>"Henry James writes with a very sharp nib and the ink is very pale and there is very little of it in his inkpot . . . The style is artistic but it is not the style of an artist . . . Henry James is definitely for non-smokers. He has charm (as the weak blond prose of Turgenev has), but that’s about all (...) I have read (or rather reread) 'What Maisie Knew.' It is terrible. Perhaps there is some other Henry James and I am continuously hitting upon the wrong one? (...) Henry James is a pale porpoise."
>I do not think that anybody has yet done full justice to his genius as an international critic of manners, esthetic values and morals. The strength of that impartial intelligence of which his hesitating and teasing ambiguity sometimes represented a weakness had prompted him to find his bearings among social gravitational fields which must at the time have seemed almost as bewildering as the astronomical ones with which the physics of relatively were just beginning to deal. It had fortified him to meet and weather the indifference or ridicule of both the two English-speaking peoples to whom he had addressed himself and whose historian he has trained himself to be; and it had stimulated him, through more than half a hundred books, a long life of unwearying labor, to keep recreating himself as an artist and even to break new ground at seventy.
—Edmund Wilson
>I have visited some literatures of the East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic anthology of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James.
—Jorge Luis Borges
>James’s critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it ... In England ideas run wild and pasture on the emotions; instead of thinking with our feelings (a very different thing) we corrupt our feelings with ideas; we produce the political, the emotional idea, evading sensation and thought. George Meredith (the disciple of Carlyle) was fertile in ideas; his epigrams are a facile substitute for observation and inference. Mr. Chesterton’s brain swarms with ideas; I see no evidence that it thinks. James in his novels is like the best French critics in maintaining a point of view, a view-point untouched by the parasite idea. He is the most intelligent man of his generation.
—T. S. Eliot
>He is as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare in the history of poetry.
—Graham Greene
>I am tired of hearing pettiness talked about Henry James's style ... I have heard no word of the major James, of the hater of tyranny; book after early book against oppression, the domination of modern life ... The outbursts in The Tragic Muse, the whole of The Turn of the Screw, human liberty, personal liberty, the rights of the individual against all sorts of intangible bondage! The passion of it, the continual passion of it in this man who, fools said, didn't 'feel'. I have never yet found a man of emotion against whom idiots didn't raise this cry.
—Ezra Pound
McCarthy is--was--a hack.
All that bluster just for Edmund Wilson to be a James acolyte in the end. Sad!
No, your comment is cringe. The thread is based. Frick Henry James and frick you, too.
Ok, prove that anon wrong, demonstrate you are not an NPC.
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
I formed my own opinion. Then I found out some writers, like Cormac McCarthy, agreed with my view. Not the other way around.
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
But you need to rely on appeals to authority to express that opinion? That is literal NPC. You don't even appeal to authorities who demonstrate having read James, just simple inflammatory remarks.
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
>But you need to rely on appeals to authority to express that opinion?
No, I have said this before on IQfy. Just felt like making this thread. >That is literal NPC
There's more praise than negative criticism for James. Liking him is the standard npc view, if anything.
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
>No, I have said this before on IQfy. Just felt like making this thread.
Saying you dislike is still NPC. Go ahead and prove you are lit. > Liking him is the standard NPC view, if anything.
Right, appeals to authority regarding things you either know nothing about or are too stupid to express.
As many men of taste, Ezra simply enjoyed the works of the Master. It is not accidental that the best secondary work on Ezra Pound - as well as the greatest piece of literary criticism of the 20th century - opens discussing Henry James.
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
After reading the Cantos, and the many mistakes he makes in the languages he supposedly knew, I stopped taking Ezra Pound seriously. His praise of James just signals the interior mediocrity of his mind and taste.
