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01:31
Not sure how to write the wiki excerpt for . will do my best, though
@bobble They're all done. Just waiting in the review queue
01:54
So close to 300 edits!
 
5 hours later…
06:35
@EddieKal Is ELL's "literature" tag used consistently? (I ask because ELU has some literature-related tags but also many literature questions without those tags.) If so, it could be great to feed in here :-)
@PrinceNorthLæraðr IMO, the tag should be (and so far it has been) for questions specifically related to anonymity, rather than for any question about a book that was first published anonymously.
@Tsundoku Congratulations on breaking triple digits in bronze badges!
06:52
@Randal'Thor I am trying to make it more consistent
 
1 hour later…
08:17
0
Q: The implication of "burned the station brand into our walking sticks"?

crucify fickle crankAn excerpt from ACt test (No origin of the passage given): Every thousand feet, we came to a small station constructed of tin and cement, barely able to block the wind. At each one, we noted the roof piled high with fallen rocks and felt both unsettled and reassured by this evidence of the stati...

 
2 hours later…
10:13
@bobble David Lodge's first novel, Ginger, You're Barmy, uses fugg as a curse word. The novel's setting is the military, and soldiers of course curse a lot, so fugg appears quite frequently. I believe Lodge was worried about censorship. After he became an established and successful author, he did mention somewhere that he regretted his squeamishness. All of this is a memory from eons back when I read the novel (~35 years ago?) so I'm afraid I can't get more specific.
@verbose Congrats on 4k reputation and new Trusted User privileges!
@Randal'Thor Thanks! As usual, you're just too sweet. Sorry I reached the 4000 mark bonus before you could award me that bonus on the messenger of death question 🙂
10:30
Eh, no problem. At least I set the bounty before you reached the threshold - good thing I did it this morning without waiting :-)
You've made plenty of really good answers, so I wanted to seize the opportunity before you passed into the high-rep realm.
I actually don't know the deets. What's the threshold for high-rep? 4000? And is it the case that high-rep users are ineligible for boni?
Not at all, anyone can be awarded a bounty. It's just my personal rule on this particular site, trying to use bounties to help lower-rep users and swell the ranks of privileged users.
4000 is the highest moderation-related privilege on beta sites - there's an extra one at 5000, but it's not very interesting.
With 4000 you can vote to delete answers, and vote to delete questions more easily, so it's good to have more 4k+ users who can contribute to cleanup where necessary.
Ah, I see. Thanks. As for "plenty of good answers", well, I was working on the big election and it's all over but the shouting, so I have time on my hands now. 🙃 I also just got lucky that the topic challenge was Tagore. I grew up speaking Bengali (albeit as a third or fourth language), plus Tagore is out of copyright, so that makes poking around the interwebs to find the requested answers much easier. Not that I needed to poke around to recognize the language of "This Dog" 🐶😜
Yeah, thanks to you it looks like Tagore is going to be one of the most successful topic challenges in terms of answers. (We've had a few topic challenges where people were interested enough to read the stuff and ask questions about it but nobody had the time/expertise to answer them.)
I should be able to get through the rest of the Tagore questions too. It just takes me a while to write out the answers. I don't know how you, @GarethRees, and @Tsundoku can so consistently write long, detailed, scholarly answers at such a pace. Like, it took me about two hours just to write out the answer the Scalia question, even though I knew the answer the minute I read it.
It's happened more than once (particularly on Shakespeare questions) that I begin writing out my answer, then as I'm halfway through, I notice that Gareth or Christophe have already posted what I was gonna say, and have said it better than I could've. Wish I were more efficient.
ah well, bedtime 😴 gnite, ladies!
10:49
I type fast, but most of my answers aren't on par with yours, Tsundoku's, or especially Gareth's, in terms of detail and quality.
Oh I type fast. It's not the typing speed that's at issue. It's the actual composing of the answer.
And you're being modest about the quality of your answers.
The problem with Shakespeare is that we have almost too many experts able to write good answers there. At least for topics with just one site expert (like Tsundoku on Gilgamesh or you on Tagore), they can take their time to write up answers without having to worry about competition.
@verbose I've noticed some of your Tagore answers seem to be based more on your own knowledge than on online research. I guess that makes it harder to compile that knowledge into an answer? For me, I often go researching a question and end up with multiple tabs open, and maybe it's easier to compile info from an organised list of tabs than from the complex space of a brain :-)
I'd not call myself a Tagore expert. Just happen to have some useful background that nobody else here has, 'sall. My doctoral work was in English renaissance poetics.
Ooh, you have a PhD in literature? Nice.
Oh I did need to research all the Tagore answers except to the one I asked and answered myself ("The Cabuliwallah"). Like, I recognized yamaduut / messenger of death, and vaguely remembered something about the indigo revolt, but I did have to put in the work to be able to answer more specifically.
10:55
I've never made any formal study of literature beyond GCSE level, but I'm experienced with academic research from my own field (maths), and I have university access to journals and so on which is sometimes really useful for researching answers here.
I said I did doctoral work. I never claimed I finished it 😉
I will, someday. After I retire, perhaps
Sometimes when I find an interesting academic article which is paywalled but accessible to me, I feel almost obligated to share that knowledge, even if I have to post Q and A myself.
ah. Well, thanks to COVID-19, JSTOR has a "100 article per month" limit now, and I'm in no danger of hitting that any time soon.
Oh nice! I wasn't aware.
11:12
@verbose I was wondering about that, based on the answers you wrote recently. They read like answers that required knowledge of Bengali (and not just familiarity with Devanagari and related scripts). Mystery solved :-)
@verbose you published any papers on that research topic? (In some disciplines, PhD researchers are required to do this, but I don't know about literature. I never even started a PhD in literature.) My master thesis was on Shakespeare, so I'm curious.
@verbose That also explains the level of detail of your answer to the question about the English sonnet.
 
