/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.8657429]

ITT: untranslatable prose from your native language

>pic absolutely related

[Anonymous No.8657448]

[Anonymous No.8657454]

>>8657448
You don't happen to be a native speaker of Coptic do you?

[Anonymous No.8657474]

>>8657448
What are you talking about? This totally readable. It's about a guys who swims in a river, finds a snake, puts the snake in a bowl, then a bird eats it. This bird becomes his new pet, the guy starts wearing eyeliner, and rearranging his bowls. the end.

[Anonymous No.8657488]

This nigga's prose is so musical holy fuck

>>8657448
That's very funny but you don't speak ancient egyptian and hieroglyphs have been decoded two centuries ago.

[Anonymous No.8657495]

José Lezama Lima y Daniel Sada.

[Anonymous No.8657714]

This based man

[Anonymous No.8657739]

[Anonymous No.8657745]

>>8657488
matoš legenda

[Anonymous No.8657777]

>>8657448
What's your excuse to not learn Coptic, /lit/?

[Anonymous No.8657798]

kotzmoluchovitzch
names from dead souls by gogol

[Anonymous No.8657819]

The one and only

[Anonymous No.8657840]

>>8657777
nice digits, fellow memester

[Anonymous No.8657882]

>>8657429
Heidegger is basically not translatable while carrying even close to all the connotations he intends his texts to.

His philosophy is basically based on puns.

[Anonymous No.8657885]

Berlin Alexanderplatz
The Notebooks of Malte Laurid Brigge

[Anonymous No.8657891]

>>8657882
>His philosophy is basically based on puns.

b2r

[Anonymous No.8657906]

I dislike the idea of 'untranslatability'. It feels pretentious as fuck, I mean, don't you basically claim that your special snowflake language is capable of capturing emotional/intellectual aspects of human life other languages simply aren't able to?
Ask any competent linguist, and they'll tell you that such notion is nonsense.

[Anonymous No.8657932]

>>8657906
Your existance is nonsense. Never ever post on 4chan again.

[Anonymous No.8657934]

>>8657448
>the smiley face

[Anonymous No.8657939]

>>8657777
Czhecked

[Anonymous No.8657963]

Finnegan's wake

[Anonymous No.8657973]

>>8657840
Thanks m8. I'll keep up my hard work.

[Anonymous No.8658022]

>>8657714

[Anonymous No.8658227]

>>8657906
Don't be stupid, you know what op meant.
>don't you basically claim that your special snowflake language is capable of capturing emotional/intellectual aspects of human life other languages simply aren't able to?
No. These untranslatable writers are such because they exploit the cultural and linguistic specifics of their own language as much as possible. Those specifics simply don't have equivalents in other languages, thus the books are untranslatable (not literally, of course - there are translations of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in existence). This can be done in any language if the writer is talented enough, so it simply has nothing to do with being a special snowflake.

[Anonymous No.8658352]

>>8658227
>cultural and linguistic specifics
If that's your angle, it has nothing to do with language, and everything to do with culture and nationalism. Hence, the question OP should've asked is
>untranslatable prose from your native land

[Anonymous No.8658364]

>>8657963
but it's already most every language

[Anonymous No.8658454]

>>8658352
>it has nothing to do with language
Yes it does because we are talking about books and their translations. Language is pretty fucking important here. A syntax that is unusual in one language (and chosen by the writer because of that, for example) may not be unusual in some other language, and so the translator will have to look for a different way of conveying the original effect, if that's possible at all. Same shit happens to verse - Shakespeare's iambs are impossible to reproduce in my language, so the translators use trochees.
>everything to do with culture
Well, yes, language and culture are heavily connected. The culture forms the language, and it certainly affects literature, both through the language and by other means (writer's mentality, themes etc)
>and nationalism
Is understanding and using elements of local culture and language in art nationalistic now or what?

[Anonymous No.8660149]

Volter Kilpi - Alastalon salissa (In the Parlour at Alastalo)

>Alastalon salissa (In the Parlour at Alastalo) (1933) is a landmark Finnish novel by Volter Kilpi. The two-volume, 800-page story covers a period of only six hours, written in a stream-of-consciousness style similar to James Joyce's Ulysses.

The central narrative of Alastalon salissa describes a meeting of a group of wealthy men from Kustavi, Western Finland, who are trying to decide whether to invest in a shipbuilding venture proposed by one of their number, Herman Mattson. The novel's length stems from numerous digressions, internal monologues and a detailed accounting of each character's thought processes. In one famous scene, a character's journey to the mantelpiece to fetch a pipe is told in over seventy pages.

It has not been translated into English.

[Anonymous No.8660158]

>>8657429
You can't translate prose or poetry.

You can translate the plot and that's it.

[Anonymous No.8660161]

>>8660158
B8

[Anonymous No.8660175]

Don Quijote de la Mancha.
Not kidding. You can't appreciate the extent of its greatness in English, for example. There are too many words, expressions and implications that aren' t translatable.
Also, probably the Tristram Shandy -the other way around this time: I read it in Spanish, and without hundreds of annotations I wouldntve been able to appreciate it completely. And even with them.

I sound pretentious as fuck, my apologies for that.

[Anonymous No.8660233]

>>8657906
Broadly I agree, it's an overused meme with not much basis. However, as the poster below notes, prosody is literally untranslatable. I study and speak Persian (Farsi) and it is literally impossible to capture a lot of Persian poetry in English because the poem itself is the marrying of semantic meaning and artfully constructed form, particularly with something like Persian, as its classical poetry makes an absolute fetish of form.

>>8658454

[Anonymous No.8660239]

Céline. Yup, Céline.