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/lit/ - Literature

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21753156 No.21753156 [Reply] [Original]

We are having a thread on Kazantzakos.

>> No.21753167

>>21753156
Should I read this in the original to assist in learning modern Greek

>> No.21753176

>>21753167
I don’t know Greek, but I have heard Kazantzakos used a lot of idioms and a more modern/natural sounding dialect rather than more lofty/ancient dialogue
So, probably. The answer is a resounding “probably” from me

>> No.21753423

>>21753167
>modern Greek
You’re better off learning Turkish or German. Modern Greek is on the way of the dodo.

>> No.21753430

>>21753156
he was a communist

>> No.21753432

>>21753156
BASED.
I support you and your endeavours op

>> No.21753435

>>21753156
You're going through your mid 20s mystical phase.

Ah the good old days

>> No.21753463

>>21753435
>everyone is me

>> No.21753481

>>21753463
You don't get it, mid 20s is very romantic. I love this dark mysticism bordering on blasphemy filled with demiurgic intensity, contemplation, tears, despair, suicide, deserts, existential angst, rotten flowers and death phase.

You're truly alive.

>> No.21753504

This goes really fucking well with jewish miserabilism

>shestov
>michelstaedter
>weil

Add
>Cioran
>Artuad
>Trakl

>> No.21753508

>>21753156
>hackazantzakis

>> No.21753524

is it just the translation or was the prose boring compared to some of his other work? bien's zorba translation felt energetic and the vasils translations i read were good but last temptation seemed to fall flat.

>> No.21753527

>>21753504
You’re a fucking retard.
>Weil
>Jewish miserablism
>miserablism
She was raised agnostic then discovered catholicism. There’s nothing Jewish about her work.
Also
>Artaud
>Trakl
More writers you clearly have not read

>> No.21753559

I now remember having a mental breakdown while reading Saviors of God and writing an extremely blasphemous poem that night as I believed in how struggle, conflict and evil is itself an expansion of God and a good thing

>> No.21753571

>>21753527
Shut up! You don't know what you're talking about.

>Jewish Miserabilism
fuck the demiurge, fuck the archons, fuck this entire vampiric world order enshrined as "necessity", "progress", or "natural law", the only truth is suffering and the truth you find in suffering. everything else is recreational language games played by urbanites

Trakl drank the silence of God. Artuad was a blasphemous dark mystic.

>> No.21753591

>>21753571
Retard.

>> No.21753594

>>21753591
Stop being rude for no reason.

>> No.21753601

>>21753571
>the only truth is suffering and the truth you find in suffering

Do you think this is something Kazantzakis tried to speak of? It sounds like a conclusion I could make based on Saviours of God, but not one I could make after reading Zorba. In Zorba it is more like, as I read it, forget all truth, forget everything, just live, drink, be merry, like Ecclesiastes (who also, along with many other people in the bible, I believe, drank the silence of God, as you put it).

If we are speaking of the silence of God, then can we even speak of truth or suffering? Just like how in Eden the fruit on the tree of good and evil was a single fruit where good and evil co-mingled without prejudice or favour, I believe God would also lovingly create anything and everything. God creates lies as equally and as lovingly as truth, I would say.

>> No.21753618

>>21753601
you're too rational and logical to step into the graveyard of eden where only currency is tears.

>> No.21753627

>>21753618
Most pseudo-intellectual retard on this board today. Stop taking retarded platitudes from academic articles on Trakl

>> No.21753654

>>21753627
>The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It’s not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.

Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints

I'll pray with a dagger for thy innocent soul.

>> No.21753677

>>21753618
I wish you would expand a little more because you haven't given much for me to engage with.
You are anti-rational? Anti-logic? In a sense, I absolutely agree with that. I could even see myself saying Sophism is the true philosophy of man (hey, I just did) and that rationality is best used as a system for navigating to your desired answer/state/belief (because, after all, language is just a game in the body of God, and the spirit of God is love, creation, playfulness, expansion imo and cause and effect fall to the wayside with the power of imagination). If you agreed with me on this though, that rationality is nothing but a tool, another illusion in the game of life, I do wonder why you would be using it to rationalise yourself into states of misery when the opposite state of joy could be as easily reached. Zorba would have no time for being morose, he would be too busy eating, dancing, or chasing a woman.
And what about Eden are you saying? Why is it a graveyard? Why is the currency there tears and what exactly are they purchasing with them? In the biblical story I don't remember there being any tears or any death before the fall.

