The Reading Room

Q: What is the contemporary translation of this quote from The Art of War?

8:36 AM

Guy Debord's 1988 essay “Comments on The Society of the Spectacle” opens with this epigram from Sun Tzu's The Art of War: However critical the situation and circumstances in which you find yourself, despair of nothing; it is on the occasions in which everything is to be feared that it is necessa...

translation sun-tzu the-art-of-war-sun-tzu

Q: Help me find the ISSN number of the journal or book

9:01 AM

I have been trying locate an article/Journal from one of the citations. I am in need of the article to complete my literature search for project. Help me locate ISSN number of the book or Journal cited as below attached is the resource from where took the citation . "Anatkov A, Gekova K. The use...

physical-books library-and-information-science

3 hours later…

12:05 PM

I haz 12,000 points! :pulls string on solitary party popper: yay....

suddenly balloons fall from the ceiling, and a miniature plane flies across the room pulling a banner that says...

                       ____       _
                    |___\_\_o,___/ \         _________________
                   ([___\_\_____-\' ---------<CONGRATS SPAGIRL
                    | o'                       ------------------

@AncientSwordRage fame at last! ;-)

that's definitely a plane

@AncientSwordRage Thats very definitely a plane, with a very tiny, round headed pilot.

@Spagirl yup!

12:16 PM

I choose to believe that the most famous round-headed kid of them all, Charlie Brown became a pilot of planes made of text, when he eventually grew up.

12:36 PM

@Spagirl growing up outside of the US I know vanishingly little about Charlie Brown: There a dog called snoopy who sleeps on their dog house, somebody called Lucy(?), moving the football somebody is kicking and adults talking like "Waaah-wah"... and thats it?

1:33 PM

@AncientSwordRage I also grew up outside the US, but my sister and I spend much of our pocket money on Peanuts (Charlie Brown and Co) books, which were pretty widely available in Scotland in the seventies. I Think Charles M Schulz is the only writer whose work is represented by more volumes on my shelves than Terry Pratchett!

You have Lucy right, she is the bossy older sister of linus, who has a security blanket, and is in love with Schroeder, who plays Beethoven on a toy piano, obsessively. Charlie Brown is the kid that Lucy always snatches the football away from.

The waahwaah adults is from the animated version, which I've mostly managed to avoid.

1:49 PM

@Spagirl I think when I eventually get shelves I'm going to try and fill the shelves with Terry Pratchett

@Spagirl that all rings a bell

I'm an 80s/90s child so I don't know if I would have come across/appreciated Peanuts back then or not :/

2 hours later…

Tsundoku

3:43 PM

@Bookworm Without error, this question went HNQ.

1 hour later…

Q: Reference for author of "The earth has music for those who listen"

4:48 PM

The earth has music for those who listen. I just came to know about this quote but I found out that the author is not known. Some say it's by William Shakespeare, others say George Santayana and others say something different. I want to use this quote in my video but I can't find author's name ...

quote-source

@AncientSwordRage I've started my collection

Q: Why does this copy of the Iliad mention "the will of God"?

5:37 PM

In my copy of the Iliad, which is a Mentor Book published in April 1938, it opens like this: An angry man—there is my story: The bitter rancour of Achillês, prince of the house of Peleus, which brought a thousand troubles upon the Achaian host. Many a strong soul it sent down to Hadês, and left ...

greek-literature homer the-iliad

bobble

I was hoping to get a response by someone who had read the book, which could touch on more of the sequence than I quote in my question... not sure what to do about the answer I got. It's useful?

5:55 PM

@Mithical nice

Q: are Martha Sarah and Marther Sarer the same names in "The Distracted Preacher" by Thomas Hardy?

6:15 PM

@Bobble Many people never accept an answer, even when they’ve commented to say how happy the are with one… see my recent answer about a Jamaican tiger for example. Some people comment to nudge answers into ever more research and detail, see anything I’ve answered of Rands for example. And some people politely just never comment or accept answers at all. Do what suits you.

Eng Lit Learner

6:29 PM

In beginning of The Distracted Preacher a maid is introduced in Newberry estate. It seems that both names refer to the same person and different spelling deals with different pronunciation. Quote: "A little girl crept in at the summons, and made tea for him. Her name, she said, was Marther Sarer,...

pronunciation british-english literature names

Rand al'Thor

@Spagirl Congrats! Belatedly as you're already on 12.2k by now ...

Rand al'Thor

6:55 PM

@Bookworm That was a fun one. Easy enough to find a probable answer, and interesting enough to dig into the details, that I suspect @Mithical might've posted it already guessing what the answer would be, as a honeypot for whoever cared to research it :-)

Half my questions are like that, TBH...

I often have a suspicion of what the answer will be, but I'll post it anyway to see what people come up with.

Rand al'Thor

Thereby hopefully providing good content for the site, and sometimes learning more than you expected to. I do that too.

Like, composing my answer there already taught me something new, and I won't be at all surprised if someone like Gareth or Tsundoku or Peter blows past me with an even better one.

I'm not an expert in ancient Greek, but translating "Διὸς" as "God" in this context feels borderline inexcusable.

That would have me questioning the legitimacy of the rest of the translation...

We'll see what other things arise as I slog my way through it :)

Do you have an alternative translation handy to reference?

7:08 PM

I do not, unfortunately, and since I tend to do most of my reading on Saturday it's difficult to reference online versions.

It's been sitting on my shelf after I rescued it, along with several others, from a pile of books someone had left by the trash, and I figured I should probably at least try to get through it.

Makes sense!

I'd love to follow along with the Saga of Mithical's Mythical Mystical Mystic Mysterious Mythos if it ends up causing further consternation.

I'll be working my way through a translation of Dante's Inferno at the same time, by the same publishing house, so... there may be some questions about that as well.

I hope it is an "interesting" read.

What's the publishing house, I'm curious?

Mentor Books by the New American Library

Huh.

Looks like a small publishing house that eventually merged with Penguin, but had a spat during the McCarthy era.

7:17 PM

Interesting. Looks like it was a 100-book series published before the NAL merged with Penguin.

publishinghistory.com/mentor-books.html

I think I have their pre-merger copy of One, Two, Three... Infinity, actually.

Interesting. I guess there's a decent chance I have other classics of theirs sitting around somewhere.

Probably!

1 hour later…

Q: Who are all these writers referred to by Premchand?

8:54 PM

The first paragraph of Premchand's (true?) short story "My First Composition" (available on the Internet Archive) is: At the time my age was about thirteen years. I was quite ignorant of Hindi. I had a passion for Urdu novels. Maulana Sharar, Pandit Ratan Nath Sarshar, Mirza Ruswa, Maulvi Mohama...

identification-request urdu-literature premchand