@“whatsarobot”#p113353
It‘s not really a translation, since Le Guin doesn’t read or speak Chinese. She uses a few translations and then rewrites them.
Despite the seeming inelegance of the process, her version is my favorite. But, uh, I also don't read or speak Chinese so it might be the _worst_ one! But I think it's the best.
@“edward”#p113367 your comment reminded me of this eliot weinberger book: https://www.ndbooks.com/book/nineteen-ways-of-looking-at-wang-wei/
any weinberger heads here?
since we‘re on the subject of translation I’ll take the opportunity to promote possibly the only good post I've ever made
https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/538-the-mortal-enemy-of-videogames/532
@“edward”#p113367 I wondered about Le Guin’s Chinese language ability! But it sounds like she was very familiar with various versions of the text, and consulted closely with (Chinese-fluent) experts. Honestly it would be awesome if more translated texts got this kind of loving treatment.
@“MoH”#p113372 I wrote a review of his book Oranges and Peanuts For Sale for my college literary magazine and I've read a bunch of his translations (though not this Wang Wei book). I like his stuff quite a bit. In the book I reviewed, he has a lot of pieces that are literary criticism but written more like poems or hybrid works, yet somehow he usually manages not to seem all smarmy and self-important in doing so.
If people are interested in what he's up to, maybe start with "The Cloud Bookcase":
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n15/eliot-weinberger/the-cloud-bookcase
@“rearnakedwindow”#p113393 oh dude that's awesome. was your college mag something i might recognize?
i really like that oranges book, along with [elemental thing ](https://www.ndbooks.com/book/an-elemental-thing/)and ghosts of birds. also a big fan of the elemental thing cover.
i remember reading (maybe hearing?) an interview with him once where he was asked what he was going to write about next. i was expecting some bombastic scholarly answer, but instead he was like "i've been thinking about animals a lot lately for some reason, so maybe that?"
that answer has always stuck with me
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@“MoH”#p113420 was your college mag something i might recognize?
Nah, it wasn't any of the big, lauded ones, just an undergrad lit mag from a small liberal arts college.
I always like it when erudite writers show they have a humble or at least straightforward side. I think it was in the Paris Review Interview that Geoff Dyer said a lot of times he likes doing his laundry more than writing. I'm like "yes, I can relate."
Weinberger's answer is great, though. It's never a bad time to just write about animals.
@“rearnakedwindow”#p113439 ah word. very cool book to review nonetheless. have you done any reviews since? i tried doing them for a little bit when I was in school but found the whole process exhausting and a little distasteful. i likely just don’t have the talent for it.
this will be too much to explain over a forum post, but the main thing Murnane does in his free time is this solitary, intricate fantasy horse racing game he made up as a child and continued throughout his life. it essentially involves picking a sentence out of a book and using the number of clauses etc to determine a horses position. he’s kept detailed records of it in filing cabinets and he says it’s been as if not more rewarding to him than reading or writing.
Bernhard had a shoe fetish and his house had closets full of shoes.
i’m sure the list goes on, but i agree that those traits are pretty cool.
@“whatsarobot”#p113390
I agree! It‘s the kind of thing I’ve considered doing despite (or because!) being a monolingual fool.
found some fun stuff. got a book called “on the shores of [place i live censored” that's all local history from the area: lots of stuff about settler colonists in the Wild Wild West, baby, but also a lot of little personal anecdotes about the kind of people crazy enough to ditch the war (the civil war) and try and live in some of the harshest environments in the world instead
also a bit about quakers! quakers in arizona! APPARENTLY there are no quakers in arizona because the state government got fed up with them arming +helping natives defend their land that they ran them out of the state en masse!
Feeling pretty good. It was probably more nerve-wracking when I first sent an early draft to my friends/family a few years ago. Enough people have read the book in its various drafts at this point that I feel fairly comfortable with people seeing it. I'm mostly just happy that I have finally gone through with it, and I don't have to sit around and wonder all the time whether I should release this book or not.
I'm proud of the book! I think I did the best I could, and I learned a lot. Excited to keep working on the next one.
I‘ve read reading The End of the Affair, which was recommended to me because a friend of mine told me that one of my favorite Spanish novels could be probably inspired by Greene’s novel. I have yet to end it, but I‘m really surprised. This is a mystery novel that ends up being a emotional voyeuristic story. All is centered around a not so mysterious character, and since it works like a noir story, it works like every twist reveals a crack under everyone’s armor. I am not so fond of the ending, although I can understand why there‘s this final spin, but I also feel like seeing it everywhere under the eyes of Bendrix makes it work since he’s the most miserable and pathetic of the whole cast. It‘s not a brilliant novel, but it’s a crafty one.
@"wickedcestus"#p113864 Good luck. I'm usually not very fond of cliche stories, but these kind of tropes (as dark romance ones) are the ones I usually end up digging from time to time. I'll check it out ;)
@“MoH”#p113295 I read this story too, thinking it‘s about time I take another look at Wallace’s stuff with a little hindsight. A year or two ago I read “Up, Simba,” his essay about the McCain presidential campaign of 2000, which was pretty interesting as a historical document, especially for me since I grew up broadly aware (using this term liberally) of early 2000s politics but way too young to even begin to know what it must have been like to have a real opinion on things at that time. Anyhow, later I read the lobster essay, which I felt was more on the twee/fussy side of things, and now “Good Old Neon”: I found the first 38 pages of this absurdly self-absorbed, which I guess was intentional, but unnecessary imo for setting up the point. But the point is pretty good! Reminded me of what I liked about his writing. “Staked to a thesis statement” definitely describes this story pretty well. Passages in Infinite Jest briefer than G.O.N. had more going for them I think. I'd like to see if The Pale King has anything good in it.
