Random Literature Thread

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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby linguoboy » 2016-08-23, 2:34

I've been reading a collection of Chinese short stories in translation and one of them ("Big Chan" by Wang Zengqi [汪曾祺]) lists off several "classics" read by the headmaster of a provincial high school. I recognise some of them (e.g. The Strange Tales of Liaozai [sic], Letters Home from Zeng Guofan), but others have me scratching my head. They are:

Conversations on the Edge of the North Pool
A Rainy Autumnal Retreat
Spirits in the Wilderness
Life Among the Floating World

Any guesses? Normally I would just look up the Chinese original, but the title isn't given in the volume I have and so far my guesses as to what it might be haven't panned out.
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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby Yasna » 2016-08-23, 5:10

linguoboy wrote:Any guesses? Normally I would just look up the Chinese original, but the title isn't given in the volume I have and so far my guesses as to what it might be haven't panned out.

The name of the story is 詹大胖子. Here's the passage in the original:

王文蕙常常一个人在校园里走走,散散步。王文蕙散完步,常常看见张蕴之站在教务处门口的台阶上。王文蕙向张蕴之笑笑,点点头。张蕴之也笑笑,点点头。王文蕙回去了,张蕴之看着她的背影,一直看到王文蕙走进幼稚园的前门。张蕴之晚上读书。读《聊斋志异》、《池北偶谈》、《两般秋雨盦随笔》、《曾文正公家书》、《板桥道情》、《绿野仙踪》、《海上花列传》……

The titles of the first two works are 池北偶谈 and 两般秋雨盦随笔. The third title Spirits in the Wilderness appears to be a mistranslation of 绿野仙踪, which is actually the Chinese translation of The Wizard of Oz. The fourth work 海上花列传 is considered the most famous novel written in Wu and China's first novel written in a topolect (最著名的吴语小说,也是中国第一部方言小说)*. It was translated into Mandarin by Eileen Chang under the title 海上花.


*source
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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby linguoboy » 2016-08-23, 17:15

Wow, very well done, Yasna!

Sadly the mistranslation of "綠野仙蹤" doesn't surprise me. As just one indication of the editors' sloppiness, Wang Zengqi's name is consistently misrendered "Wang Ceng-qi".
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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-09-16, 17:01

Mayura Sandesam is getting hard for me to memorize. Currently, I feel kind of like I've plateaued out at 24 quatrains. (There appear to be 141 in all).

Also, my dad told me that he couldn't even find it available to buy online and wondered whether the bookstore that published our copy still exists. It seems the other bookstore whose website he looked it up on bought it.

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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby linguoboy » 2016-10-15, 16:08

I've long since given up on the Nobel Prize for Literature as a prize for literature, but even so, Bob Dylan? Seriously? Just more evidence that we need to move past this era of our societal institutions being dominated by out-of-touch aging Boomers.
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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby mōdgethanc » 2016-10-15, 23:26

linguoboy wrote:I've long since given up on the Nobel Prize for Literature as a prize for literature, but even so, Bob Dylan? Seriously? Just more evidence that we need to move past this era of our societal institutions being dominated by out-of-touch aging Boomers.
Completely agree with you on that second part.

The Nobels in the natural sciences are worth keeping up with, even though they have their share of controversial decisions. The Peace Prize is just politically motivated nonsense (even if it does sometimes go to deserving recipients) and I don't care about the economics prize. I've never followed the literature one. It's high time they restructured the whole enterprise and considered new rules and especially new categories (where the hell is math? Other fine arts? All the other social sciences?). It's bullshit.
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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-10-16, 0:05

Not to mention that the prize is heavily Western-centric anyway.

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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby Johanna » 2016-10-16, 0:24

The thing is, they can't restructure the whole thing or introduce new categories, the rules were laid down by Alfred Nobel in his will and they're quite rigid.

What they could do is to do something like the Economics Prize, which isn't a true Nobel Prize even though it's administered by the Nobel Foundation and the whole process of nominating candidates and deciding on a winner is very close to two of the actual ones (Physics and Chemistry), instead it was created by our national bank way later, and they're the ones paying for it rather than the money ultimately coming from Nobel's estate.

The official name translates to the Swedish National Bank's Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, which is way more true to its status than its usual English version: The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby mōdgethanc » 2016-10-16, 19:51

If they can create a new prize for economics and find a way to pay for it, though, surely the National Bank of Sweden has enough money to afford to create a few more prizes. Just math, drama, social science (could cover sociology, anthropology, political science, history), and maybe psychology (though some of it could go under "medicine" which historically has happened) would be enough IMO. Or to be even vaguer, "arts" could cover anything from drama to film to painting and sculpting. Oh shit, and maybe philosophy.
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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby Yasna » 2016-10-20, 3:11

Has anyone read The Dirty Dust (Cré na Cille) by Maírtin Ó Cadhain? I just heard about it for the first time as a German translation is being released and it sounds quite interesting.


http://blogs.faz.net/buchmesse/2016/10/19/joyce-und-beckett-finden-ihren-verlorenen-drilling-wieder-1099/
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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby linguoboy » 2016-10-20, 4:30

For years, that's been the Holy Grail of my Irish studies--one of the greatest 20th century novels available only in Irish--and now there are suddenly two English translations available.
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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby Yasna » 2016-12-21, 14:54

linguoboy wrote:For years, that's been the Holy Grail of my Irish studies--one of the greatest 20th century novels available only in Irish--and now there are suddenly two English translations available.