1 hour later…
12:29
0
Q: What's meant by "these things" in The Just Men of Cordova?

Ahmed SamirIn chapter 5 of The Just Men of Cordova (1917) by Edgar Wallace, the author was describing an outside broker and financier talking to his friend about their hard financial condition: Black tossed a letter across to him. “What do you think of that?” he asked. “Here’s a demand from Tangye’s, the b...

 
2 hours later…
14:19
128
Q: What are the reputation requirements for privileges on sites, and how do they differ per site?

badpFormerly Reputation requirements compared. What are the reputation requirements for privileges on the various sites in the network? Also, how do reputation requirements for various privileges compare on different Stack Exchange sites? Specifically, the following types of sites: Designed sites e....

14:35
Oct 25 at 16:56, by b_jonas
@GarethRees I got the article. Apparently the FSzEK library gives remote access to the JSTOR database to anyone with a valid library registration. Possibly only temporarily due to the pandemic, I can't really tell.
^ Though it seems that not all of JSTOR is accessible that way, only some of it. Also, the libraries are completely closed again (they were only mostly closed during the autumn), which is sad. They do at least extend the expiry of my registration, including all the online stuff.
@Randal'Thor While we're there, and Tsundoku is asking about literature PhD, let me point to madore.org/~david/weblog/… by David Madore. It describes a humanties thesis ceremony from the point of view of a mathematician.
14:54
@EddieKal Hi Eddie! How are you?
Did you ever try Sordello by Robert Browning? I was thinking of getting some help from you.
15:08
@KnightwantsLoongback You might consider asking your Sordello questions on literature.se
@Randal'Thor Yes, congratulations to verbose — some great recent answers
My favourite story about Sordello is that Tennyson said that he had understood only two lines from the poem — the first line, "Who will, may hear Sordello's story told" and the last line, "Who would has heard Sordello's story told" — and they were both lies!
It starts as it means to go on — "for as the friendless-people's friend / Spied from his hill-top once, despite the din / And dust of multitudes, Pentapolin / Named o' the Naked Arm, I single out / Sordello"
A reference both obscure and self-deprecating at the same time (Don Quixote was just confabulating when he short-sightedly peered at a dust cloud and discerned "the king of the Garamantas, Pentapolin of the Bare Arm")
15:50
0
Q: How does the setting of Sense and Sensibility affect the plot?

