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@“wickedcestus”#p117650 I don’t know what it is, but that word “smilingly” comes up a lot in translations of Russian novels. It’s so weird.
This must be due to the Russian people's sunny, carefree disposition, complemented by their relatively calm and uneventful national history.
i started reading the new (and last) javier marías book, tomas nevinson. it's great, but had to recommend because it builds heavily on his older books, particularly the your face tomorrow trilogy, which are some of my favorite books of all time. @yeso have you read marías?
@captain tim parks has written some great stuff on the art of translation. paywalled article about [tolstoy here](https://www.nybooks.com/online/2017/12/09/gained-in-translation/), [interview i've never read here](https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2019/05/06/on-criticizing-translation-an-interview-with-tim-parks/), and an [amazing book of his essays here](https://www.nyrb.com/products/where_im_reading_from).
@“MoH”#p117907 I have not. I don’t know much about Spanish lit tbh, more of a western hemisphere guy. Looked him up on wikipedia and seems interesting. Having Jess Franco for an uncle is a good bit of family trivia
@“yeso”#p117910 i was gonna make a joke about how you don‘t seem to read that side of the atlantic, but i didn’t want to presume based on what you've only posted on the forums lol
I’m just not classy enough for europe
@“wickedcestus”#p117650
@"Gaagaagiins"#p117651
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@“Gaagaagiins”#p117651 the first time I was really confronted with Russian naming conventions (and also differences in casual address and more formal address, etc.), and it also took me a while to realize princes aren’t just a monarch’s male children, lol.
Part of why I think it's the translation is the fact I'm relatively comfortable with these conventions by now (possibly hubris on my part). Granted it has fewer characters and is narrower in scope than W&P, but I had no problem reading _Anna Karenina_ before bed when I was still working my exhausting school job, where _War and Peace_ . . .
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one of the reasons I loved War and Peace was for its power to knock my ass out
. . . no matter how awake I am after 7:00pm, is instant anesthetic! Which come to think of it is probably why I have some trouble recalling specifics, is I continue to try to read it before bed. If I do switch to the P&V t. of W&P and still struggle, it will not discourage me from continuing
Incidentally, I just read the chapter in which Natasha demands to know what kind of dessert will be served following her name-day dinner. Marya Dmitrievna tells Natasha they will be eating a frozen dessert: "ice-pudding" in Garnett and Maude, "ice cream" in Pevear/Volokhonsky. But when Natasha demands to know the specific kind of frozen dessert, she says she doesn't like one particular kind. In Garnett, she says she doesn't like "ice cream" (contrast with ice pudding); in my _revised_(??) version of the Maude translation, she says "plum ice"; and in Pevear/Volokhonsky, she says "vanilla ice cream." In the Russian she says she doesn't like мороженое, which I don't know anything about the Russian language or dessert, but the English Wikipedia page for Ice Cream corresponds to the Russian one for Мороженое, suggesting a general kind of dessert rather than a particular flavor. I am curious how this difference in translation came to be!
@"MoH"#p117907 Thank you for these!
I really dislike Nuestra parte de noche as “literature” but it‘s somehow like a much better ramsey campbell novel, so idk if I’ll finish it since reading in Spanish takes a bit more of my very, very limited brainpower than I may be able to afford. If it gets an English translation, then maybe it's a good spooky time.
I went in expecting like kitchen sink occultism like much of her short fiction, but as I said a while back, it gets bogged down in exposition and premise, which is surprisingly banal considering the author. It worked much better from an oblique and limited view, but this is a long novel with important family lineages and magic spell rules etc
What book did you buy your dad for Father's day if thats a thing you like to do?
@“yeso”#p118238 English translation came out earlier this year. I've been wanting to give it a go after liking Dangers of Smoking In Bed.
maybe I just had the wrong expectations going in. It’s engaging enough and has its virtues
is this a sign lol. Breaking the MST3K rule
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[IMG]https://i.imgur.com/USDWX70.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
I think it‘s a bad good book, but maybe a good bad book. There are some real groaner moments that surprised me considering the author. Some of that forrest gumpist shit you see way too much with “important” US novels. I did not like david bowie appearing. And like I said, the occultism is somewhat imaginative, but also pretty lame. Like Magemaster Anthony, every ascended master, thelemite, theosophist, huge party, etc. It veers into The Invisibles territory pretty hard for a while there. Hey I liked The Invisibles well enough for what it is, but it’s adolescent and I hoped for more from Nuestra parte de noche.
A different book with different aims, but it's making me think about _El obsceno pájaro de la noche_, and I think I dislike how this book makes the (genuinely disturbing and otherworldy) Imbunche stuff literal and "realistic" in a way that Donoso avoids, and I'm not sure it's successful, especially I think positioned in this kind of smart, kind of dumb horror novel. I mean it's not quite exploitation, but instead feels like a good writer pursuing an impossible task, which is to tie an elaborate supernatural cult conspiracy plot to real world atrocities and use the former to elucidate the latter. The metaphor recedes as the material description of the occult system is exhaustively detailed. If you read "el chico sucio," I think you pretty much get what's good about this book. I don't think this 600+ page novel provides more than trivia and spectacle after "el chico sucio" said what it said. I mean I don't think that made up black magic shit, no matter how gnarly (and it gets pretty gnarly) is anything close to as crushing and bleak as real narratives of the dirty war. I don't know what the intertwining serves. In fact I think the most awful and wrenching passage is just an accurate description of the death of Omayra Sánchez (do not look this up if you don't want bad shit in your memory forever)
Been reading After The Winter by Guadalupe Nettel and am really liking it! It’s about two characters, a man and a woman, and their various relationships and outlooks on life as they grow up and change. I like how she writes, it’s very blunt in how it presents the characters’ thoughts but it’s also quite emotionally intelligent at the same time imo. Translation also reads very well, the author is Mexican and the book originally in Spanish, which is something I always feel ready to be critical of so that a relief. I’m not super far in but definitely really intrigued to keep going.