Did you decide to read it in translation?

In other news, I was doing some work at Starbucks yesterday, and the guy sitting next to me was reading this dense looking philosophy book called Field of Consciousness by Aron Gurwitsch. After a while he replaced it with マンガで学ぶ動物倫理 (Learn about Animal Ethics with Manga), which formed quite the contrast.
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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby linguoboy » 2016-12-21, 15:29

Yasna wrote:
linguoboy wrote:For years, that's been the Holy Grail of my Irish studies--one of the greatest 20th century novels available only in Irish--and now there are suddenly two English translations available.

Did you decide to read it in translation?

I haven't yet. My next Big Fat Novel might be Anna Karenina or Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.

For right now, I don't seem to have much concentration at all. Even though the Laxness consists of very short chapters, I'm not even a quarter of the way through it. I started an even shorter novel by Stewart O'Nan about a fast-food restaurant closing down just before Christmas (Last night of the Lobster) and if I can finish that by the weekend I'll be well-pleased with myself.
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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby Yasna » 2016-12-21, 21:15

linguoboy wrote:My next Big Fat Novel might be Anna Karenina or Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften.

Those two are on my to-read list as well. I'm tackling a big book right now myself, Der Zauberberg. It's my second go at it, so I've tried to improve my chances this time by breaking it up into four chunks. It almost seems designed to be read that way. The last 3 chapters are each around 250 pages, and the other chapters also add up to a chunk of around that size, so the segmentation didn't require much thought on my part. In between each chunk I read one other novel, so that it doesn't feel like my fiction reading has come to a standstill for months. I'm almost done with the second chunk, and really enjoying it. Amazing writing by the Mann.
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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-12-22, 1:05

I remember my dad tried to read that once in English, which really is the only language he knows besides Malayalam (he studied Hindi at school, of course, plus German as an undergraduate(?) and Russian as a grad student, but forgot all three of those because he never does anything with any of them and Hindi class was never effective anyway). He had to stop because all the French in it was throwing him off. I tried to tell him I could just translate all the French into English on the fly while reading the chapter out loud to him. He didn't believe me at first, so I demonstrated it for him. Then he was like "wow, you really can do that" but didn't bother asking me to do it again anyway.

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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby Yasna » 2016-12-22, 4:12

vijayjohn wrote:He had to stop because all the French in it was throwing him off

I thought I was coping fine with the French. A couple lines here, a couple lines there, which I could understand for the most part. But today, all the way on page 462, I got to this section with 12 straight pages of mostly French dialogue. It definitely broke my stride. And it's at the hitherto most suspenseful moment in the novel, so I don't really feel inclined to just skim through it. I think I will just read it for gist, because I can't imagine that Mann would include anything terribly important in a French part.
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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-12-22, 5:01

Yasna wrote:
vijayjohn wrote:He had to stop because all the French in it was throwing him off

I thought I was coping fine with the French. A couple lines here, a couple lines there, which I could understand for the most part. But today, all the way on page 462, I got to this section with 12 straight pages of mostly French dialogue. It definitely broke my stride. And it's at the hitherto most suspenseful moment in the novel, so I don't really feel inclined to just skim through it. I think I will just read it for gist, because I can't imagine that Mann would include anything terribly important in a French part.

That sounds so much like what my dad found that I just had to retrieve his copy. In the version he has, it's just a little over 9 pages (straight of mostly French dialogue, including a long paragraph at the end), pages 335 to 343 (the end of Chapter V, from the section called "Walpurgisnacht" in the original and "Walpurgis-Night" in this translation). He has a bookmark at the beginning of Chapter VI since it's right after where he gave up. :P He didn't mind the couple lines here and there, either, because he could just ignore them, I guess, but he seemed to have lost hope after that part.

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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby mōdgethanc » 2016-12-22, 5:17

vijayjohn wrote:from the section called "Walpurgisnacht" in the original and "Walpurgis-Night" in this translation
And now I'm having flashbacks to that incredibly boring and overrated piece of dreck, Goethe's Faust. I still don't understand how it's possible for a work that long to contain so little plot.
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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-12-22, 5:24

Then you'll be happy to hear that the only thing I ever associate Faust with is Tintin. :lol: I'm sure (well, I hope) anyone who's read any Tintin will understand why, and it seems unlikely that anyone else would have to or want to know anyway.

EDIT: I think that may also be where I first heard of Goethe. :para: (And then wondered how the fuck his name was supposed to be pronounced).
EDIT2:
mōdgethanc wrote:I still don't understand how it's possible for a work that long to contain so little plot.

Then you must not have watched enough popular Indian movies! :D

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Re: Random Literature Thread

Postby mōdgethanc » 2016-12-22, 5:47

vijayjohn wrote:Then you'll be happy to hear that the only thing I ever associate Faust with is Tintin. :lol:
No way would that make me happy. You know Tintin fills me with rage.
I'm sure (well, I hope) anyone who's read any Tintin will understand why, and it seems unlikely that anyone else would have to or want to know anyway.
Correct assumption.
EDIT: I think that may also be where I first heard of Goethe. :para: (And then wondered how the fuck his name was supposed to be pronounced).
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Then you must not have watched enough popular Indian movies! :D
Even the four-hour musical epics I've watched had a more interesting (and comprehensible) plot than the second half of Faust. If you practically need to be a Renaissance scholar of classics, theology and alchemy just to understand what the fuck is going on in your play, you may need to tone it down a little.
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