What are you currently reading? (part 2)

[vijayjohn]

You mean "resent"?

[księżycowy]

No, I said it right.

[vijayjohn]

Back on topic: I started Chapter 11 of Practical Chinese Reader III, reread Unit 1 of Basic Chinese: A Grammar and Workbook, and restarted Unit 2. I'd like to see how far I can get in both. The first book has 15 chapters; the second has 25. Practical Chinese Reader IV has 15 more chapters, and the fifth book in the series has 14. I don't have the last book in that series yet, but it should have 16 more. I hope to read some more of TY Business French soon, too.

[linguoboy]

Updates!

Finished Gilead. Overall a good read, if I still don't quite see why it's been so praise-lavished.

Also finished The borrower. Although it seems like pure fluff, she introduces more serious elements partway through and goes for a surprisingly bittersweet ending. I would read more from her.

Stalled in Bettyville. I'm even more confused why it's gotten the attention it has because I just don't find that Hodgman has a very compelling voice. As mentioned before, I've been going back and rereading some short stories from Ethan Mordden (another gay refugee from smalltown American who ended up in Manhattan working as an editor) and, boy, does Hodgman ever suffer by comparison. Mordden's style is just levels above his. Granted, the two authors are aiming for different effects, but I get hardly any urban gay sensibility from Hodgman whereas it's the medium Mordden swims in.

Still working on the Böll. I'm in no hurry to finish, so I'm content with my progress. I'm about a quarter of the way in, though that might slow given I've started some new books, to wit:

Solitud arrived today. It's a novel I've been meaning to read forever (despite that the ending was spoilered for me many years ago) and the edition that arrived yesterday is really beautiful. Even though it was after 3 a.m. when I got back home last night, I forced myself to stay awake long enough to read the intro and the first paragraph. Just as with Rodoreda, the old-school diction is going to be something of a challenge; I've already found myself going to the Alcover-Moll dictionary for words too obscure to find their way into the Diccionari GEC.

Oh, and Friday I started on Independent people. Been wanting to tackle this one for a while and winter seems like a good time. Terrific so far--I really like Laxness' dry satire and the mock-heroic tone he's adopted for the work.

[vijayjohn]

I finished Practical Chinese Reader III, started Practical Chinese Reader IV, and have been also reading:

TY Business French
Querschnitt (a German reader but with notes and stuff in English in which I read the first story, "Die Lieblingsspeise der Hyänen" by Siegfried Lenz)
TY Portuguese
the February 1992 issue of Geomundo (I didn't even realize until just now that it's from Spain)
Medieval Latin edited by K. P. Harrington and revised by Joseph Pucci
Introductory Russian Grammar by Galina Stilman and William E. Harkins (my dad's Russian textbook from I think grad school?)

And, of course, as always, I've been trying to rehearse [məˈjuːɾa sən̪ˈd̪eːɕəm]. Ideally, I would like to start the new year off with quatrain #55.

[linguoboy]

A little over a week ago I stumbled across the English translation (The man who spoke Snakish) of Andrus Kivirähk's Mees, kes teadis ussisõnu in a used bookstore, bought it on the spot, and started reading it immediately. (Sorry, Halldor!) I'm about a third of the way through, which is more than sufficient to have Opinions.

The first of these is that the reviews I read oversold it. Am I enjoying reading it? Yes. Am I dazzled by the author's vivid imagination and fantastical vision? Not really. He has some good ideas and some weak ones. The are some lovely bits of whimsy and then there are jarring anachronisms (like mediaeval forest dwellers referring to themselves as "Estonians" long before any sense of nationhood emerged there).

Many of the anachronisms are lexical as well. Since I don't know the language, I'm not sure whether to hold Kivirähk responsible for these or his English translator, Christopher Moseley, but it's odd to say the least for a narrator whose people don't even smelt or sow to be throwing around words like "science", "species", and "primate". I imagine these words are less jarring in Estonian, where they're formed from native roots that disguise their recent origin, but a translation which doesn't take this into account feels half-baked.

I'm curious: Those of you who have read this in other translations, do they share this same fault? (I'm particularly curious about the German version, since I suspect there are some highly-competent German-Estonian translators out there.)

In any case, I'm hoping to finish it this weekend and move on to something else.