Sophia L.I’m writing a book report and I’m not sure how to verbalize how the setting impacts the plot

16:22
@KnightwantsLoongback I could be better, if the proud boys are fettered.
@verbose That's awesome! You are the second Bengali speaker I've met on SE
@Randal'Thor A synonym probably is needed. "Bangla literature" is also an often used term by scholars of Bangla/Bengali literature/language themselves. See this and this. — Eddie Kal Oct 3 at 2:51
I'd be curious to know your thoughts on this @verbose
@Randal'Thor I applaud this. This is very important.
17:11
0
Q: "English Faculty Vote to Change Name to ‘Department of Literatures in English’"

Eddie KalPiggybacking on this previous discussion, how does this bear on our understanding of literature and our categorization and tags? English Faculty Vote to Change Name to ‘Department of Literatures in English (courtesy of Tsundoku) During the English department’s first faculty meeting of the fall s...

17:25
@Librarian already -1. wawaweewa proud boys at work!
17:36
@GarethRees Seems like I need to master the Renaissance history and tales before reading that poem, ha?
@KnightwantsLoongback Sordello is notoriously difficult but there are editions with notes, for example Complete Works vol. II has notes by Charlotte Porter & Helen A. Clarke
@GarethRees Is there any central message of that poem? I mean some central thought?
@EddieKal The reason for the downvote is probably that quoting an entire article, in this case copyright of The Cornell Daily Sun, does not make a good meta post. It would be better to paraphrase or summarise it and add what issue on Lit SE it is intended to highlight.
2
If you are looking for a one-sentence summary, Porter & Clarke write, "Sordello is the story of a poet’s inner development as affected by his social environment."
2
@Tsundoku I have another "probably" which is more probable given the fact that no comments were left.
@Tsundoku And it is directly relevant to this site, more pressingly relevant than ever.
Yeah, Browning writes in his letter (to his friend) that history is chosen just for communicating and no special purpose.
Tsundoku has made a change to the feeds posted into this room
@EddieKal I've created a new feed for that; we'll see what it does. (Strictly speaking, it should now push the five most recent literature questions from ELL into this room.)
17:59
Nice!
room topic changed to The Reading Room: Welcome to chat for literature.stackexchange.com! — Read any good books lately? [authors] [books] [intentions] [my-god-its-full-of-stars]
The above change just replaces the http protocol with https and the double hyphen with a proper em dash (—).
@KnightwantsLoongback Sordello is medieval rather than Renaissance — the historical Sordello was a contemporary of Dante, who included him in Purgatorio canto VI ff.
@EddieKal I have created as a synonym for .
18:21
@Tsundoku I am not entirely sure about this though. me being a non-Bengali speaker. I wondered what people more familiar with this field have to say about it.
That's what scholarship is really about. Consult people who study it.
@EddieKal On Wikipedia, Bangla literature redirects to Bengali literature.
That is a nice clue
And Bangla language redirects to Bengali language.
I suspect the terminological bifurcation might have to do with the West Bengal/Bangladesh difference/divide.
I thought Bangla was just Bengali for Bengali.
18:31
That's what I thought too. But seems like--can't remember where I read it--some people prefer one over the other in certain contexts.
Tsundoku has made a change to the feeds posted into this room
1
Q: Meaning of "look to it that.."?

John VI am familiar with the usual usage of "look to sb to do sth" but in the following sentences, the meaning does not make sense to me: 'I will no longer be a suppliant for knowledge which the gods withhold. Let them look to it that they do me no wrong. I will do my duty as best I can and if I err u...