>> No.21753688

>>21753677
He’s a pseud who is trying to write like Trakl and Cioran. He is in his 2nd year of Uni and just discovered these writers, so now his entire personality is trying to be like them

>> No.21753733

>>21753688
>so now his entire personality is trying to be like them

I did something similar for much of my own life, I think, especially when I was a teen and in my early twenties. I looked to starving artists and people who instilled suffering with a sort of grandiosity that made them seem noble, special, and I suppose I saw that as a way for me to grab onto some dignity and purpose in my life by reframing my bad situation and my mental habits in a similar way, as something noble and special, rare and difficult.
I learned about myself by living that way, and I don't regret anything, but certainly there are more pleasant ways to grow up if you can somehow just really understand the danger of identifying with certain archetypes or cultural memes. I read somewhere before that you take on the fate of the archetype you identify with, and when you think of all the wannabe rockstars who kill themselves with drugs before they ever hit 30 you can see one of the extreme ways that people manifest their destinies via their beliefs and who or what they identify with.

As far as archetypes, role models, and heroes go, I think Zorba is probably a fine one. Live every moment, eat and drink deeply, dance, don't think too much, jump on every opportunity that presents itself and never say no to life, and never let a beautiful woman go home alone.

>> No.21753755

>>21753430
He was a redbrown actually.

>> No.21753859

>>21753755
>>21753430
his relationship with communism was weird. he became pretty disillusioned with a strong state-run communism after seeing the soviet union and hanging out with soviet exiles. he also disliked communism's materialist focus. he kind of pushed for some kind of undefined "communism that also takes care of peoples spiritual needs" while also supporting the soviet union as a cleansing force like the visigoths.

>> No.21753937

>>21753677
Our pockets are filled with rotten grapes of melancholy to give a rationality a chance. All happiness shall tremble under the quietism of wounded feet. Only minions of demiurge are happy. Anyone who hasn't died young deserves death.

>“All saints are sick, but luckily not all sick people are saints. Thus for the saints the end of suffering is the loss of grace. Sickness brings grace, for it nourishes otherworldly passions. Through sickness we understand the saints, and through them, the heavens. Sickness is not ultimate knowledge for everybody. For ordinary mortals, it is only a mediated knowledge.
>Blue skies make us sadder than gray skies because they offer us hopes which we do not have the courage to entertain. Whereas a gray sky is a tomb without alternative. Blue is a soothing color for melancholy; it is neutral towards divinity. When God’s call breaks through the azure, we would rather have heavy black clouds. They allow us the freedom of feeling abandoned without hope. Couldn’t we live without a sky?”

Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints

>“Rose of Lima, born in South America apparently to redeem Pizarro’s crimes, is a model for all those with a vocation for suffering. Young and beautiful, she could not think of an excuse to resist her mother’s wish to bring her out in society. But she finally found a compromise. Under the crown of flowers on her head she pinned a needle that pricked her forehead incessantly. Thus she satisfied her desire to be alone in society. One conquers the temptation of the world through pain. Pascal’s belt belongs to this tradition of suffering.
For whom did Rose of Lima put a needle in her crown? The heavenly lover made a new victim. Jesus was the Don Juan of agony.
>Saintliness is the negation of life through heavenly hysteria. How does one negate life? Through uninterrupted lucidity. Hence the saints’ almost total suppression of sleep. Rose of Lima never slept more than two hours a night, and when she felt that sleep was overpowering her, she would hang herself on a cross in her room, or force herself to stand by tying her hair to a nail.
>Saintliness is a special kind of madness. While the madness of mortals “exhausts itself in useless and fantastic actions, holy madness is a conscious effort towards winning everything.”

Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints

>> No.21753943

>>21753937
>Our pockets are filled with rotten grapes of melancholy to give a rationality a chance. All happiness shall tremble under the quietism of wounded feet. Only minions of demiurge are happy.
Stop writing like a pretentious undergrad, you utter imbecile.

>> No.21754018

>>21753943
Stench of rotten grapes was dined to your nostrils. Truly a pathetic invalid and not worthy of graceful suffering.

>> No.21754274

>>21753423
They're better off learning Ancient Greek for that matter

>> No.21754306

>>21753423
I‘m mostly able to read in German and will pick up Greek as my third language once I am able to refine my German by practice without deliberate effort.

>>21754274
I want to learn Modern Greek as a pathway to Ancient Greek

>> No.21754444

>>21754306
Just go straight to Ancient Greek. You’ll thank me later once you learn they’re not mutually intelligible.

>> No.21754507

>>21753167
If you wants.

>> No.21755966

>>21754306
Greek here. I kinda understand a little bit of Plato without modern Greek translation but I am certain the average Greek won’t understand jack shit, especially someone that isn’t a Greek at all. Learn Ancient Greek straight. Spoken modern Greek is unironically a dead language which we bastardised by changing it in 1976 to Demotic Greek (Δημοτική) from Katharevousa (Καθαρεύουσα). All our great writers of the 20th century wrote on Katharevousa or a Demotic-Katharevousa mix which the new generations of Greeks have harder time (though not impossible or very hard for that matter) to understand. Also apart from 4 or 5 poets and novelists we don’t really have any meaningful contributions to lit related things (or anything in general in reality, thanks ottomans). Just learn Ancient Greek.