Yeah sometimes the stacks posted in these threads feel like hoarders buying shit without the least bit of criteria but so far that generally hasn't been true of the ones posted ITT.
It’s usually charity shop book hauls, my fiend does something similar, just buys any old shit he vaguely recognises as ‘good.’ I’d argue about stacks in this thread, they do seem like my friend. Most people are moronic.
I do sympathize with that to an extent, when someone goes out of their way to go to these stores it sucks to go home empty handed so you end up picking up whatever you find that seems interesting, but some of the shit people here pick up sometimes is just plain hoarder behavior.
How do you know that? Did you read both the original and the translations?
Are you Jon Fosse by any chance?
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
I read both, yes. And the prose translates well. He has a very unique style.
You do not read Norwegian, and you cannot comment on an author’s prose through translation, translation destroys nuances of prose, rhythms and the way words look on the page, the way letters are bunched together, the signs and symbols, semiotics, the auditory and visual delicacies are mutilated - you do not look for good prose in works of translation, that’s reading 101. You can parrot whatever the nobel committee said but you can’t fool me
Jeg leser og skriver helt fint norsk. Det er morsmålet mitt.
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
Ja, jeg kan bruke Google translate også.
Kys
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
hadde jeg brukt Google translate så hadde jeg vel gjort det på nynorsk som er det Jon Fosse skriver i. selv om du ikke har peiling betyr ikke det at andre ikke har det.
Man I fricking hate people like you, going into Waterstones and buying what the Nobel prize people told you was good, snd telling your friend about your Waterstones trip and about Jon fosse and how good his prose is, fricking pseud
His prose is great. And it is obvious for anyone who read a translation that it is not anything ordinary about his style and even a english translator is somewhat forced into this unique poetic short sentence style of his.
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
See
[...]
Look at you you fricking gay, how much did that stupid giant glossy book cost? That’s like £20 here, easy, and you don’t have a fricking clue what you’re doing, just taking photos of a book on a bench in the dirt patch all on your lonesome, “la di da I fell in love with his prose” and telling us he won the Nobel prize, yes don’t forget to mention that, you must be 19, please throw away that doorstop and pick up a physical sport
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
[...]
Look at you you fricking gay, how much did that stupid giant glossy book cost? That’s like £20 here, easy, and you don’t have a fricking clue what you’re doing, just taking photos of a book on a bench in the dirt patch all on your lonesome, “la di da I fell in love with his prose” and telling us he won the Nobel prize, yes don’t forget to mention that, you must be 19, please throw away that doorstop and pick up a physical sport
Ah actually I’ve just seen the guardian quote in Norwegian, so maybe u do speak Norwegian, in which case I apologise
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
I do speak Norwegian. I knew about Jon Fosse before. He has had the "artist house" in the Royal Castle gardens for like a decade. but I never read him until he won the Nobel prize. I kinda regret not reading him before. He does have a reputation of being this dense serious postmodernist writer. so I never imagined he would be as enjoyable to read as he is. but it is really something different and even the English translations I have read manage to keep the sentences and style to a great degree. There are a lot of poetic layers that are lost for example his latest book is translated as "a shining" but in his native nynorsk it is "kvitleik" which means "whiteness" but also "white play" (play as in games) which is kinda beautiful because it is about a guy who gets his car stuck in the forest and start walking into the forest for help and it starts snowing and he starts experiencing these weird and wonderful spiritual experiences. so it fits and it was probably on purpose because he could have used other words
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
Translation destroys prose is all I’m saying, it’s not a debate
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
Man I fricking hate people like you, going into Waterstones and buying what the Nobel prize people told you was good, snd telling your friend about your Waterstones trip and about Jon fosse and how good his prose is, fricking pseud
You do not read Norwegian, and you cannot comment on an author’s prose through translation, translation destroys nuances of prose, rhythms and the way words look on the page, the way letters are bunched together, the signs and symbols, semiotics, the auditory and visual delicacies are mutilated - you do not look for good prose in works of translation, that’s reading 101. You can parrot whatever the nobel committee said but you can’t fool me
Yes, but the style also translates and you get a good view of it in translations as well.
