/lit/ - Literature

>>23457242

>>23435680
>wrt japanese literature, i dislike most of what i've read apart from kawabata who i think is a genius and who i read in french.

I like his Kaguya Hime translation. I own it with a dual side translation to English from Donald Keene. It is surprising to find out that Kawabata was known for X rated fare considering the light hearted nature of the tale as well as the fact he apparently committed suicide by sticking his head inside an oven.

>>23196451
One of the few points I have seen you make which is actually spot on. He made the movie into his own thing which stands as its own clearly separate entity but the source material is also good in its own way, which is much different than what you see in the film. The famous Dinner at Trimalchio’s segment is pretty much straight from the text as is the widow of Ephesus but everything else is different. The implied temple robbery is in the actual book as well though it is from one of the lost sections. In the film, the defilement of Priapus’ temple is replaced by the kidnapping of a hermaphrodite oracle.

>>23153090
I am almost done with the second volume (Cosette) though I am also reading medical essays on the side so if I were only reading Les Mis I would’ve probably gotten farther into it by now.

There are many digressions but something else which is difficult is the constant references to 19th century French politics. I have to constantly flip to the end notes because Hugo will off handedly mention a z grade French mayor from 1820 and expect the reader to know who he is. It was very much written for a 19th century audience who lived through these events. It is a wonderful book and I recommend it if you enjoyed the Hugh Jackman movie but you have to really get into it.

>>23150861
>living on minimum wage as a single mom.
I am a Jo hater, but I do that as a resident of Scotland who is unimpressed with her larp.
For all the wankery and her misguided political alignments where she aligns closer to the centre right but believes she is part of the radical left:
There was no minimum wage when she wrote or released the books. That didn't hit until New Labour (TM) and Jo was out of the trenches.
However describing Jo's worklife as the trenches is a bit rich; like her family. It's very vogue to say she lived a life of relative poverty but Jo, no hun. Jo was middle class masquerading as poor.
She was privately educated at a time before tuition fees were abolished and in an English university no less, she enjoyed stints in public service and the private sector, she even got to work abroad and married, although that fell apart since it was borne out of a short term relationship.

By the time she came to Edinburgh in late '93 she already had a bunch of work done on the novels and had the means to support herself pre-NMW off of a living wage and she was studying part time. The child came off her own volition as did the choice to study part time AGAIN while living in "relative poverty".
Now millionaire Jo (formerly billionaire) LARPs as someone vehemently interested in Scottish politics and likes to talk about her life in poverty when the life she faced for those 3 years in 'burgh were stil extremely priviledged and better than the life of any child raised reading her books under SNP rule. Even with tuition fees paid for, even with the national minimum wage. They could never measure up to her level of priviledge.

-And that is why it's so utterly sickening & offensive to see the narrative that she lived in relative poverty and all her misguided views mangled with her own inability to see where she lies on the political spectrum.
She really does embody everything wrong with Edinburgh, right down to owning a millionaire property as an Englishman.

>>23150806
I have no fucking idea what we’re even arguing about now cause we’re both saying the same exact thing. My main issue was putting Penelope on par with the fucking swine herd and the family dog. Yeah, they are all part of his Oikos but Penelope’s relationship to him is more paramount at the head of the house. Now we are just arguing over semantics. I would like to imagine Penelope meant more to Odysseus than the fucking old fuck swine herd guy who raised his pigs to eat.

>>23130475

>>23127066
Yes me neither. Most of my colleagues are basically the people in that video. There is an old boomer lady who is at least knowledgeable on basic social political events in the world but she isn’t exactly lit. She had only a basic idea of who Proust was and also got angry when I talked about Tucker Carlson once since she and her husband have a policy in their home where they don’t ever turn his show on or mention his name.

>>23116525
Les Miserables

On the surface it is a tale of redemption vs revenge. The one seeking to restart his life and the one wishing to bring it down again for a perceived slight or offense with which the former tries to make amends with thus proving his own humanity.

