Oh hey, it looks like babelmatrix probably got some legal threats about hosting a lot of copyrighted text snippets, and now has a warning that they'll control new submissions more strictly. They may have even removed some things. I think I bulk downloaded them at just the right time.
And it's a yellow image bullet before the name that means a Nobel prize.
In DFW "This Is Water" Commencement Speech there is a story used a as a metaphor about a fish asking another fish "what the hell is water".
I had the impression this story was something I had heard before, and DFW was there only using or slightly modifying a popular joke to illustrate his point....
Sándor Márai may be good for a topic challenge. Several of his novels have been translated into English. Of course, these translated are not in the public domain.
@Randal'Thor What you predicted has happened - it took only 11 days.
@IkWeetHetOokNiet I was thinking of Magda Szabó, who seems culturally significant and much translated. But again the same problem with her stuff not being in the public domain.
Magda Szabó
Magda Szabó was a Hungarian author who wrote novels, poetry, essays, short stories, etc. Her works have been translated into many languages, many of them into English. These include:
The Door (Az ajtó), a 1987 story about the complex relationship between a woman (who may be modelle...
We've been misreading the title of a famous novel by Albert Camus: it's not "La Peste" but "Rien de plus qu'une petite grippe" ("Nothing more than a little flu").
@IkWeetHetOokNiet Random question, but what's a good short form of your username? One can talk about "Rand" and "Gareth" and "Mith" and "Matt", but should we remember the full name IkWeetHetOokNiet or is something like "Ik Weet" OK for referring to you? (I assume you don't want the first name of your old username to be used any more.)
@Randal'Thor Hmm, let me think about that. Since "ik weet het ook niet" is Dutch for "I don't know it either", shortening the name to "ik weet" ("I know") would assume too much ;-)
Or I could change my name again. Do you find Tsundoku easy enough to remember?
The first line of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Satan in Goray goes:
In the year 1648, the wicked Ukrainian hetman, Bogdan Chmelnicki, and his followers besieged the city of Zamosć but could not take it, because it was strongly fortified; the rebelling haidamak peasants moved on to spread havoc in ...
Wow, that was a quick three upvotes. Looks like we're heading for another HNQ.
And maybe a more expert answer. There's a whole Ukrainian Language SE, which probably has a lot of people who know a lot more about Ukrainian history.
(And hopefully not a debate in the comments about whether the haidamaks were heroic rebels against their oppressors or evil genocidalists against Catholics and Jews.)
@Tsundoku Can you explain when it's appropriate to use the sumerian-literature or akkadian-literature tags for Gilgamesh questions? I don't get it, so I'm probably continuing to make mistakes. And I've already half forgotten what the different versions are. Wasn't there a Sumerian version and a Babylonian version? Was Babylonian not a language?
I'd thought the "original", or at least oldest known, version of the story was in a language called Sumerian, hence the sumerian-language tag (as it might be presumed the other versions are translations). Is that not correct?
It's based on the language those works were written in. The Standard Babylonian version and the Old Babylonian version require the tag akkadian-literature, since Babylonian was the variety of Akkadian used in Souther Mesopotamia. (...)
The five/six older Gilgamesh texts were in Sumerian.
Some passages exists both in Sumerian and in Babylonian, e.g. about the Bull of Heaven, so both tags can be relevant there.
So if a question is about materials only found in the Standard Babylonian version, the tag sumerian-literature makes no sense.
If the older texts were in Sumerian, and later ones in Akkadian, isn't it reasonable to suppose that Sumerian was the "original" and Akkadian versions were "translations"? Or not? Or are the versions different enough that they really deserve separate tags, not like translations of a single story?
The Akkadian texts go way beyond translation, since they combine the stories into an integrated whole, add new material and add a unifying theme that did not exist in the Sumerian texts.
I was confused because I'd thought the two main versions of the Epic were the "Sumerian version" and "Babylonian version", but looking again at the Wikipedia page now it lists the "Old Babylonian version" and "Standard Babylonian version". (Now I'm wondering if one of my older questions even makes sense ...)
Well, regardless of whether our Gilgamesh topic challenge was a success in terms of Q&A posted in that month, it's certainly been a success in getting us a Gilgamesh expert.
You've learned all this Gilgamesh stuff in the last few months, right? Or had you already studied it before this site's topic challenge?
No, everything I read about Gilgamesh is a result of that challenge. And I'm not done reading yet.
So, now the Wikipedia article consistently says "Standard Babylonian version" instead of "standard version".
To continue the discussion about the tags: the decision that Enkidu must die only occurs in the Babylonian text, not in the Sumerian ones (unless a new fragment suddenly appears).
English is not my native language, and I'm really interested in literature but finding it hard to go through(Shakespeare for example), we didn't take English literature classes at school unfortunately... so..
-Where do you think I should start ? Is there some learning pathways that i should be familiar with ?
-What skills you think i need to develop in reading comprehension besides being familiar with each word's meaning ?
-Any suggestions of (authors/books) I should start with ?
-Some Terminology to look for regarding literature?
Magda Szabó
Magda Szabó was a Hungarian author who wrote novels, poetry, essays, short stories, etc. Her works have been translated into many languages, many of them into English. These include:
The Door (Az ajtó), a 1987 story about the complex relationship between a woman (who may be modelle...
The first line of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Satan in Goray goes:
In the year 1648, the wicked Ukrainian hetman, Bogdan Chmelnicki, and his followers besieged the city of Zamosć but could not take it, because it was strongly fortified; the rebelling haidamak peasants moved on to spread havoc in ...
