/lit/ - Literature

Hello, guys. Sorry to be an enormous, impertinent asshole but this is the only board I post on and I know you guys are a notch about the rest.

I think Pimsleur is a great introduction to learning a language. In the past, it's quickly taught me the basics of German, Italian and Swedish. I already know English (native) and French. Now I'm looking to start a new linguistic project, because I enjoy the process a lot.

Basically, I'm wondering if there's any compelling reasons to pick a particular language. I learned Italian, German and French for their literature and began Swedish on a whim. Now, I'm wondering:

>Is there another language with particularly great literature?
>Is there a particularly beautiful language I've missed?
>Are there specific economic or practical reasons for learning another?

Anything on the following list is available from Pimsleur. I know a bit of Dutch, having lived there briefly, and have something like an intermediate knowledge of Ancient Greek.

Thanks, folks. Also, languages thread (because /lit/ > /int/).

http://www.pimsleur.com/List-of-Languages

I realise it's anachronistic, but I've always thought that portrait of Hume looked like his terrible, cheap attempt at a Lord Byron Halloween costume.

'Sure, Dave! You look, uh, you look just like him.'

My parents realized how much I enjoyed having stories read to me as a toddler. So - from the age of four onwards - they put me to bed every night with an audiobook playing. I must've listened to scores of novels every year. I exhausted the selection of children's literature available at my local library quickly, so I had to move on. I seemed to be interested in naval histories - which the library had an enormous collection of - so I started working through those tapes.

By that point (about eight years old), I was reading from the genre too. Eventually, I discovered Bernard Cornwell's 'Sharpe' series, which I became passionately interested in. The novels were saturated with references to contemporaneous philosophy - of the 'Enlightenment' era - and my curiosity got the better of me. I borrowed 'Candide' from the library when I was eleven or twelve. Naturally, a fair amount went over my head - though I enjoyed the plot. So, over the next few years, I dedicated a sizable chunk of my time to trying to work it out. I mostly read Locke, Rousseau, Godwin and more Voltaire. Latterly (about fourteen), I picked up Shelley, Wordsworth and - most importantly for me - Lord Byron. Once I discovered Don Juan, that was it for me. I knew literature was my great passion.

After that, I just followed references to other works in appendixes to Byron's poetry. 'Manfred' brought me to 'Hamlet', then Nietzsche, both of which led me to Sartre. It's a big, lovely, infinitely-branching tree after that.

Shelley regularly read for sixteen hours a day while studying at Oxford. If people on here even managed an eighth of that we might avoid threads like this.

The Magus is a remarkable achievement and I can only imagine those who doubt its literary merits to be tasteless, loveless and thoughtless. Incidentally, are you dissenters the same lot who I see on here sticking the boot into English Romanticism? I think there must be an ugly undercurrent of 'logicians' here who're just killing time until the next tedious thread on analytic philosophy.

>>3562788

"I deny nothing, but doubt everything."

- The 'mad, bad and dangerous to know' Lord Byron

(capticha: byorsed discovery)

What's tha... Oh, I see. Never mind.

Don Juan is my favourite poem, I won't be able to share all sixteen cantos, though. Here's something something from Wordsworth instead.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

(from Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood)

>>3480318

>Laird Barron
>Scottish Lord Byron?

Portraits, women complained, couldn't capture the remarkable beauty of Byron's face, which was said to appear 'lit, like an alabaster vase, from within'.

Byron's relentless prurience was a major element of his life. And, like Fitzgerald and all true Romantics, his life - being in such a large part ideal and imaginative - was lived partially in his work.

'The Magus' is my go-to recommendation. New readers enjoy the dynamic plot, vivid characterisation and accessible philosophical elements, literates can appreciate the prose. The romance does it for the women, the Romance does it for the young men.

Picture somewhat related: the protagonist teaches at the fictional 'Lord Byron' school.

A short collection of Byron's poetry, published in 1823. I was awarded it by the National Library of Scotland after finishing top of my year at the University of Edinburgh. The library houses a large collection of memorabilia relating to the Murray family (John Murray having published Byron) and they thought it'd be a suitable gesture, given that I'd written my dissertation on him. Highly treasured, of course.

Don Juan, I suppose.

>>2867189

Could've been this fellow, too. 'I don't like it when a woman is silent, I worry that she's thinking' or whatever he said to that effect.

>>2577253

Don't forget Borges, OP! Another brilliant writer with difficulties seeing. Also, 'Paradise Lost' isn't the best poem in the English Language: 'Don Juan' is better (not more influential or important, just better).

>>2539865

'No.' - Lord Byron, 1810.

It's ridiculously petty, but seeing that the only two British writers on that list who attended university each went to one of my alma maters makes me proud.

I don't think it's juvenile and it's often unavoidable or, at least, inadvertent. However, I would try to avoid prolonged alliteration in academic writing.

>>2428405

>That feel when not handsome enough to be a real hedonist hero

I study in Edinburgh. Today, I had a tutorial in the room which once housed the publication which inspired Byron's first great poem, 'English Bards and Scotch Reviewers'. Incidentally, if you negate Byron's time in Scotland, you lose one of the English language's finest versifiers. That harsh Aberdonian landscape, the dialect, the coarseness of the local Calvinists: it's what forms the wonderful sorrow and sense of damnation that runs like a magma stream below his finest lines.

>Swift (then Yeats, then Wilde)
>Lord Byron (Shakespeare, Scott, Stevenson, Pope and Marlowe following closely behind)
>Emerson (I also love Frost)
>Voltaire (Baudelaire for poetry)

This thread would've been even better if it'd included German, Greek and Italian writers (because, let's face it, that would've completed the pantheon of national literary excellence).

>Lord Byron
>Charles Baudelaire
>Robert Frost
>John Keats
>Robert Louis Stevenson

>>1605176

Name them, dear boy, name them.

>>1488416

What is 'lugubious' (sic) to you is to me the very essence of his brilliance (and is as present in his travel writing as in his 'romantic mode' poetry). The Calvinism he was exposed to in Scotland imbued in him a deep sense of foreboding melancholy - a conception of his own mortality which permeated all of his best poetry and defined him as a man.