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
Pound's (mis)translations have a particular ideogrammatic intent, which he picked up partly from Ernest Fenollosa. (Cf: https://www.pileface.com/sollers/IMG/pdf/The_Chinese_Written_Character_As_A_Medium_For_Poetry_Ernest_Fenollosa-Ezra_Pound_.pdf)
Here is some recent scholarship on the issue: >Graphological translation can be considered an intersemiotic translation of graphology that operates independently of the lexical semantics of the source text, i.e. as a kind of translation that treats its source graphs as essentially non-glottographic. Graphological translation as used by Pound, then, is an argument for translation as an aesthetic form, an argument of fidelity to image, reminiscent of Oulipian translation, or the translation methods used by concrete poets with their focus on the non-linguistic elements of the grapheme. Harry Mathews wrote of the topic of the former that it is a mode of translation that does not concern itself with nominal sense, but rather the form of written language: ‘What has been translated, however, is not the text’s nominal sense but other of its components; and we may call these components “forms”, taking “form” simply to mean a material element of written language that can be isolated and manipulated’ (Mathews 1999, 99). For Pound, this ‘form’ can simply be understood as the graphological semantics of the logograph, or, in other words, the form may contain its own sense either independent of or diverging from the linguistic meaning. Further, Pound’s graphological translations can be seen as a reflection of his own particular understanding of grammatology: the prioritising of visual semantics in writing. The Naxi examples highlighted in this essay allow us perhaps the clearest view of this belief and are an under-discussed way of directly tracing the visual etymology of Pound’s translations. But this is a kind of translation he nevertheless employed more widely, particularly in his later translations out of Chinese, and that no doubt reflexively influenced his original English compositions. The principle of direct treatment of the ‘thing’ was an early imagist tenet that he never abandoned (Pound 1968, 3); a philosophy of writing that can also be understood as a philosophy of translation. When it comes to semantically charged written graphs, Pound’s graphological translation operates as a rebuttal of a phonocentric hierarchy by showing how writing can be more than just a simulacrum of speech.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13556509.2023.2188697
Nevertheless, it can certainly be a turn-off regardless of intent. I would not say this alone makes a man's mind mediocre however.
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
>I would not say this alone makes a man's mind mediocre however.
I would say it does. And I wasn't only thinking about Chinese. He's bitten off more than he can chew. Ambition without nothing to back it up.
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
>Ambition without nothing to back it up.
You mean like the appeals to authority you made?
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
Ironic that you say that since the reason we're even talking about Pound in an unrelated thread is because a jamesgay brought him up as an appeal to authority lol
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
That would only be ironic if I was jamesgay which I am not and you don't seem to think I am or if I supported the view of jamesgay which I didn't. You seem dim.
Explain what you think James is terrible.
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
I know you unironically referred to him by his flamboyant nickname "the master" (lol) or at least you're on the same side as a moron who did. My contempt for James will be formally put on the some day but as of now I have only bits that will be part of a larger critique. I won't waste my arguments on this shithole, thoughbeit.
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
put on the page*
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
I've never read James, I just want people to stop being morons and actually talk about James.
>Let me say at once that I regard the works of Mr. Henry James as those most worthy of attention by the critics—most worthy of attention of all the work that is to-day pouring from the groaning presses of continents. In saying this I conceal for the moment my private opinion—which doesn’t in the least matter to anyone, though it is an opinion that can hardly be called anything but mature—that Mr. James is the greatest of living writers and in consequence, for me, the greatest of living men. >There is very little in short to be said about pure genius. It is just a thing that is. And there is nothing left for us, who are in the end but the stuff with which to fill graveyards, to say more than that marvellous are the ways of Providence that gives to a few so much and to the vast many nothing at all. But there remains a second —by no means secondary—order of great people into whose work it is possible, and very profitable, minutely to enquire. For, if you can’t say much about Moltke you can discover pretty easily, and descant for long upon, the strategy of Marlborough; if you can’t say much about Shakespeare you might write several books about the craftsmanship of Goethe; if Johannes Sebastian Bach defies the pen as far as his peculiar magic is concerned, the pen can find endless objects for its activity in the music drama of Richard Wagner; or, if you can’t find out how Turgenieff did any single blessed thing you could write a volume about the wording of one paragraph by Flaubert. To this latter category belong the works of Mr. Henry James. >He has in short written, in English, books that are worthy to be read by readers of the great Continental writers. As far as his phraseology goes (and le style c’est l’homme) he has expressed his race. And for a man to have attained to international rank with phrases intimately national, is the supreme achievement of writers—a glory that is reserved only for the Dantes, the Goethes and the Shakespeares, who none the less remain supremely national.