[vijayjohn]

I memorized Mayura Sandesham up to (not including) quatrain #57, finished reading Chapter 19 of Practical Chinese Reader IV, am in the middle of Unit 13 of Basic Chinese, read the first story ("八哥兒," in Traditional Chinese) from this version of 聊斋故事, reread the first few pages of the famous cartoon version of 莊子說 to pick out words I didn't know, and have just barely started reading 老舍散文, Ourika by Claire de Duras, La princesse de Clèves by Madame de Lafayette, Der fremde Freund by Christoph Hein, and Das Schönste von Wilhelm Busch (printed in Ljubljana, interestingly enough).

[Osias]

[vijayjohn]

Tried to do a bit of careful reading from Itinerarium by Egeria and a bit of much more careless reading from Pui de țigan by Călin Kasper and am about to start on Terra Sonâmbula by Mia Couto. I'm curious as to whether Kasper might be Boyash. He has his e-mail address in the book. I'm slightly tempted to ask...

[Yasna]

I finished Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was better than expected, but then I don't expect much from classic sci-fi. I also read Geschichte des Kapitalismus by Jürgen Kocka. You can't do better than this book for an historical overview of capitalism. And then I got around to 人間失格 by Osamu Dazai, which years ago I read in German translation (Gezeichnet) before I could read Japanese. It's basically a novel about low self-esteem. And finally I finished Independent People, which was quite a ride. It was fun to follow around a poor Icelandic crofter in the early 20th century, and a solid lesson in why the romanticizing of rural life is absurd.

[linguoboy]

And finally I finished Independent People, which was quite a ride. It was fun to follow around a poor Icelandic crofter in the early 20th century, and a solid lesson in why the romanticizing of rural life is absurd.

Damn, you have been busy! I stalled on this about forty pages in, but I plan to return to it as soon as finish with the Kivirähk (which I'm basically reading just to finish at this point, because on top of not being all that clever and piling up absurdities, he also likes to kill off characters in a very unsatisfying and arbitrary sort of way).

[vijayjohn]

Not much, but I started Terra Sonâmbula, finished reading Unit 13 of Basic Chinese (will probably start on Unit 14 soon and possibly read another story from 聊斋故事), am almost done with Chapter 20 of Practical Chinese Reader IV, and hope to start reading all these books I have in Spanish once I get to Spanish in my TAC round. I'll probably read another chapter in TY Business French sometime soon, too. That chapter would be Chapter 12, and the whole book has 24 chapters, so once I read that, I'll be halfway through!

[Yasna]

Damn, you have been busy! I stalled on this about forty pages in, but I plan to return to it as soon as finish with the Kivirähk (which I'm basically reading just to finish at this point, because on top of not being all that clever and piling up absurdities, he also likes to kill off characters in a very unsatisfying and arbitrary sort of way).

That reminds me of an anime I used to watch called アカメが斬る! I banished the show from my life after the bastards beheaded my favorite character on a whim...

[vijayjohn]

Read through Unit 14 of Basic Chinese and started reading both La muerte de Artemio Cruz and (okay, just barely) Crecer a golpes.

[linguoboy]

started reading..La muerte de Artemio Cruz

Hey, I've got that! Maybe I should join you.

But first let me put a knife in this damn Estonian book.

[vijayjohn]

Don't worry, no matter how long you take to read the Estonian book, I promise you you'll be done reading this one years before I get anywhere with it. I might not even get past the second paragraph by the time you're done.

[Yasna]

I might not even get past the second paragraph by the time you're done.

That wouldn't be an issue if it was a Thomas Bernhard book...

[vijayjohn]

I might not even get past the second paragraph by the time you're done.

That wouldn't be an issue if it was a Thomas Bernhard book...

No easy read, I'm guessing? How might he compare to Thomas Mann?

Hmm, maybe I should've also mentioned the authors' names for those books I'm reading even though I already have on my TAC. La muerte de Artemio Cruz is, of course, by Carlos Fuentes, and Crecer a golpes is a collection of essays about various conflicts throughout the Americas (including the US, apparently) edited by Argentine writer (now living in Washington, D. C.) Diego Fonseca. Meanwhile, I've also started reading La tentación de lo imposible, which is actually an essay on Les Misérables and Victor Hugo by Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa (I'm not entirely sure what's supposed to be so great about this particular essay yet. I think it's supposed to be particularly insightful on the author or something). I'm also about to start reading Cosecha de mujeres by Diana Washington Valdez, a book on the female homicides in Ciudad Juárez that the author (a journalist from El Paso just across the border) has been threatened for writing.

[linguoboy]

Don't worry, no matter how long you take to read the Estonian book, I promise you you'll be done reading this one years before I get anywhere with it. I might not even get past the second paragraph by the time you're done.