Look at you you fricking gay, how much did that stupid giant glossy book cost? That’s like £20 here, easy, and you don’t have a fricking clue what you’re doing, just taking photos of a book on a bench in the dirt patch all on your lonesome, “la di da I fell in love with his prose” and telling us he won the Nobel prize, yes don’t forget to mention that, you must be 19, please throw away that doorstop and pick up a physical sport
His writing is great. You shouldn't feel so intellectually intimidated it really isn't some dense writing. it is enjoyable and good. actually the style makes it easier to read I think.
Again, moron, I’m not commenting on his style in Norwegian, I’m talking about translation
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
Translation destroys prose is all I’m saying, it’s not a debate
I will still insist that the translations I seen carries over his style.
It would take a tremendous effort to rewrite the story without the style. would need to change the point of view probably and why would anyone do it. I read also english translations of the same book because I wanted to show a friend who don't speak Norwegian and I feel that the translation does get his style across quite well. Norwegian isn't that far from English. And I assume Jon Fosse knows english quite well like is normal here and he probably okeyed it. I mean, the English translations usually are released at the same time as the Norwegian in his latest works. If all we had was the English i would still say it had great prose.
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
Ur not getting it moron
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
As an outside observer you’re being pedantic.
Some characteristics of style are observable even through translation. For example Proust favors long sentences. Hemingway favors shorter sentences. Both of the these characteristics would be obvious as they’re translated to English/French.
Now of course other aspects are not easily translatable or at the very least fall on the quality of the translator to attempt.
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
Jesus Christ long vs short sentences big whoop
We’re talking about prose, you dumb gay
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
Anon, if you're worried about the lack of perfect fidelity between original and translated prose, just WAIT until you hear about language and immediate internal experience !!! Uh-oh!
Also >muh how the letters look >nooooo you have to use the author's original chosen font or the prose will be RUINED!!
2 weeks ago
Anonymous
>you're being pedantic >can I join in?
If you knew what you were talking about you would have given a meaningful example.
I didn’t know LoA released a collection of D’J Pancake’s stuff. The cover looks almost as comfy as my old Henry Holt Owl edition.
They put it out a few years back, part of theirs special publications (someone gave them enough money to publish something which is not quite in line with their selection process) so it is not the same quality as their standard books but still better than most paperbacks and only $12 so a great deal. Believe these special editions are exempt from the never going out of print deal of the normal editions as well. Also has letters, notes and some stuff about the two novels he was planing. Enjoying it so far, he is really good at developing the setting, gives an amazing view of time and place.
£20 is pocket change for Norwegians, keep coping you neet embarrassment. The next time you're crying about "tfw Houellebecq's latest novel has been out for years, why isn't it translated to English?" remember this: we have it in Norwegian
I got:
Strunk & White's Elements of Style
the Art of Fiction by John Gardner
and three other books written by anons >get home >package on doorstep had only been there a couple hours >the tape on both sides, not the top, looks ripped open so that it was easy to open already >all of the books are still there
Why? Nobody wanted to steal these books? Guess nobody reads after all.
No pics because half of them haven't arrived yet but my recent acquistiions are:
Miss Macintosh My Darling-Young
Khatyn-Ales Adamovich
A Mountain to the North, A Lake to the South-Laszlo Krasznahorkai
I like Akutagawa but haven't read Kappa. It's one of the works by him I want to check out most the premise reminds me of something like Kafka, or Gogol with the asylum setting.
Inverted World is one of the worst books I have read, might even be the worst. Only redeeming quality is the general premise regarding the city which goes completely unexploited and is just a minor plot detail.
No pics because half of them haven't arrived yet but my recent acquistiions are:
Miss Macintosh My Darling-Young
Khatyn-Ales Adamovich
A Mountain to the North, A Lake to the South-Laszlo Krasznahorkai
I like Akutagawa but haven't read Kappa. It's one of the works by him I want to check out most the premise reminds me of something like Kafka, or Gogol with the asylum setting.
>Miss Macintosh My Darling-Young
Thats right, got to order that, thanks for the reminder.
I’m just a little leery of Pynchon trade paperbacks: I went into a big chain bookstore one days a few years ago and randomly flipped through a Harper Perennial copy of V. and found half a dozen spelling and typesetting errors.