@“captain”#p113983 well said. i remember re-reading the lobster essay for a non-fiction class in grad school. when i had first read it, i thought i was in the presence of genius, but revisiting it made me feel like i was dealing with someone‘s overeager dog, especially with the footnotes. i also found myself annoyed at how coy he was with his arguments and recursive lines of thought. maybe this is a stretch, but it almost feels like a product of pre-recession, middle class US thought? idk, haven’t thought that one through.
i know exactly what you mean about _the point_ in that story. when i first got to _the point_ years ago, particularly the sentence >!Go ahead and cry if you want, I won't tell anybody.!<, i legit had tears in my eyes. now, it just kinda makes me go "huh, that's a neat trick." surely that says more about me than anything. in fact, i'd say it even puts a point in DFW's favor that he can be a very special writer if you encounter him at the right time.
the pale king is good from what i remember. it's hard to comment on an unfinished work, but it was more confident than IJ in a lot of ways, and almost an answer to some of the questions IJ posed (DFW started attending catholic mass toward the end of his life and some of that makes it's way into the book--where religion and worship were one piece among many in IJ, they are treated more of a terminus in PK). i still half-remember one line from PK--something about how unordered chaos is actually the most boring thing in the world. all that said, it is still full of DFW's stylistic tics, so it wouldn't be something i'd personally revisit anytime soon.
last stray thought--george saunders seems to have a similar cultural currency these days as DFW had. he also followed a similar, if not muted, trajectory of esteem in my mind.
@“wickedcestus”#p113864 grabbed for my kindle, will try to get to it soon!
(Just like everyone, the list only ever gets longer)
@“MoH”#p113295 DFW was my favourite author for a good number of years. The way he described thought-spirals and intensive self-criticism felt like he was looking directly into my mind and describing what was in there. It's an amazing skill, but at the same time, I do find it harder and harder to relate to his works as time goes on.
I think success/fame at an early age was really bad for him. Having that amount of scrutiny and attention seems to have reinforced and strengthened his own self-reflective tendencies. Part of the way I have got over my feeling that everyone is constantly judging/hating me was understanding that most people just don't think about me the way I think about myself -- they are a lot less harsh, for one, and for two, they are a lot less _interested_. People just don't care about what I am doing as much as I do, which is in fact a very good thing! But when I imagine being in the situation where people were actually attentive to my works and my words, and I was on TV and etc, it would be easy to externalize these sort of thought-spirals and make them feel intensely _real_, because in a sense they are.
I think one of my major criticisms of his work is that I think he is missing an entire "register" of human emotion. His unwillingness to be "sentimental" means that the only emotions he's willing to seriously address are despair, loneliness, dread, etc. It's kind of weird to think that in a book as large and varied as _Infinite Jest_, there is almost no joy. Sure, there are jokes and levity, but they mostly come from farcical moments in which we, the audience/narrator, are able to laugh at the characters. I can't help but think of someone like Tolstoy, who is able to write stories that incorporate joy, humour, hate, anger, fear, romantic and familial love, death, etc etc, without any of these emotions feeling like they dilute or counteract the others.
There's a sense in which _Infinite Jest_ equates happiness and addiction, and is intensely critical of all sources of happiness. For all its jokes, there is this incredibly somber underlying foundation, and I don't think it is an explicit philosophical intention of DFW's as much as an aversion to actually tackling these emotions because they're the fodder of TV and "sentimental novels" and therefore not serious. I think this is a result of being hyper-aware of criticism and trying to pre-empt it in the same way the character in that story does.
And it ends up in the same sort of fashion, where all he can do is pre-empt and pre-empt and dance around and around, getting caught up in paradoxes and etc but never actually dealing with the criticism itself, never actually opening up those more basic and "primitive" emotions that are so strong they can't be danced around. That story is so deeply uncomfortable because it so accurately describes the way he seems in interviews, where he constantly says something that he obviously understands is insightful, and then stops and says, "Did that make any sense?" and at first you say, "oh, he's insecure and uncomfortable on TV" and then you read that story and you think, "Oh, he doesn't want us to know that he thinks he just said something smart," which is way more unsettling and a lot less cute.
... I think this whole post is a bit more harsh than I intended, because I _am_ sympathetic to what he went through and what he was writing about, and I do still think _Infinite Jest_ and a whole bunch of his stuff is absolutely great. Perhaps a lot of my current feelings are a sort of recoil from holding him in such high esteem for so many truly miserable years of my life, and now trying to move on. Unsure. Just had to share my thoughts.
This Is Not Miami getting a belated translation out 5/10. FYI fans of forum favorite Fernanda Melchor
https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/this-is-not-miami-1
been a good couple weeks for books by forum favorites with this one and @wickedcestus 's
Been reading The Master and Margarita, really enjoying it. Wacky ass book. I’ve only read Dostoevsky for Russian lit before and this is pretty wildly different!
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@“sabertoothalex”#p114410 Been reading The Master and Margarita, really enjoying it. Wacky ass book. I’ve only read Dostoevsky for Russian lit before and this is pretty wildly different!
I love that wacky ass book. [Russians are some of the funniest writers ](http://www.sevaj.dk/kharms/kharmseng.htm)
@“sabertoothalex”#p114410 you’ll probably enjoy The Foundation Pit