It is frustrating, not being able to read these great authors in their native tongue. Particularly someone like Flaubert, where the style is supposedly so much the point.
Not that I think this should stop anyone reading them in translation. So much of style IS "content", after all.
I thought that at first but now I take more pleasure in that kind of simple precision than I used to... I went the same route with others, can't think of many off the top of my head bu Graham Greene is one.It's just serviceable, imo. It reads like an instruction manual which is fine for the stuff he writes.
Was there any particular reason for Beckett writing a bunch of his novels in French?
Why did Beckett, an Irishman, choose to write in French and why, after achieving considerable success in that language, did he insist time and again on returning his work to the language of his homeland? Beckett himself provided a string of reflections on the issue. In a 1937 letter to his friend Axel Kaun, he explained,
It is becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothing-ness) behind it. Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask…Is there any reason why that terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved?
Here Beckett expresses a desire to rid himself of the baggage of traditional English. Only by divesting himself of the “irrelevancies” of grammar and style, he thought, could he approach something like the truth beneath the “mask.” Since Beckett held such excessiveness and irrelevance of language to be endemic to English, he began experimenting with French, a language in which he claimed, “It is easier to write without style…[French] had the right weakening effect.”
"[Tolstoy] was bedridden due to illness," Chekhov told Gnedich, . "Among other things, he spoke about me and my works. Finally, when I was about to say goodbye he took my hand and said, 'Kiss me goodbye.' While I bent over him and he was kissing me, he whispered in my ear in a still energetic, old man's voice, 'You know, I hate your plays. Shakespeare was a bad writer, and I consider your plays even worse than his.'"
Surly analogous to John Lennon (I think it was) saying that when he got too comfortable on an instrument he would move on to a different one and thus, I guess, avoid clichés in his playing.re: Conrad - "English wasn’t even his second language – his French was better – but he claimed to enjoy the “plastic” freedoms of his adopted tongue."
Girlfriend read Junky recently which reminded me how good that is, though very different from Naked Lunch etc it's like a anthropological report into heroin scene. I've read that before but my gf said that herself too.merci! have noted it down.
i have never read any burroughs, what should i start with? i think i read kerouacs "on the road" in high school and hated it at the time, maybe that's why i never tried burroughs.
Imagine having to read Shakespeare in German or whatever. No doubt there are brilliant translations but you could never really replicate that, perhaps only a German genius of the order of Shakespeare could do it.
Which reminds me - never, under any circumstances, read "Wilhelm Meister" by Goethe. Or at least, don't read it in English. It's ted-i-ous.