On a deeper psychological level it is a Freudian tale of a man (Javert) seeking revenge on his own parents (hooker gypsy mother and prisoner father) by hunting down all who err from the law for anything no matter how slight. It is about a man coming to terms with his own upbringing by punishing those whose wrongdoings he finds akin to those of the very parents who spawned him. Javert’s psychological grappling with his own identity is as important as Valjean’s plight.

>>23083365
(you) Redditor moment

You are the Nietzschean last man. We have everything figured out and the ancients are too primitive and brutal for our modern libtard consensus.

>>23079980
Everyone complains about that but I liked that aside. The year of 1817 chapter which introduces Felix Tholomyes and Fantine and which contains a massive list of random events and pop culture from 1817 is so much worse.

>>23046839
The translator’s intro sets the tone for what to expect from the text itself. If the translator does not even know what he is translating then that might be a bit of a problem.

If the translator can not discern between geology and astronomy (fields of study which are for the most part NOT dubious) and with what is a sly reference to philosophy under the banner of a famous Aristophanes quote on the subject then that is just clueless. No, Hippocrates was not criticizing geology as a field, you silly man.

>It can be doubted whether Odysseus' story is intended, within the general narrative of the Odyssey, to be taken as true.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_the_Odyssey

Is this an actual opinion which scholars had in antiquity about Odysseus? That his actual account within the framework of the story was intended as a bunch of lies. I would like to hear more about this idea because I never heard of it before. I know Odysseus was a liar but I didn’t think it was that his story to the Phaician king was itself a grand lie.

>>22907574
Everything that I know about literature is self taught. Schooling did nothing for me and I really feel it hampered me quite a bit and held me back. I had already taught myself to read full chapter books by age 3 iirc and I had already read everything in the library at the preschool while the others were still beginning hooked on phonics. Anything I need to know I could’ve self taught. School was a waste of time and saddled me with a ton of people I vary between find vaguely annoying and outright hating and wishing death upon but that is no issue of yours to know about.

>>22886698
Why is there not a good adaptation of the shadow over innsmouth?

This may sound like a really stupid question but if Lovecraft was a racist why does he cite Arabic and Egyptian poetry so frequently? In At the Mountains of Madness every other paragraph is referencing some ancient Egyptian writing or something I never heard of. Was he one of those “Arabs were NORDIC in ancient times” people?

>>22767658
lmao just by being on this site and board is solid proof that you are not in the 5% and in fact probably live under bigger delusions than the 95% of humanity. Just kill yourself already

>>22725156
Because they didn’t write anything of particular worth and also they aren’t part of the great conversation of western thought. Western literature is a continuous chain of authors which all inevitably lead back to either Homer or the Bible. Egypt isn’t a continuous part of that chain and so no one cares.

>>22720096
I mean, if you read all those hundreds of dense books and at the end of the day your viewpoints are still the same as the average Democrat voter then that really disqualifies your field of study in my eyes as having any merit. The point of acquiring information is ideally to reach a certain viewpoint which can benefit you or your soul in some manner. If the average person on the street is about the same level as you are intellectually and morally then you are doing something wrong. Even Plato repeatedly said that in his dialogues, ironically enough as the point I am making betrays his field as being grounded in nothingness.

>>22697709
Paganism is entirely compatible with Platonism, you pea brain. Plato believed the pagan gods were subordinate to the One as in he was their creator. See Timaeus. Quit trying to steal Plato for your looney Christcuckery.

>>22688321
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcomannic_Wars

I know modern comparisons are never welcomed but Marcus Aurelius was the worst parts of Hitler and Napoleon mixed together with an extreme anti-German bent.

>The wars had exposed the weakness of Rome's northern frontier, and henceforth, half of the Roman legions (16 out of 33) would be stationed along the Danube and the Rhine. Numerous Germans settled in frontier regions like Dacia, Pannonia, Germany and Italy itself.