—Ford Madox Ford
"Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty"
----Oscar Wilde
>"Despite the scruples and delicate complexities of James, his work suffers from a major defect: the absence of life."
---Jorge Luis Borges
>"Please tell me what you find in Henry James. ... we have his works here, and I read, and I can't find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar and pale as Walter Lamb. Is there really any sense in it?"
----Virginia Woolf
>I read a collection of Henry James' short stories—miserable stuff, a complete fake, you ought to debunk that pale porpoise and his plush vulgarities some day
---Vladimir Nabokov
>Henry James? That's not literature.
---Cormac McCarthy
>E.M. Forster complained about what he saw as James's squeamishness in the treatment of sex and other possibly controversial material, and dismissed his late style as difficult and obscure, relying heavily on extremely long sentences and excessively latinate language.
Oh boy! Another thread where we demonstrate our inability to form and support our own opinions on books we never read! I love IQfy so much, it is so useful to have a place to practice adulting, I can't wait to be an NPC! Best lifehack ever.
>bait
Ezra Pound's "mistranslations" of classical Chinese are still its most - if not only - readable iterations in English. Cathay is a masterpiece. It's a matter of professional credibility that is being discussed, not quality.
>Lazy appeal to authority? That's not bait.
>Seething cope? That's not an argument.
>Strawman argument? That's not unmoronic.
Literature:
>Homer
Slop:
>everything else
Damn right
I’m reading The Golden Bowl right now. He’s wrong.
>"Henry James writes with a very sharp nib and the ink is very pale and there is very little of it in his inkpot . . . The style is artistic but it is not the style of an artist . . . Henry James is definitely for non-smokers. He has charm (as the weak blond prose of Turgenev has), but that’s about all (...) I have read (or rather reread) 'What Maisie Knew.' It is terrible. Perhaps there is some other Henry James and I am continuously hitting upon the wrong one? (...) Henry James is a pale porpoise."
>I do not think that anybody has yet done full justice to his genius as an international critic of manners, esthetic values and morals. The strength of that impartial intelligence of which his hesitating and teasing ambiguity sometimes represented a weakness had prompted him to find his bearings among social gravitational fields which must at the time have seemed almost as bewildering as the astronomical ones with which the physics of relatively were just beginning to deal. It had fortified him to meet and weather the indifference or ridicule of both the two English-speaking peoples to whom he had addressed himself and whose historian he has trained himself to be; and it had stimulated him, through more than half a hundred books, a long life of unwearying labor, to keep recreating himself as an artist and even to break new ground at seventy.
—Edmund Wilson
>I have visited some literatures of the East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic anthology of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James.
—Jorge Luis Borges
>James’s critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it ... In England ideas run wild and pasture on the emotions; instead of thinking with our feelings (a very different thing) we corrupt our feelings with ideas; we produce the political, the emotional idea, evading sensation and thought. George Meredith (the disciple of Carlyle) was fertile in ideas; his epigrams are a facile substitute for observation and inference. Mr. Chesterton’s brain swarms with ideas; I see no evidence that it thinks. James in his novels is like the best French critics in maintaining a point of view, a view-point untouched by the parasite idea. He is the most intelligent man of his generation.
—T. S. Eliot
>He is as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare in the history of poetry.
—Graham Greene
>I am tired of hearing pettiness talked about Henry James's style ... I have heard no word of the major James, of the hater of tyranny; book after early book against oppression, the domination of modern life ... The outbursts in The Tragic Muse, the whole of The Turn of the Screw, human liberty, personal liberty, the rights of the individual against all sorts of intangible bondage! The passion of it, the continual passion of it in this man who, fools said, didn't 'feel'. I have never yet found a man of emotion against whom idiots didn't raise this cry.
—Ezra Pound
McCarthy is--was--a hack.
All that bluster just for Edmund Wilson to be a James acolyte in the end. Sad!