It's difficult. I read the first ten pages last night and had to look up at least a half-dozen words (like hormigueo and alcabala) in order to make sense of some passages. The first two pages are pure stream of consciousness and characters just get introduced one after another with almost no context. I enjoyed it immensely, but I feel like in order to get as much out of it as I'd like to I'd have to brush up on my Mexican history, such as by rereading Distant neighbours.

I also spent some time thinking about why I didn't like the Kivirähk and even read some reviews to help me. He's much too fond of the Deus ex machina in a way that negates meaningful suspense and gives the whole thing more the flavour of a children's adventure story than a serious novel. As one of the reviewers point out, his overall theme--the collapse of an old world under the assault of a new order--is pretty well-worn and I've read it done better. The whole time I was reading it, I kept thinking of all the opportunities he was missing to enrich the narrative.

Probably his most interesting choice was making the protagonist atheist as well as pagan. It's not just that he resists Christianity; he thinks all belief in things you have no good evidence for is nonsense, and the world depicted is quite amazing enough without it. But the religious debates eventually get tiresome. In fact, the novel has so much repetition you could probably lose a hundred pages and not sacrifice much in the way of plot or world-building (though I'd rather he used those pages to develop some of the more crudely-sketched characters, including most of the female ones).

I finished up the evening by reading a bit more of Solitud. I'm finding it much harder than the Fuentes. The version I bought is a critical edition and I honestly don't understand why it doesn't have a glossary. Albert was writing before the language was fully standardised (the First International Congress of the Catalan Language took place a couple years after it was originally published) and her diction is replete with dialect words and castellanismes, some of which I have to go to the Alcover-Moll dictionary to translate. I can't imagine contemporary Catalan readers aren't in the same boat so I don't know why Edicions 62 couldn't have handed us an oar.

[Linguaphile]

The are some lovely bits of whimsy and then there are jarring anachronisms (like mediaeval forest dwellers referring to themselves as "Estonians" long before any sense of nationhood emerged there).

Many of the anachronisms are lexical as well. Since I don't know the language, I'm not sure whether to hold Kivirähk responsible for these or his English translator, Christopher Moseley, but it's odd to say the least for a narrator whose people don't even smelt or sow to be throwing around words like "science", "species", and "primate". I imagine these words are less jarring in Estonian, where they're formed from native roots that disguise their recent origin, but a translation which doesn't take this into account feels half-baked.

I haven't read Mees, kes teadis ussisõnu yet, but I've read other works by Kivirähk, and other historical fiction, in Estonian. I doubt the vocabulary sounded anachronistic in the original. Historical fiction plays a large role in Estonian literature and the vocabulary used is both well-known to Estonian readers and usually historically accurate (such as hallid "the Grays" to refer to Estonians who lived in cities rather than the countryside, or maakeel "language of the land/countryside" to refer to the Estonian language). I can guess at the words Kivirähk probably used in Mees, kes teadis ussisõnu: maarahvas for Estonians ("people of the land/countryside", referring to Estonian-speakers as opposed to people in other lands or people who came to that area from other lands). Sometimes maarahvas is translated into English as "countryfolk", but when translated that way it loses its sense of national/ethnic/linguistic identity, which it does have, so I can see why Moseley would have translated it for an English-speaking audience as "Estonians." In any case, the word Estonia actually was used in Medieval Latin, and before that Estia (and there's even Aesti from as far back as the first century AD), but these were not adopted by the Estonians themselves (who stuck with maarahvas to describe themselves) until later.
Esikloomalised is probably the word used for primates (more or less "the primary/first type of animals"). Modern Estonian also has the synonym primaadid, but the word esikloomalised comes from older Finnic roots. Liik is probably the word used in the book for species (it does mean species, but also means "kind," "sort," "type," etc.) And for "science," the modern word is teadus, which comes from the verb teadma ("to know") and has an older, now lesser-used meaning of "knowledge, information." So it would not be anachronistic at all, but to translate it into English as "knowledge" when the word truly does mean "science" in modern Estonian would seem rather odd.
I think when reading a book like this you just have to accept that these concepts did exist that long ago, at least in a slightly modified form (i.e., the concept of "Estonians" meant the people who speak the Estonian language, not people who carry an Estonian passport and live within today's national borders), even if the specific words used in the translation wouldn't have been known to English-speakers of that time. The concepts certainly existed, just not precisely the same as how we understand them today.