The Reading Room

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user185131

9:32 AM

@Tsundoku Would it be good to add the ken-liu tag to this question of yours?

user185131

Q: What narrative techniques and literary devices in The Three-Body Problem required or justified adjustment in the English translation?

In a postscript to the English translation of Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem, Ken Liu drew attention to his approach to the translation work. Ken Liu writes that "differences in linguistic structure and cultural references, are actually easy to resolve". In some cases, he used footnotes for t...

Knight

11:38 AM

Three-body problem? Are we doing physics here? Pulleys and strings or three electrically charged bodies?

Bookworm

11:49 AM

Q: Is there any evidence that Lope de Vega and William Shakespeare influenced each other?

During the Spanish Golden Age of the arts, one of the key figures in Spanish literature was Lope de Vega, a prolific author of plays, poetry, and novels. He was approximately contemporary with William Shakespeare (Vega 1562-1635, Shakespeare 1564-1616), and in some alternate-history fiction they ...

william-shakespeare spanish-literature lope-de-vega

2 hours later…

user185131

1:30 PM

@Knight It's a fantastic book; if you've not read it, yet I highly recommend it :)

user185131

And yes, the title of the book does refer to Euler's three-body problem.

Tsundoku

2:15 PM

@Brahadeesh Good point. Done.

@Knight It's the first part of a three-volume novel that I really enjoyed reading, even though I had completely ignored science fiction before 2018.

Tsundoku

2:33 PM

@Brahadeesh Sometimes a "list" turns out to be a singleton; see one of my earlier questions: Tudor or Jacobean plays that are sequels to a Shakespeare play?. Note that this is scoped in time (Tudor or Jacobean), so the list would be very short.

user185131

@Tsundoku True. Do you suppose that's the case here, though?

Bookworm

Q: What authors/poets try to convey when they use antitheses or things similar to it?

As myself an admirer of T.S.Eliott and Joseph Conrad, my experience with antitheses is enough to drive me to grope for their actual intended meaning. When authors write Shape without form, shade without color Was this the answer thrown at him like an insult that thing made of wood and iron, in...

t-s-eliot joseph-conrad

user185131

It would be worth reopening if that does turn out to be the case, but I have to admit I have no idea which way that "list" question will fall.

Tsundoku

@Brahadeesh There is no effort there to scope the question to a specific literature and time period, so the answer is no.

user185131

Ah, I missed the point of your earlier message then.

Rand al'Thor

2:53 PM

@Randal'Thor , Knight. If the question is about these specific authors, the question needs to be split into separate questions about specific passages. If it is about literary devices, the tags t-s-eliot and joseph-conrad need to be replaced with something like terary-device; in that case, it would be wise to shift the focus of the question to methods of analysis rather than authorial intent. — Tsundoku ♦ 6 mins ago

@Tsundoku I assume that's a typo and you're not proposing to create a new tag here ;-)

2 hours later…

Bookworm

5:03 PM

Q: Sources for claims about the identity of Kitty, the addressee of Anne Frank's diary entries

Anne Frank addressed her diary entries to Kitty and there has been much conjecture whether this name referred to a real person or was inspired by one. The English Wikipedia article about The Diary of Young Girl contains the followinng sequence of unsourced statements about the identity of Kitty: ...

dutch-literature anne-frank

3 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

7:56 PM

Nice first post, and a new user who uses feedback to improve their answer.

Tsundoku

8:27 PM

@Bookworm This question about Lope de Vega and Shakespeare became HNQ 45 minutes ago.

That's two Shakespeare questions in a row, if I'm not mistaken, and both by Rand al'Thor.

@Randal'Thor Yes, and much better than the other answer.

Rand al'Thor

Easy for Shakespeare questions to go HNQ when they tend to get good answers quickly, those answers usually being from a certain active moderator ;-)

Tsundoku

Getting answers quickly definitely helps. And having a small Shakespeare library now that access to real libraries is not what it used to be.

BTW, I'm still working on an answer about the possible source(s) of inspiration for the statue scene in The Winter's Tale. So far I have found two literary works and one historic event.

Bookworm

9:09 PM

Q: Trying to identify the source of a Roman short story about a senator and a slave

A few days ago I remembered a short story that I was thought in high-school, and I'm trying to find from what book it comes from. The story goes something like this: A roman senator was at a dinner party, he was bored of the people there because he thought that no one matched his intellectual sta...

story-identification short-stories author-identification

Bookworm

9:58 PM

Q: What does it mean when Faulkner says: “The will of man to prevail“?

I am reading Faulkner in the University (edited by Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner. University of Virginia Press, 1995) and some parts are ambiguous for me. I was wondering what does he mean when he says: “The will of man to prevail“ or in general what does the italic part mean? Note: I...