Now we know why you bumped it, you felt left out of the cringe and needed time to find some quotes.
>Fregoli delusion
Many such cases.
>samegay
Many such cases.
You're wrong.
>missed the subtext
Ok, prove that anon wrong, demonstrate you are not an NPC.
I formed my own opinion. Then I found out some writers, like Cormac McCarthy, agreed with my view. Not the other way around.
But you need to rely on appeals to authority to express that opinion? That is literal NPC. You don't even appeal to authorities who demonstrate having read James, just simple inflammatory remarks.
>But you need to rely on appeals to authority to express that opinion?
No, I have said this before on IQfy. Just felt like making this thread.
>That is literal NPC
There's more praise than negative criticism for James. Liking him is the standard npc view, if anything.
>No, I have said this before on IQfy. Just felt like making this thread.
Saying you dislike is still NPC. Go ahead and prove you are lit.
> Liking him is the standard NPC view, if anything.
Right, appeals to authority regarding things you either know nothing about or are too stupid to express.
Damn, I didn't know Ezra Pound was such a homosexual. I mistakenly thought he was based.
As many men of taste, Ezra simply enjoyed the works of the Master. It is not accidental that the best secondary work on Ezra Pound - as well as the greatest piece of literary criticism of the 20th century - opens discussing Henry James.
After reading the Cantos, and the many mistakes he makes in the languages he supposedly knew, I stopped taking Ezra Pound seriously. His praise of James just signals the interior mediocrity of his mind and taste.
Pound's (mis)translations have a particular ideogrammatic intent, which he picked up partly from Ernest Fenollosa. (Cf: https://www.pileface.com/sollers/IMG/pdf/The_Chinese_Written_Character_As_A_Medium_For_Poetry_Ernest_Fenollosa-Ezra_Pound_.pdf)
Here is some recent scholarship on the issue:
>Graphological translation can be considered an intersemiotic translation of graphology that operates independently of the lexical semantics of the source text, i.e. as a kind of translation that treats its source graphs as essentially non-glottographic. Graphological translation as used by Pound, then, is an argument for translation as an aesthetic form, an argument of fidelity to image, reminiscent of Oulipian translation, or the translation methods used by concrete poets with their focus on the non-linguistic elements of the grapheme. Harry Mathews wrote of the topic of the former that it is a mode of translation that does not concern itself with nominal sense, but rather the form of written language: ‘What has been translated, however, is not the text’s nominal sense but other of its components; and we may call these components “forms”, taking “form” simply to mean a material element of written language that can be isolated and manipulated’ (Mathews 1999, 99). For Pound, this ‘form’ can simply be understood as the graphological semantics of the logograph, or, in other words, the form may contain its own sense either independent of or diverging from the linguistic meaning. Further, Pound’s graphological translations can be seen as a reflection of his own particular understanding of grammatology: the prioritising of visual semantics in writing. The Naxi examples highlighted in this essay allow us perhaps the clearest view of this belief and are an under-discussed way of directly tracing the visual etymology of Pound’s translations. But this is a kind of translation he nevertheless employed more widely, particularly in his later translations out of Chinese, and that no doubt reflexively influenced his original English compositions. The principle of direct treatment of the ‘thing’ was an early imagist tenet that he never abandoned (Pound 1968, 3); a philosophy of writing that can also be understood as a philosophy of translation. When it comes to semantically charged written graphs, Pound’s graphological translation operates as a rebuttal of a phonocentric hierarchy by showing how writing can be more than just a simulacrum of speech.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13556509.2023.2188697
Nevertheless, it can certainly be a turn-off regardless of intent. I would not say this alone makes a man's mind mediocre however.
>I would not say this alone makes a man's mind mediocre however.
I would say it does. And I wasn't only thinking about Chinese. He's bitten off more than he can chew. Ambition without nothing to back it up.
>Ambition without nothing to back it up.
You mean like the appeals to authority you made?
Ironic that you say that since the reason we're even talking about Pound in an unrelated thread is because a jamesgay brought him up as an appeal to authority lol
That would only be ironic if I was jamesgay which I am not and you don't seem to think I am or if I supported the view of jamesgay which I didn't. You seem dim.