0
Q: "Would nothing do but thou must at once break the eternal compact?" - meaning in the context

John VI am utterly lost in deciphering the very last sentence from the story Haita the Shepherd: In the obscurity the maiden's figure grew dim and indistinct and her voice seemed to come from a distance, as she said, in a tone of sorrowful reproach: 'Presumptuous and ungrateful youth! must I then so s...

0
Q: Meaning of a sentence in an example - literature

John VThe final paragraphs of Bierce's story “Haita The Shepherd” read as follows (the maiden referred to in the text is, in fact, Happiness itself, and the guy met her thrice only to lose her immediately) and I cannot figure out what the very last part means, what this "two" is referring to. She come...

0
Q: Interpretation of a short sentence from an older story

John VThe very first sentence of Bierce's story “Haita The Shepherd” reads as follows: In the heart of Haita the illusions of youth had not been supplanted by those of age and experience. While the sentence is basically easy to understand per se, I am not sure how to interpret it, what is the actual ...

1
Q: Merchant of Venice "I'll die for't a women had the ring" (Shakespeare, 5.1, 221)

KashPortia has the ring but Bassanio believes that he had given the ring to a male. Portia says "I'll die for't a women had the ring"(Shakespeare, 5.1, 221), which is funny as it really is a women who has the ring. I do not think this is a pun, as the line itself is not funny, rather its the situatio...

19:12
@Tsundoku Sadly, no, Christophe. I had a couple of scholarly book reviews published. But I never got around to bringing my own academic research up to publishable standards. If I had stayed on in the program, publishing scholarly work would have not been required for the degree per se; but without any published work, I'dn't've ever been considered for an academic job (or any job that required a PhD), so in practical terms, yes, I'd've to publish something.
I've always had the impression that it is much harder to get something published in literature journals than in my own domain, i.e. HCI. This is based on the low number of publications by my literature professors at university compared to my own field.
hah, that was definitely one of the questions I had in mind when I wrote:
>It's happened more than once (particularly on Shakespeare questions) that I begin writing out my answer, then as I'm halfway through, I notice that Gareth or Christophe have already posted what I was gonna say, and have said it better than I could've. Wish I were more efficient.
I was busy composing and polishing my answer, when I saw you'd got in first. I took my time finishing my own anyway, coz I find the topic interesting.
Okay I clearly don't know how to paste a transcript of an earlier message in the chat into a new message ....
@verbose It has happened to me too a few times; I then check to what extent the existing answer overlaps with what I was writing. The availability of an existing answer was never meant to be a deterrent ;-)
@EddieKal @NapoleonWilson is correct, Bangla is just the Bengali word for Bengali. There isn't a Bangla:Bangladesh::Bengali:India correlation as there is, for example, with Urdu:Pakistan::Hindi:India or Serbian:Serbia::Croatian:Croatia.
There is a Bangal/Bangla distinction which is an Eastern Bengali/Western Bengali split. Bangal or Eastern Bengali is the vernacular of Bangladesh and also the Indian state of Tripura. It is considered dialectal; Western Bengali, the language spoken in the Indian state of West Bengal, is considered standard.
Bangal is also a demonym for Bangladeshi refugees who fled to West Bengal in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during the Bangladeshi war of independence. (The contrasting term for the original residents of West Bengal is "ghoti", for some reason.)
While Bangal is definitely recognizable as different from Bangla, it's a matter of accent and certain grammatical features, much as New Zealand English is different from Australian.
One reason to maintain a Bengali literature / Bangla literature distinction is that Bangla is the language, Bengal the region. There are literary works from Bengal written in languages other than Bengali. For example, Bankim Chandra's first published novel, Rajmohan's Wife, was written in English, but his subsequent novels were all in Bengali.
So I guess Rajmohan's Wife would qualify as Bengali literature, but not as Bangla literature. Its setting, social milieu, etc. are all Bengali, it just happens to be written in English.
19:52
@verbose Very helpful information.
@Tsundoku heh, my top-voted answer on LitSE was one of those as well. @BESW posted his answer before I could complete mine. I miss BESW, btw. He's just such a nice dude.
The last bit is a bit unclear to me. So the language is called Bangla and Bengali? Because you said Bankim Chandra's "subsequent novels were all in Bengali"
Yep, in English, Bangla is typically called Bengali. Just as French is called French rather than français.
I see. I wondered if geographical boundaries were in the mix because I knew Bengali also meant "of/from Bengal"
@verbose I see. But our tags are based on language, not country. So Bankim Chandra's Rajmohan's Wife wouldn't be tagged as .
@verbose BESW doesn't come to this chatroom anymore and his contributed only one answer since late 2017.
20:02
1
Q: Meaning of "Elizabeth Childers" by Edgar Lee Masters?

