The Reading Room

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CowperKettle

00:51

I tried out Udio on my old joke verse about Overweight

udio.com/songs/eAfJir7j7hnnD6NBn8cUUk

CowperKettle

01:06

To a Stranger by Walt Whitman, rap/hip-hop, golden record, top of the charts in the 1870s udio.com/songs/inXp8beC9xk6Ty54VjVfbV

CowperKettle

01:29

JC Ransom, "Prometheus In Straits", rapcore, 1924 udio.com/songs/514ed1ee-b68a-44c2-8c90-bd3a0245dee4

11 hours later…

Gareth Rees

12:47

@verbose I read Thrones, Dominations, the one which had a few chapters left in draft by Sayers and which was completed by Walsh, and I agree with you. The mystery plot is a bit feeble, minor characters like Bunter and Parker are barely characterized, and there doesn't seem to be a thematic connection between the mystery plot and the events of 1936 (the occupation of the Rhineland and the abdication crisis).

Also, Walsh didn't make satisfactory use of the title. Maybe it wasn't clear from the notes Sayers left behind how she intended to use it, but in Paradise Lost the line introduces God's announcement that "This day I have begot whom I declare / My onely Son" and so in the novel it ought to be used ironically in relation to the prospective Wimsey heir.

5 hours later…

Bookworm

18:11

Q: Novel about a man trying to solve the long ago disappearance of his younger brother

I was reading the entry for Raincoat of Horror and it suddenly made me remember a book I read in the last year or two, around 2022-2023, I think as an ebook from the library. I'm going to look through my history, but I'm also posting here whole my memory holds strong. The protagonist is male, I t...

2 hours later…

Peter Shor

19:45

There is no wonder, no amazement, quite like that felt when something supposed for amusement's sake to be magical and mysterious actually manifests the properties imagination has assigned it in jest--when the toy pistol shoots real bullets, the wishing well grants actual wishes, lovers from down the street fling themselves into Death's bright arms from Lovers' Leap.

I was deep in my reverie, as serene and enchanted of mind as any little swan-prince despite the jolting of the Studebaker, when I observed that my tower of cloud was no longer of the pearlypink white whose lustrousness had originally suggested to my mind the princess of my beloved green-jacketed book; it was now touched everywhere with a dusky black shot with purple that, even while I looked, deepened and deepened until the entire insubstantial spire might have been carved of night.

Gene Wolfe — Peace

Bookworm

20:06

Q: "La guerra" by Goldoni: why was it about waiting for a war commissioner to become rich?

I've started reading Carlo Goldoni's play titled La guerra ('The War'). I haven't found any translation into English. One of the characters is Don Polidoro, the war commissioner. He praises war greatly because he expects to make significant profits and become very rich from it. In fact, from the ...

italian-language carlo-goldoni

verbose

20:29

@GarethRees "Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers" occurs four times in PL. The first is as you say, when God promotes Jesus over the angels. Satan subsequently uses it twice, first in inciting his band to rebel, then in announcing his success at engineering the Fall. Abdiel also uses it to argue against Satan in the former instance. So the phrase is pretty complicated even in Milton.

verbose

20:42

@Bookworm Are titles translated or left untranslated in our tags? Since la-guerra has apparently not yet been translated into English, using the original Italian probably makes more sense than translating it, but we have (for example) love-in-the-time-of-cholera and la-fiesta-del-chivo.

Or in French, we have both le-bourgeois-gentilhomme and the-stranger, the latter particularly strange (ha) because I first read it in a translations called the-outsider

Or for that matter, there's Proust, where our preferred tag seems to be in-search-of-lost-time, and I believe remembrance-of-things-past is a synonym.

Proposal: keep tag names for translated works in the original language. Use the various translation names as tag synonyms. Thoughts?

Gareth Rees

21:00

@verbose Under your proposal, would the-bible become ta-biblia or tanakh? Would epic-of-gilgamesh become shutur-eli-sharri or sha-naqba-imuru?

verbose

@GarethRees Good point. That said, if we must be inconsistent, we could come up with some guidelines to both minimize the inconsistency, and be less ad hoc.

Gareth Rees

21:17

@verbose A simple principle would be, if there's one commonly used English title, we can use that, if there are multiple English title with no clear winner, we can use the original. For example, for the play by Plautus we would use rudens as in English it is variously known as The Rope, The Fisherman's Rope, The Shipwreck, The Storm, etc.

verbose

huh, interesting. I was thinking more along the lines of "use the original title for classical works, but translations for works from the middle ages or later"

Like the-iliad but the-count-of-monte-cristo. But I'm not entirely happy with that idea because the line between classical and mediæval, or mediæval and Renaissance, is fuzzy. Also, batrakhoi is just weird compared to the-frogs.

1 hour later…

Bookworm

22:24

Q: Meaning of speech in Synge's "Deirdre of the Sorrows"

Near the beginning of J. M. Synge's play Deirdre of the Sorrows, Deirdre's nurse Lavarcham says, "Who’d check her like was meant to have her pleasure only, the way if there were no warnings told about her you’d see troubles coming when an old king is taking her, and she without a thought but for ...