The Reading Room

Bookworm

09:24

0

Q: Ian McEwan's quote "No more magical realism" on Saturday

I read Ian McEwan's Saturday and remember a part where the daughter, who was into poetry, tried to get her father, a neurosurgeon, to read more books. She recommended South American writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The father answered something like: No more magical realism, please. Reality ...

quote-identification

verbose

10:20

I just posted an answer that included this note: "October/November 2020 was when I realized exactly how poorly Tagore has been served by translations, even his own. The dude really deserved that Nobel, and you'd never know it reading his works in the available English translations." 'strue, and y'all are to blame for my arriving at thaat realization. Thanks!

Eng Lit Learner

11:00

0

Q: Can "stabbing" mean/express a movement done by legs?

While reading Henry Kuttner's Graveyards rats, I encountered the following sentence: (for the context, the character is crawling along rat burrows, and rats are pursuing and attacking him: There was a patter of feet and he sent the light stabbing behind him. There is no mention of any sharp obj...

meaning meaning-in-context literature

b_jonas

11:35

@verbose That sucks, because if he translates his own works to English, then translators will base their translations on those.

verbose

@b_jonas It does suck, but it's not the case that most translators base their work on his. Sujit Mukherjee's translation of Gora or William Radice's translations work directly from the Bengali originals.

And those are excellent translations.

b_jonas

13:11

@verbose Good to know.

Bookworm

15:15

1

Q: How good was Rabindranath Tagore's English, in general?

As verbose recently remarked in an answer about a Tagore poem: October/November 2020 was when I realized exactly how poorly Tagore has been served by translations, even his own. The dude really deserved that Nobel, and you'd never know it reading his works in the available English translations. ...

rabindranath-tagore

Rand al'Thor

16:17

@verbose Sad, but good to know. This knowledge, together with a little browsing on Tagore's Wikipedia page, inspired me to ask a new question, more biographical than about his writings as such, but potentially still interesting in the study of his writings.

@EngLitLearner @EddieKal What happened to this question? Self-deleted? (I don't have rep to see deleted posts on ELL.)

The list of bookmarks that Gareth linked earlier includes a couple of deleted questions, one of which in particular I feel is interesting: notwithstanding the comment that it seems opinion-based, surely "what properties made this work a success" is something that could be answered based on reviews or analysis rather than pure opinion?

Bookworm

16:56

0

Q: Did the original "The Hobbit" really feature that five-army battle in the end?

I first read The Hobbit over 20 years ago, when I was still a child. I remember it as an extremely cozy and "non-epic" story about a bunch of dwarves, a wizard and of course Bilbo. In particular, I remembered the part when they took the "barrel ride" from some kind of house for some reason, and t...

j-r-r-tolkien the-hobbit

Eddie Kal

@Randal'Thor Self-deleted after -1. Maybe they are planning on posting on lit?

A valid question, but may require more context to answer. But judging from a comment, it could also be obvious with context. And I think that's why it was not well received on ELL and could've been considered too lit-focused for ELL. Let me see if OP still needs help and is amenable to posting on lit

Rand al'Thor

18:22

@Bookworm "No more magic realism on Saturday" has gone HNQ :-)

@EddieKal I can't see the full text of the question, but it seems like it might be obvious, i.e. "sent the light stabbing behind him" just uses "stabbing" as a physical metaphor for the movement of a ray of light from a torch.

b_jonas

19:11

@Bookworm Ah, so you asked a specific question for this. Makes sense.

Librarian

20:23

-2

Q: A question about a collection of poems -"KHAPCHADA" Written in Bengali language

I would like to know and my question is why the question about"KHAPCHADA" avoided? Which comprises of little poems and are found in Rabindra-Rachanabali[many parts]Perhaps there are no ENGLISH translations of the little poems. The ...

discussion support translations

verbose

@Randal'Thor Agree it’s a good q. I hope Matt Throwback undeletes it

Tsundoku

@EddieKal "Cornell is not a public university, so that portion of my answer would not apply. Even if it were, my understanding is that the Daily Sun is independent, so the copyright should belong to it or the author, rather than university." (Comment by bdb484 on Law SE).

Gareth Rees

20:50

How to poetically describe a sunset while hedging your bets as to which of Ptolemaic or Copernican cosmology is correct: "the Sun now fallen / Beneath the Azores; whither the prime Orb, / Incredible how swift, had thither rolled / Diurnal, or this less voluble Earth / By shorter flight to the East, had left him there"

verbose

@GarethRees that’s pretty. Save me the trouble of googling for the source?

Gareth Rees

Milton, Paradise Lost, book IV, lines 591 ff.

I find it charming because there was absolutely no need to bring up the issue of whether the sun goes round the earth or the earth turns under the sun

Rand al'Thor

@verbose Anyone with 2k+ rep can vote to undelete it, and it already has 2 votes of the necessary 3.

Gareth Rees

21:08

Sadly there aren't any questions one can ask about Paradise Lost — it has been very thoroughly annotated over the centuries

verbose

@Randal'Thor hint taken. Question undeleten.

