Style thread

[Anonymous No.22151961]

I know Nietzsche is a very controversial figure, but I think we can all agree that he nails something usually overlooked in writing, tempo.
He clearly knows this, he praises his style repeatedly, and he knows that style is the first thing that seduces, so he cultivated his style just as he was developing his philosophy.
For example, he says in Ecce Homo that he was going for a roman style in Zarathustra. I've read that work in English, Spanish and German and for me it sounds better in the first two (IIRC he lamented to not have written it in french), which makes sense since the first two draw so much influence from Latin.
Now, going for the Roman style makes sense, since they didn't care about rhyme and were all about rythm, tempo. In Twilight of the Idols, he called romans (I think it was either Horace or Sallust) his greatest influences in style besides Schoppy and I think Heine as well.
I haven't read those last two, but please, give me some other great stylists, I don't mind if they don't have Nietzsche's style. Recs are welcomed, doesn't matter if it's not philosophy.

[Anonymous No.22152056]

>>22151961
Read Plato, Montaigne, Joyce, Thomas Browne.

[Anonymous No.22152465]

>>22152056
Plato's content is great but I don't think he cares that much about his style besides the convenience of the dialogue type. Then again, I don't know Greek, it might sound better in his original language.
As for the rest, thank for the recs.
I've been thinking in diving into Montaigne for a while... I'll buy the essays right away, let's see what I'm in for.

[Anonymous No.22152469]

>>22151961
Soren is the king of style

[Anonymous No.22152482]

Can a good style survives a translation? It's just a question that makes me wonder.

Anyway here are some writers I think have great style:
- Frei Luís de Souza
- Manuel Bernardes
- Fernão Lopes
- Euclides da Cunha
- Machado de Assis
- Antônio Vieira

[Anonymous No.22152873]

>>22151961
Now, nothing more perverse can be imagined, than the adoption by German writers of that attribute which makes the French such brilliant virtuosi on the ground of speech. The attempt to treat the German language as an instrument of virtuosity could only occur to those to whom the German tongue is truly alien, and who therefore twist it to improper uses. None of our great poets and sages can be rated as virtuosi of speech: every one of them was in the same position as Luther, who had to ransack every German dialect for his translation of the Bible, to find the word and turn to popularly express that New he had discovered in the sacred books' original text. For what distinguishes the German spirit from that of every other culture-folk is this, that its creative sons had first seen something ne'er yet uttered, before they fell a-writing,—which for them was but a necessary consequence of the prior inspiration. Thus each of our great poets and thinkers had to form his language for himself; an obligation to which the inventive Greeks themselves do not appear to have been submitted, since they had at command a language always spoken by the living mouth, and therefore pliant to each thought or feeling, but not an element corrupted by bad pensters. In a poem from Italy how Goethe bewailed his being doomed by birth to wield the German tongue, in which he must first invent for himself what the Italians and French, for instance, found ready to their hand. That under such hardships none but truly original minds have risen to production among ourselves, should teach us what we are, and at any rate that there is something peculiar about us Germans. But that knowledge will also teach us, that if virtuosity in any branch of art is the evidence of talent, this Talent is denied in toto to the Germans, at least in the branch of Literature: who toils to acquire a virtuosity in this, will stay a bungler; if, following the musical virtuoso who composes pieces of his own, he trumps up poetical sketches for setting off his fancied virtuosity, however, they will not even belong to the category of the Mediocre, but simply of the Bad, the wholly null.

[Anonymous No.22153236]

>>22152469
makes him a bit hard to read honestly but I got the gist of "Fear And Trembling"

[Anonymous No.22153917]

I would recommend Ludwig Klages‘ short speech Mensch und Erde (Man and Earth), rhetorically very impressive but it may make you develope a burning hatred against Abrahamic religions and/or become a climate activist.

[Anonymous No.22154700]

Bump