Went up to Edinburgh last weekend and picked these up from a very nice little bookshop. Especially nice for me since the only used bookshop that is any good near where I live is a fricking Oxfam.
Only two I've read from your stack are the Faulkner and Auster books. The Faulkner is very good, I find myself thinking about it often but I should get around to rereading it soon. The four sections offer such vastly different interpretations of the same wanting, the same mourning-longing, that I can't imagine what Faulkner must've gone through when writing it. The Auster was pretty disappointing: from what I remember, all the stories/novellas start off very promising but then devolve into simplistic, cartoonish denouements: as if Auster got bored or wrote himself into a corner and had to hastily bring his plot back up to something tolerably human but thematically unsatisfying. But you may think different. Please post your opinion here if/when you read the New York trilogy because I'm interested in others' opinion of Auster.
>as if Auster got bored or wrote himself into a corner and had to hastily bring his plot back up to something tolerably human but thematically unsatisfying.
It is built around the metafiction, even the plot is understood through the meta. His execution is meticulous and nothing is done hastily, which is one of the few good things I can say about Auster. Not my sort of reading but I ultimately enjoyed it and learned a great deal about metafiction.
Makes sense, I've never appreciated Barth's later stuff, always seemed to me to be too much of the "Hey, look, this is fiction. See?" kind of writing that I detest. One of the worst culprits was a novel about a tennis match between a painter and a poet where the author inserted an email from his agent (I don't know if it was real or just done up for the page) where she sounded excited for this new book. Not that I'm entirely against this kind of fiction, like Borges or Pynchon, or Onetti and even some of the English and French classics that constantly allude to the artificial nature of the fiction, hell Shakespeare does it a handful of times. It's just this feeling, like at the end of Weill's and Brecht's Die Dreigroschenoper where the main character is about to be executed and then addresses the audience and tells them it's all make believe, he can do whatever he likes.
I will say I was enjoying them before that feeling hit me, maybe I was enjoying the metafiction (the gumshoe template, the constant allusions to the New England/Transcendental authors, the Beckettian situations in the first two books and the Hawthorne/Poe theme running through the third) before I became bored with the artificiality and was hoping he'd break free from it.
I have to admit I was reading the trilogy at a time when I was trying to write a detective/mystery, so maybe I was dissatisfied with Auster's books because I thought I would have done things differently.
Looks comf as frick!
I didn’t know LoA released a collection of D’J Pancake’s stuff. The cover looks almost as comfy as my old Henry Holt Owl edition.
You guys will simply read any drivel whatsoever at this point.
Yeah sometimes the stacks posted in these threads feel like hoarders buying shit without the least bit of criteria but so far that generally hasn't been true of the ones posted ITT.
It’s usually charity shop book hauls, my fiend does something similar, just buys any old shit he vaguely recognises as ‘good.’ I’d argue about stacks in this thread, they do seem like my friend. Most people are moronic.
I do sympathize with that to an extent, when someone goes out of their way to go to these stores it sucks to go home empty handed so you end up picking up whatever you find that seems interesting, but some of the shit people here pick up sometimes is just plain hoarder behavior.
read a bunch of Jon Fosse after he won the Nobel Prize in literature and fell in love with his prose. Then I bought his magnum opus.
How the frick would you know about his prose? Do you read Norwegian?
Yes, but the style also translates and you get a good view of it in translations as well.
How do you know that? Did you read both the original and the translations?
Are you Jon Fosse by any chance?
I read both, yes. And the prose translates well. He has a very unique style.
Jeg leser og skriver helt fint norsk. Det er morsmålet mitt.
Ja, jeg kan bruke Google translate også.
Kys
hadde jeg brukt Google translate så hadde jeg vel gjort det på nynorsk som er det Jon Fosse skriver i. selv om du ikke har peiling betyr ikke det at andre ikke har det.
His prose is great. And it is obvious for anyone who read a translation that it is not anything ordinary about his style and even a english translator is somewhat forced into this unique poetic short sentence style of his.