jerorxHere's the poem "Elizabeth Childers" by Edgar Lee Masters, published in Spoon River Anthology (1915): Dust of my dust, And dust with my dust, O, child who died as you entered the world, Dead with my death! Not knowing Breath, though you tried so hard, With a heart that beat when you lived with m...

Yes, but Bengal as a region encompasses both West Bengal and Bangladesh; Bangladesh was historically East Bengal.
@Tsundoku Oh I knew that. I was just responding to @EddieKal's question about whether Bengali literature and Bangla literature were the same thing. In certain contexts, they're not. In LitSE, they are. I'm not arguing about that; I really don't care either way.
@Tsundoku I know he doesn't. That's why I miss him, innit. 🙃
Yeah, be that as it may, it is still nice to understand the distinction and the nuances of the terms.
@verbose Tagore's novel Chokher Bali mentions Bankim Chandra several times (e.g. Vishabriksha). I wonder if that author had special significance to Tagore. Of course, he wrote the first novel in Bengali.
We may have more than 1.000 unanswered questions, as Rand al'Thor recently noted, but the percentage of answered questions has just gone up (again) from 74% to 75%. In mid-February we were still at 73%.
20:53
@Tsundoku Sadly, I'ven't read either of those novels, so I couldn't tell you. (I have seen a movie version of Chokher Bali, though.) The influence of Vishabriksha on Chokher Bali, or of Bankim on Robi Thakur in general, would be a good question for the topic challenge? But if we're trying to get our number of unanswered questions down ....
@verbose I've been thinking of asking that question on the site, but first I want to finish reading Chokher Bali.
Come to think of it, the only Tagore novel I've actually read is Gora. He's so ubiquitous in Indian and Bengali culture that it feels like I know his novels better than I do. Like, his novels are constantly recycled into movies (e.g., Charulata from Nashtanirh, or Ghare Baire, that actually reading them seems superfluous.
I've read a bunch of his short stories and poems, though, and I know a fair number of his songs.
I might get Gora from the local library. The English translation of Chokher Bali I'm reading is riddled with errors.
21:09
Right, Tagore was super careless about overseeing translations of his novels. He'd farm the work out to relatives, friends, etc., anybody who was around. The early translations all suck for that reason. If you do get Gora, the 2003 Sujit Mukherjee translation is good. The anonymous Macmillan translation, published 1924, is laughably bad.
The local library only has a German translation, which should be OK.
Apparently the translator in that case was W.W. Pearson. Tagore, unhappy with the translation, asked his nephew Surendranath to edit it before publication. Surendranath did so, but Macmillan somehow ended up publishing the first half with his corrections and the second half without. Gawd, it's bad
Ah okay.
@verbose Reminds me of Elizabethan publishing pratices :-D
Stop-press corrections (if corrections were made at all).
This essay by Meenakshi Mukherjee has an amusing section on Tagore translations into English. Well worth reading.
2
@Bookworm I have reworded the question on setting in Sense and Sensibility a bit but since the question owner if an unregistered user, we may never hear back from them again. Do people think that additional improvements are necessary?
@verbose I'll read that in the weekend :-)
21:18
There's also another English translation of Gora (2009) by one Radha Chakravarty. I don't know that one, but it's Penguin, which tends to be reliable I think.
Also, I lied to you earlier. When I went to my bookshelf to pick up the translations I have of Gora, I saw that I also have a copy of The Wreck (Noukadubi), which I'd completely forgotten about.
And just to spite you, it's not tsundoku, I've actually read it, so there 😛
@verbose Well, tsundoku is my username, not yours ;-)
oh trust me, it fits me too. Just happenstance that I've actually read The Wreck.
