The Reading Room

« first day (3375 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (1573 days later) »

bobble

01:30

@PrinceNorthLæraðr, tags needing wikis: rose-under-fire elizabeth-wein

9 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

10:17

@Tsundoku I've been focusing more on questions than answers in recent months. You and Gareth are usually better answerers than me anyway :-)

Rabindranath Tagore is now our most successful topic challenge ever in terms of number of question askers, with 6 different OPs so far (compared with 5 in the first-ever topic challenge and previous record holder).

Bookworm

Q: What is the original source of Rabindranath Tagore's "Endless Time"?

There is a poem "Endless Time" by Rabindranath Tagore as follows, which I interpret as being about a mortal human speaking to God, someone living a rushed human life and comparing it to God's timeless existence, someone who wishes to pass through the heavenly "gate" at the end of their life: Tim...

Rand al'Thor

The poem "This Dog" on AllPoetry.com is given in two languages, English and (supposedly) Hindi. Putting the "Hindi" version into Google Translate, it auto-recognises the text as Bengali. I thought that Tagore wrote in Bengali and not Hindi. Are there any Bengali/Hindi speakers around who can confirm? (Or would this too make a good question for the site?)

@Bookworm Originally this was going to be an interpretation question, but I figured out the meaning of the poem myself in the course of writing the question.

@Tsundoku Funnily enough, on Puzzling the only person to surpass me in number of answers is the Other Gareth.

Tsundoku

@Randal'Thor "the Other Gareth" :-)

@Randal'Thor I get contradictory result in online language identifiers. whatlanguageisthis.com says the poem is in Bishnupriya Manipuri. translatedlabs.com/language-identifier says its Hindi.

3 hours later…

Bookworm

13:11

Q: What's exactly meant by "“saving” on Nemesis" in The Just Men of Cordova?

In chapter 12 of The Just Men of Cordova (1917) by Edgar Wallace, the author was describing the situation of two horses, Nemesis and Timpolino, in the betting on horse racing: The previous day, on the opening of the racing season, his stable had run a horse in a selling plate, and it was encoura...

edgar-wallace

b_jonas

14:08

@Randal'Thor Two Gareths? Yeah, I shouldn't be surprised about this anymore.

@Randal'Thor It's written in the Bengali alphabet, so it shouldn't be Hindi. But I'm not a Bengali/Hindi speaker, I'm a European.

Hint: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Language_recognition_chart can help in recognizing language from written text, though it's not perfect; omniglot.com can help too.

6 hours later…

Bookworm

20:14

Q: How can I get better at remembering the subject in lengthy, complicated passages (poems or otherwise)?

I struggle, especially in poetry and older English books, with comprehension and I think one of the biggest problems is that I lose track of the subject that is in view during long passages that distract from the subject before returning to it. As an example, in the poem "The Raven" (1780) by Wil...