See
Ah actually I’ve just seen the guardian quote in Norwegian, so maybe u do speak Norwegian, in which case I apologise
I do speak Norwegian. I knew about Jon Fosse before. He has had the "artist house" in the Royal Castle gardens for like a decade. but I never read him until he won the Nobel prize. I kinda regret not reading him before. He does have a reputation of being this dense serious postmodernist writer. so I never imagined he would be as enjoyable to read as he is. but it is really something different and even the English translations I have read manage to keep the sentences and style to a great degree. There are a lot of poetic layers that are lost for example his latest book is translated as "a shining" but in his native nynorsk it is "kvitleik" which means "whiteness" but also "white play" (play as in games) which is kinda beautiful because it is about a guy who gets his car stuck in the forest and start walking into the forest for help and it starts snowing and he starts experiencing these weird and wonderful spiritual experiences. so it fits and it was probably on purpose because he could have used other words
Translation destroys prose is all I’m saying, it’s not a debate
Man I fricking hate people like you, going into Waterstones and buying what the Nobel prize people told you was good, snd telling your friend about your Waterstones trip and about Jon fosse and how good his prose is, fricking pseud
You do not read Norwegian, and you cannot comment on an author’s prose through translation, translation destroys nuances of prose, rhythms and the way words look on the page, the way letters are bunched together, the signs and symbols, semiotics, the auditory and visual delicacies are mutilated - you do not look for good prose in works of translation, that’s reading 101. You can parrot whatever the nobel committee said but you can’t fool me
Look at you you fricking gay, how much did that stupid giant glossy book cost? That’s like £20 here, easy, and you don’t have a fricking clue what you’re doing, just taking photos of a book on a bench in the dirt patch all on your lonesome, “la di da I fell in love with his prose” and telling us he won the Nobel prize, yes don’t forget to mention that, you must be 19, please throw away that doorstop and pick up a physical sport
His writing is great. You shouldn't feel so intellectually intimidated it really isn't some dense writing. it is enjoyable and good. actually the style makes it easier to read I think.
Again, moron, I’m not commenting on his style in Norwegian, I’m talking about translation
I will still insist that the translations I seen carries over his style.
It would take a tremendous effort to rewrite the story without the style. would need to change the point of view probably and why would anyone do it. I read also english translations of the same book because I wanted to show a friend who don't speak Norwegian and I feel that the translation does get his style across quite well. Norwegian isn't that far from English. And I assume Jon Fosse knows english quite well like is normal here and he probably okeyed it. I mean, the English translations usually are released at the same time as the Norwegian in his latest works. If all we had was the English i would still say it had great prose.
Ur not getting it moron
As an outside observer you’re being pedantic.
Some characteristics of style are observable even through translation. For example Proust favors long sentences. Hemingway favors shorter sentences. Both of the these characteristics would be obvious as they’re translated to English/French.
Now of course other aspects are not easily translatable or at the very least fall on the quality of the translator to attempt.
Jesus Christ long vs short sentences big whoop
We’re talking about prose, you dumb gay
Anon, if you're worried about the lack of perfect fidelity between original and translated prose, just WAIT until you hear about language and immediate internal experience !!! Uh-oh!
Also
>muh how the letters look
>nooooo you have to use the author's original chosen font or the prose will be RUINED!!
>you're being pedantic
>can I join in?
If you knew what you were talking about you would have given a meaningful example.
They put it out a few years back, part of theirs special publications (someone gave them enough money to publish something which is not quite in line with their selection process) so it is not the same quality as their standard books but still better than most paperbacks and only $12 so a great deal. Believe these special editions are exempt from the never going out of print deal of the normal editions as well. Also has letters, notes and some stuff about the two novels he was planing. Enjoying it so far, he is really good at developing the setting, gives an amazing view of time and place.
£20 is pocket change for Norwegians, keep coping you neet embarrassment. The next time you're crying about "tfw Houellebecq's latest novel has been out for years, why isn't it translated to English?" remember this: we have it in Norwegian
Based Burnside purchaser. His poetry is even better
So depressing
Papillon is dumb, but also my favorite book.
I’m a kindle reader but here ya go
I'm a Kindle reader too but you're a homosexual.
We don’t sign our posts here
I got:
Strunk & White's Elements of Style
the Art of Fiction by John Gardner
and three other books written by anons
>get home
>package on doorstep had only been there a couple hours
>the tape on both sides, not the top, looks ripped open so that it was easy to open already
>all of the books are still there
Why? Nobody wanted to steal these books? Guess nobody reads after all.