Also she’s apparently a professor at my Spanish tutor’s university in Mexico City which is pretty cool!
@“sabertoothalex”#p118502 are you doing UNAM online or in person? How are you finding it?
finished Nuestra parte de noche and it‘s ultimately disappointing although compelling enough as a a goofy horror book. I don’t think there‘s anything much to it though if you’re read her earlier fiction and have From Hell or The Invisibles. Bums me out to say this
Moving on to Onetti's second novel _Tierra de nadie_. It's good so far and really cinematic, almost like a film script. Interesting that Brausen will be writing a screenplay in the following novel of course! This isn't usually considered one of the Santa María novels but guess who comes knocking on the door in the opening pages, that's right you guessed it folks it's Larsen. I think I might have to sign up for wikipedia and put things right on the english language Onetti pages
Has anyone read Subcutanean? I just finished it last night and found it an engaging-enough iteration on House of Leaves. Didn‘t feel as exciting or fresh as that, but the developments on its concepts were neat. What I’m most fascinated by is the gimmick that no two copies are identical. If anyone has a copy themselves, it'd be interesting to see if we can figure out where our copies deviate.
I was watching that _Rome_ show, and, even if it wasn't totally explicit about this, it got me thinking... did those Roman senators assassinate Caesar because he was a bit of a class traitor?
Then on a completely unrelated post, I was reminded that Michael Parenti wrote a book on that very subject. So, now I'm reading _The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History Of Ancient Rome._
I'm a first day commie kid and rarely eat my vegetables and read theory books, but, boy, Parenti is a really great and accessible writer. The book is a bit of a barn burner. And Cicero was a real motherfucker. Hmm, well, I guess calling him that is a bit Greek. Oh well.
need some stuff to read that will expand who i am as a person so i'm going back to otessa mosfegh
no pressure Otessa Mosfegh
Just here to throw out a few thoughts on some books I read recently.
A couple examples chosen more or less at random:
a. "Fawx’s Mt. was a jerkwater—a little rustic boosterville running in a crazy thalweg along the base of the Blue Ridge chain and hedged in by slonks and dark deciduous forests of rotting logs, leaf-mold, and eaten-away pines."
b. “'But love?' Crucifer’s tongue seemed to sour on the word. 'What is this bit of jackasserie from the goliardic corpus of pothouse verse other than lust for possession?'"
I mostly enjoyed the style: running into new words and going down tangents can be a good time for me. Theroux is a big fan of writers like Laurence Sterne and Robert Burton; he quotes them often, and in some ways, this book reminds of a modern version of some of those Enlightenment era satires. (Sure, I'll throw the term Menippean Satire in here). There are 100 chapters and some include diversions like lists, letters, essays written by the characters, stories within stories. etc.
Still, I wouldn't say I loved the book as a whole. See, I used to revere "style" (whatever that means) as the greatest thing in literature. Style or die. But, as I get older, I'm finding even artful styles can read pretty superficial or showy to me and I really crave something else: human insight, spiritual insight, wisdom, virtue, Truth...something like that. Darconville's Cat has style out the ears but I found the basic story - a male college professor falls in love with a student, she breaks up with him, he feels sad- mostly barren. There's encyclopedic brilliance on top, but not a lot underneath. The only memorable character was the villain Dr. Crucifer, and even he is more cartoony than anything.
Gass is another heavy stylist. He's pretty well known among fans of postmodernist American literature; he often gets mentioned alongside writers like Pynchon, Barth, and Gaddis.
This is a short book of his, and it's an essay about the meaning of "blue."
Here's how the book starts (this is the first half of a two-page long sentence):
"BLUE pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of its delirium; Russian cats and oysters, a withheld or imprisoned breath, the blue they say that diamonds have, deep holes in the ocean and the blazers which English athletes earn that gentlemen may wear; afflictions of the spirit—dumps, mopes, Mondays—all that’s dismal—low-down gloomy music, Nova Scotians, cyanosis, hair rinse, bluing, bleach;"
Wow! Again, lots of fun verbal fireworks. Gass really likes the sounds of words and is often interested in them as something almost as objects. In fact, he goes into a mini-treatise on the way words exist apart from their meanings:
"WHEN, with an expression so ill-bred as to be fatherless, I enjoin a small offensive fellow to ‘fuck a duck,’ I don’t mean he should."
He also likes to swear...it's okay, though sometimes it feels like he really wants to advertise that he's this erudite scholarly guy "but, look, I can get down and dirty and swear, too, guys." Sometimes it's funny.
Anyway, I don't think the book really gets to a conclusion other than that "blue" can mean a lot of things and it's interesting that a word/idea/color can contain so many connotations. Again, I enjoyed the book overall, but like Darconvillle, it was another sign for me that style by itself can only go so far without some strong content to back it up.