@GarethRees I knew I’d read them before. I couldn’t recall where. Thanks. Shakespeare has been annotated pretty thoroughly over the centuries as well, and yet we get questions about him on this site, and scholarly books continue to be written about him. I’m sure we could find a q or two to ask about Paradise Lost if we really wanted. No?

bobble

Unrelated: if a question is about a series as a whole, then it would be tagged with the series name and not individual book tags, right?

(The series name in this case is just the first book's title followed by "Duology", as far as I can find)

Rand al'Thor

21:23

@bobble Right.

Such finely-grained tagging wouldn't be much use, since it's not really possible to be an expert in (e.g.) The Two Towers without knowing the whole of The Lord of the Rings.

bobble

Apologies for asking so many questions - on Puzzling I lurked for a few weeks to figure out the site culture, whereas here I jumped in feet-first and have been figuring this stuff out as I go.

Rand al'Thor

@verbose Adding to that, even if a question has been raised before and throughly answered by annotations centuries ago, it might still be worth having on this site. Not every question here is a new contribution to the study of literature. I've even asked questions that I know the answer to myself.

@bobble No problem at all! You're helping to keep the chatroom active as well as posting on the main site ;-) Also, if we tell you stuff now, we can quote the same advice later for other people too.

bobble

Does name-significance still apply if you're asking about the significance of an in-universe organization's name, and not a character's?

Rand al'Thor

Hmm, good question. I'm not sure offhand, but searching through the list of tagged questions, I spotted one about the name of a country and one about the name of an organisation (albeit one named after a person).

bobble

I could also rephrase the question to be more about the symbolism of the organization's symbol. Their symbol is a lion, and they're the "Dime Lions". But while that addresses the "Lion" part, I'm also interested in the "Dime" part of their name.

Rand al'Thor

21:37

There was another question about the name of an organisation (in a book I haven't read) that ended up having a very interesting answer. Sadly I don't remember it ...

Eddie Kal

22:09

@Tsundoku You know, patience is a virtue. I spoke with one of people indirectly involved in this decision at Cornell yesterday. But since now our focus is on the student run newspaper and the newspaper as that user correctly suggests is independent, I would advise you to be patient. Work in under way as we speak.

Once again, Cornell English Department is a great department and has proven its excellence in the study of Anglo-American literature. This time, they just outdid themselves.

Tsundoku

@Bookworm Coriolanus, with Tom Hiddleston.

Eddie Kal

22:33

@Tsundoku If you spent 20 minutes on Cornell English's website, this question of yours would be answered.

Eddie Kal

22:44

Incidentally, apropos of some, I have been spending a huge amount of time promoting environmental causes. One of the recent pieces I wrote discusses the devastating impact of Trump, soon-to-be-has-been president of the US, appointing Scott Pruitt as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt holds a J.D. but with absolutely no knowledge of geological and envitonmental sciences.

Bookworm

0

Q: How does Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge represent the notion of self-conflict?

How does Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge represent the notion of self-conflict? I am looking for an answer based on psychoanalytic criticism. Note: This question was originally part of a question that asked both about To Kill a Mockingbird and The Mayor of Casterbridge, which made the qu...

thomas-hardy psychoanalysis the-mayor-of-casterbridge

Eddie Kal

Denying and dismissing global warming, he flatly refuses to listen to the scientific community, people with Ph.D.s in science. One of the problems is obvious in anti-intellectualism's central position in all this. Also it almost tells people education is not important. Even if you have a PhD in science even if it is a scientific concensus it doesn't matter.

Trump's populism is killing the planet. People like Trump and Pruitt can do whatever they want because of the sheer number of mob supporters they enjoy.

Napoleon Wilson

Unfortunately, though, the "saner" governments aren't that much further either. They just don't do it with such a blatant "we're going to destroy the planet extra hard because we're assholes and want to stick it to the "elites"" attitude.

Eddie Kal

Yeah, environmental issues are talked about and cared about much more in Europe, but as you say not by the governments there.

I used to use an app to follow up-to-the-minute information on electricity production percentages in France

It showed, say 60% nuclear power, 15% fire

bobble

23:01

My US government teacher had a tangent where she heaped praise on Nixon for setting up the EPA, saying it showed how there used to be an era of bipartisanship and working government.

Eddie Kal

Yup, Nixon did do that. But I wouldn't consider the EPA his brainchild though.

A lot had happened prior to that point.

Rachel Carson, a brave writer and activist, played a crucial role in essentially bringing people's attention to it

bobble

Silent Spring got a quick mention in World History, but besides a ~5 minute discussion about what was in that book we didn't cover the environmental movement at all.

US history had some more environmental stuff, mostly in the context of the national parks.

And that about covers what I can contribute to this discussion, I think.

Bookworm

0

Q: Books that refer to candy or sweets

This might be a somewhat odd question, but I didn't know where else to turn. I'm preparing a quiz, and one of the subjects is about candy and sweets. In one of the questions I want to ask about fictitous sweets. When googling for this, I get drowned in Harry Potter and Charlie and the Chocolate ...

story-identification

Transcript for