I'm surprised I'm the only user on Lit SE who picked that name. It is not unique on Stack Overflow, for example.
Same here: unique verbose on LitSE, non-unique on Stack Overflow.
Stack Overflow has a lot more people, though.
21:31
True dat
Maybe it's a bit more exotic than the 5th Gandalf.
yep, a tweet by someone with the username Rand al'Thor crossed my Twitter feed the other day and it took me a second to realize I was not reading something from LitSE. (No, it wasn't one of those auto-posted tweets @Randal'Thor enabled, I checked.)
At one point, this site had a second Rand al'Thor.
Ah. Our buddy is *the* Rand al'Thor, though, no mistake.
I'ven't ever read the WoT novels, and have no desire to ... never read LotR either. Can't commit to reading such lengthy works. If I could, I'd prolly read Proust first 😁
I started reading Proust a few years ago. The fourth part has been waiting for more than a year now...
21:44
In French? In German translation? In English translation?
In French. I don't read translations if I can read the original language well enough.
@verbose Yet you're wielding your apostrophes like Robert Jordan himself. ;-)
22:06
@verbose Seeing the name Surendranath for Tagore's nephew reminds me of a question I had about his name, which I didn't post on the main site as it's more about linguistics than literature, but which you might be able to answer with your knowledge of Bengali.
I've seen his name sometimes written as Rabindra Nath Tagore instead of Rabindranath Tagore. Are they both equally valid transliterations of his name in Bengali? Like how it is (AFAIK) in Chinese, where a pair of Chinese characters that form someone's name could equally well be transliterated as either one or two separate "words" in the Latin alphabet.
22:58
@Randal'Thor We have standards for most of that transliteration stuff. ("Most of" in the sense of from all source languages that you'll ever encounter; but as there are like a shitton of languages, you can't say "all languages".) Usually more than one to choose from. Typically there's at least one that reflects the internal logic of the language closely and so useful for scientific works and library catalogs and other writings;
and one that uses the closest approximation of the pronunciation in Hungarian, which is useful for only that one thing, which usually shouldn't be a goal, and should probably never be used for many languages, yet it is the general practice to use it in general purpose text.
I'm only familiar with the transliterations from Russian, since that's the one that comes up the most often.
For Russian two, there are two of them. The scientific one used by library catalogs is the one described in the "ISO 9:1995" column in "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Russian", which is a very simple system that just has a correspondence of one Russian letter to one Latin letter, with no complications.
The pronunciation one is described in "https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Cirill_bet%C5%B1s_szl%C3%A1v_nevek_%C3%A1t%C3%ADr%C3%A1sa" . This is quite a reasonable one, but that's because it's for a European language with phonology and writing system that doesn't differ all that much from ours. There's a simple mechanical rule for transliterating any Russian word. It's not entirely reversible, there are ambiguities, but they're not too bad in practice.
But nothing like that works well for Chinese or Arabic. Those should always be transliterated using a scientific system, never by pronunciation, even if the latter is the general practice. "http://www.madore.org/~david/weblog/d.2011-07-27.1914.html" talks about this.
The part that we got right is that if the language is written in Latin letters (including Serbian) then it's not transliterated, the original form is kept. This applies even for Vietnamese. This is good, and the correct generalization of that practice is to always use the scientific transcription rather than a phonetic one.

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