/lit/ - Literature

>>17671197
it's probably fine

>>17671197
I've read Pynchon both in English and in Portuguese. It's best to read the original, of course, but it's also way more confusing. If you think you can do it, go for it, but I don't think you lose too much by reading a translation (if it's done well).

>>17671229
basically, it depends on how much patience you have to reread stuff multiple times.

>>17671197
It's complicated in English but it's not like Joyce where he makes up words that wouldn't really make sense in another language. I haven't read GR in translation, so I wouldn't know, but I assume it wouldn't lose much more than most novels do in translation.

>>17671197
Several years ago I couldn't even get through V, I simply had no idea what I was reading, so I gave up.
Last year I got my C2 certificate and tried again, it went much smoother. I'm planning to read GR this year.

>>17671200
>>17671229
>>17671239
>>17671268
Thanks lads
>>17671280
Godspeed

>>17671197
The language isn't tough. Most rare words are technical ones. Go ahead.

>>17671280
I'm C2 certified and I still have to reread paragraphs in A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man. I've just now tried to read GR and couldn't manage to finish a paragraph before encountering a word that I don't know the contextual meaning of.
Am I retarded? Did I just get lucky on that exam?

>>17671682
Obligatory fart smelling Joyce

>>17671682
let me remind you that a lot of native speakers struggle with old books. why would it be easy for you? The vocabulary you need to post on here and read some news and essays/watch tv shows and movies is very different from vocab you need to read literature. I am ESL too and i struggle a lot even with many british invasion comic books and i use dictionary a lot (cause i wanna know EVERY WORD). You need to develop a reading habit in english before you can read old books easily. My habit is quite shitty and i read slow as fuck when i am trying to understand everything. It gets to the point when i overthink basic things but it is probably OCD related.

>>17671682
That word probably should have been known to you. It's not an uncommon word even by middle school standards.

>>17671682
Admittedly that first section of Gravity's Rainbow is pretty difficult to understand even for native English speakers (me). This goes for any ESL trying to read GR in english: there are plenty of free resources online that describe a lot of the novel almost sentence by sentence, explaining word meaning, references, adn plot. I don't remember the resource that I used since it was a while ago, but if you just google "Gravity's Rainbow guide" you should be able to find any number of good resources.

>>17672221
He's talking about it contextually. I'm sure he knows what the words in that sentence mean individually, but the syntax of the sentence combined with the figurative language make the sentence a bit hard to parse, especially for an ESL. For instance, the sentence begins with a preposition and then a noun, but the noun is neither a subject nor a direct object, it is an object of preposition and it is placed at the beginning of a sentence, which is not the most common place. Next is a verb and another object and this is probably where the difficulty lies. There is no subject, only an object. This is what can make it difficult for an ESL: is "him" the subject or the girders? are neither objects? Then there is the simile at the end, which isn't hugely difficult to understand, but for an ESL what is an Iron Queen? what is an Iron Queen in a literal sense to a native speaker? It's a strange (yet effective) metaphor but is hard to understand, especially in the context.

>>17672288
I am an ESL too, but unless you are a complete novice in reading, that sentence shouldn't trouble you; besides the iron queen reference, which is neither a syntactical nor vocab issue. I think anon is pointing to the word 'girders' in his post, not to a contextual issue.

>>17672221
>>17672288
>>17672385
It had to do with me not understanding what lift girders means. Is it pic related? Is there some sort of lift that "girders" above him? Is a lift girder an actual construction machine?
One of you said that there's a verb in there so I guess it's the second option.