Yesterday's haul.
Well, I bought The Idiot by Dostoevsky. The Garnett translation. I don't feel like taking a picture though.
I am waiting on two more related books but I will begin this one today.
I got these the other day.
What happened in 1992?
Was it the year he was raped?
>What happened in 1992?
>Was it the year he was raped?
That's not Nash
The cute girl working the counter at Barnes and Noble said it was good. What am I in for?
No pics because half of them haven't arrived yet but my recent acquistiions are:
Miss Macintosh My Darling-Young
Khatyn-Ales Adamovich
A Mountain to the North, A Lake to the South-Laszlo Krasznahorkai
I like Akutagawa but haven't read Kappa. It's one of the works by him I want to check out most the premise reminds me of something like Kafka, or Gogol with the asylum setting.
Read it last night. It was my first Akutagawa. Very on the nose cultural satire—α bit like Voltaire.
>on the nose
Hah, I see what you did there.
Inverted World is one of the worst books I have read, might even be the worst. Only redeeming quality is the general premise regarding the city which goes completely unexploited and is just a minor plot detail.
>Miss Macintosh My Darling-Young
Thats right, got to order that, thanks for the reminder.
guess I'll have to judge it for myself. Most seem to say it's a masterpiece.
wish me luck.
Did they ever correct that printing error?
Only the first printing had that error, been fixed for ages.
I’m just a little leery of Pynchon trade paperbacks: I went into a big chain bookstore one days a few years ago and randomly flipped through a Harper Perennial copy of V. and found half a dozen spelling and typesetting errors.
Not super recent but a question
>make $1200 or bleed into it for hidden gnosis
Went up to Edinburgh last weekend and picked these up from a very nice little bookshop. Especially nice for me since the only used bookshop that is any good near where I live is a fricking Oxfam.
Only two I've read from your stack are the Faulkner and Auster books. The Faulkner is very good, I find myself thinking about it often but I should get around to rereading it soon. The four sections offer such vastly different interpretations of the same wanting, the same mourning-longing, that I can't imagine what Faulkner must've gone through when writing it. The Auster was pretty disappointing: from what I remember, all the stories/novellas start off very promising but then devolve into simplistic, cartoonish denouements: as if Auster got bored or wrote himself into a corner and had to hastily bring his plot back up to something tolerably human but thematically unsatisfying. But you may think different. Please post your opinion here if/when you read the New York trilogy because I'm interested in others' opinion of Auster.
>as if Auster got bored or wrote himself into a corner and had to hastily bring his plot back up to something tolerably human but thematically unsatisfying.
It is built around the metafiction, even the plot is understood through the meta. His execution is meticulous and nothing is done hastily, which is one of the few good things I can say about Auster. Not my sort of reading but I ultimately enjoyed it and learned a great deal about metafiction.
Makes sense, I've never appreciated Barth's later stuff, always seemed to me to be too much of the "Hey, look, this is fiction. See?" kind of writing that I detest. One of the worst culprits was a novel about a tennis match between a painter and a poet where the author inserted an email from his agent (I don't know if it was real or just done up for the page) where she sounded excited for this new book. Not that I'm entirely against this kind of fiction, like Borges or Pynchon, or Onetti and even some of the English and French classics that constantly allude to the artificial nature of the fiction, hell Shakespeare does it a handful of times. It's just this feeling, like at the end of Weill's and Brecht's Die Dreigroschenoper where the main character is about to be executed and then addresses the audience and tells them it's all make believe, he can do whatever he likes.
I will say I was enjoying them before that feeling hit me, maybe I was enjoying the metafiction (the gumshoe template, the constant allusions to the New England/Transcendental authors, the Beckettian situations in the first two books and the Hawthorne/Poe theme running through the third) before I became bored with the artificiality and was hoping he'd break free from it.
I have to admit I was reading the trilogy at a time when I was trying to write a detective/mystery, so maybe I was dissatisfied with Auster's books because I thought I would have done things differently.
I hope Siddhartha is good, self discovery of religion and philosophy and changing of the superego are all what I like most in books.