The Reading Room

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4:51 AM

It seems there are two distinct parts to this post: the completely on-topic [quote-source] question, and a tangential rant against the validity of the quotation. I've removed the strongest and most unnecessary parts of the latter, but I would suggest a further rephrase to simply ask what the quotation was supposed to mean. — bobble 16 secs ago

Bookworm

5:05 AM

Q: Did Dostoevsky say “While nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer, nothing is more difficult than to understand him.”?

Raskolnikov’s Strange Ideas: How Dostoevsky Predicted Modern Terrorism – Bloggers Karamazov “While nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer, nothing is more difficult than to understand him.” – Attributed to Fyodor Dostoevsky in the 1999 report The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism ...

4 hours later…

Bookworm

9:11 AM

Q: How to find out if a translation exists?

Is it possible to find out if a translation exists? Books since 1966 have an ISBN (International Standard Book Number), so a book can be traced to the publisher, and then in theory to the copyrightholder, who should than have knowledge of various translations. For public domain books, there is pr...

translation publishing

6 hours later…

b_jonas

3:33 PM

@Bookworm how do we answer this one? we can point out that library catalogs often mention the original title, or at least a transcription of it, but I'm not sure if that's enough of an answer. I guess you'll have to point to library catalogs with lots of books in dutch, online and otherwise.

2 hours later…

Bookworm

5:23 PM

Q: What is the textual origin of the quote attributed to Goethe starting "The heights charm us, but the steps do not"

The full quote is The heights charm us, but the steps do not; with the mountain in our view we love to walk the plains. I remembered reading it several years ago, most likely in quotation, but a search failed to find the original context.

quote-source johann-wolfgang-von-goethe

1 hour later…

Bookworm

6:37 PM

Q: Another punctuation question about Keats

Is there an edition of Keats' poem To Autumn which ends the first stanza with something other than a period (full stop)? Do we have an edition of it that Keats saw thru the press? the reason this matters is I think the stanza ought to end with a colon but I have not seen it printed that way. It o...

poetry

bobble

6:50 PM

@Bookworm I could have sworn I saw a nearly-identical question before; could a mod check deleted posts?

Rand al'Thor

@bobble Only 3 deleted questions mention Keats, and none of them resembles that one.

bobble

Weird. I distinctly remember the "ejaculations" aside

Rand al'Thor

Ah, you're probably thinking of this.

(I searched only questions at first.)

bobble

Ah, that's it

Rand al'Thor

Well that's good, if a question is posted as an answer and then the user takes the feedback on board to post it as a question.

3 hours later…

Bookworm

9:30 PM

Q: How was The Great Gilly Hopkins revised for 2015?

I'm reading Katherine Paterson's The Great Gilly Hopkins for the first time. It's the "Revised paperback edition, 2015" of a book copyrighted in 1978, according to the copyright page. Based on the content of the book, I'm guessing some or all of those revisions may be bowdlerizations of the word "...