuguese spoken in northern Minas Gerais, which contains many authentically untranslatable words (two of them appear in the title itself: Sertão and Veredas are contrasting elements of northeastern Brazilian landscape, which carry not only a specific meaning in an "ecological" sense, but beyond that, are also very dense in cultural signification - Sertão is almost a metonym for the whole of Nordeste). So, I wouldn't say you lose something in translations of these books - you lose almost everything here. And that is fortunately not the case with any literary work (not that radically).

[KingHarvest]

You're really overestimating the difficulty here.

Martin Amis, for example, is never touted as being untranslatable, but let's look at this short block from his newest novel, The Pregnant Widow (the title is also supposed to be a double entendre, the second meaning being "the full empty thing"):

"As the fiftieth birthday approaches, you get the sense that your life is thinning out, and will continue to thin out, until it thins out into nothing. And you sometimes say to yourself: That went a bit quick. That went a bit quick. In certain moods, you may want to put it rather more forcefully. As in: OY!! THAT went a BIT FUCKING QUICK!!!"

It's probably impossible to transmit the full sense of the change and mixture of registers in this excerpt outside of English, but it would be silly to act like this is impossible to translate some sense of it into another language.