Explain what you think James is terrible.
I know you unironically referred to him by his flamboyant nickname "the master" (lol) or at least you're on the same side as a moron who did. My contempt for James will be formally put on the some day but as of now I have only bits that will be part of a larger critique. I won't waste my arguments on this shithole, thoughbeit.
put on the page*
I've never read James, I just want people to stop being morons and actually talk about James.
>Let me say at once that I regard the works of Mr. Henry James as those most worthy of attention by the critics—most worthy of attention of all the work that is to-day pouring from the groaning presses of continents. In saying this I conceal for the moment my private opinion—which doesn’t in the least matter to anyone, though it is an opinion that can hardly be called anything but mature—that Mr. James is the greatest of living writers and in consequence, for me, the greatest of living men.
>There is very little in short to be said about pure genius. It is just a thing that is. And there is nothing left for us, who are in the end but the stuff with which to fill graveyards, to say more than that marvellous are the ways of Providence that gives to a few so much and to the vast many nothing at all. But there remains a second —by no means secondary—order of great people into whose work it is possible, and very profitable, minutely to enquire. For, if you can’t say much about Moltke you can discover pretty easily, and descant for long upon, the strategy of Marlborough; if you can’t say much about Shakespeare you might write several books about the craftsmanship of Goethe; if Johannes Sebastian Bach defies the pen as far as his peculiar magic is concerned, the pen can find endless objects for its activity in the music drama of Richard Wagner; or, if you can’t find out how Turgenieff did any single blessed thing you could write a volume about the wording of one paragraph by Flaubert. To this latter category belong the works of Mr. Henry James.
>He has in short written, in English, books that are worthy to be read by readers of the great Continental writers. As far as his phraseology goes (and le style c’est l’homme) he has expressed his race. And for a man to have attained to international rank with phrases intimately national, is the supreme achievement of writers—a glory that is reserved only for the Dantes, the Goethes and the Shakespeares, who none the less remain supremely national.
—Ford Madox Ford
"Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty"
----Oscar Wilde
>"Despite the scruples and delicate complexities of James, his work suffers from a major defect: the absence of life."
---Jorge Luis Borges
>"Please tell me what you find in Henry James. ... we have his works here, and I read, and I can't find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar and pale as Walter Lamb. Is there really any sense in it?"
----Virginia Woolf
>I read a collection of Henry James' short stories—miserable stuff, a complete fake, you ought to debunk that pale porpoise and his plush vulgarities some day
---Vladimir Nabokov
>Henry James? That's not literature.
---Cormac McCarthy
>E.M. Forster complained about what he saw as James's squeamishness in the treatment of sex and other possibly controversial material, and dismissed his late style as difficult and obscure, relying heavily on extremely long sentences and excessively latinate language.
Both Woolf and Borges were deep admirers of James. This kind of quote grabbing is a really useless way of thinking about literature.
Shut up, nerd.
Lawrence Durrell: "Would you rather read Henry James or be crushed to death by a great weight?"
r
T. S. Eliot: "He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it."
Marilyn "Clover" Adams: "It's not that he 'bites off more than he can chew' but he chews more than he bites off."
H. L. Mencken: "An idiot, and a Boston idiot to boot, than which there is nothing lower in the world."
And finally, Mark Twain said he would rather "be damned to John Bunyan's heaven" than read Henry James's novel The Bostonians.
Oh boy! Another thread where we demonstrate our inability to form and support our own opinions on books we never read! I love IQfy so much, it is so useful to have a place to practice adulting, I can't wait to be an NPC! Best lifehack ever.
cringe
Yes this thread is cringe. Why did you bump it?
No, your comment is cringe. The thread is based. Frick Henry James and frick you, too.
>It's meant to suck!
lol oldest cope in the book
>bait
Ezra Pound's "mistranslations" of classical Chinese are still its most - if not only - readable iterations in English. Cathay is a masterpiece. It's a matter of professional credibility that is being discussed, not quality.