The Reading Room

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Bookworm

03:05

Q: How does the first stanza of Robert Burns's "For a' That and a' That" translate into modern English?

I want to like this poem, but I guess I'm too dense to make sense of the first stanza, mainly because (I suppose) of Burns's dialect: Is there, for honest poverty, That hangs his head, and a’ that? The coward-slave, we pass him by, We dare be poor for a’ that! For a’ that, and a’ that, Our toils ...

Bookworm

03:50

Q: Poem About Missshapen Tree

Looking for a poem about a tree that has grown in adverse conditions, but is more interesting because it has more character. Thought it was written by a famous American poet but my searches don't seem to find anything. It is not a poem about good timber, but I encountered it in a forestry compa...

identification-request

3 hours later…

User1865345

06:57

Obituary: Nikki Giovanni, poet and literary celebrity, has died at 81

5 hours later…

User1865345

11:31

This day in 1913: Rabindranath Tagore becomes first non-European to receive Nobel Prize in Literature

Rand al'Thor

11:45

Congrats on the spanish-language tag badge, @ClaraDíazSanchez!

@EJoshuaS-StandwithUkraine In the process of answering one of your Belarusian literature questions, I realised there's a tag for like-water-like-fire, which appears to be a collection of various works by different authors that had already been published elsewhere (e.g. the poem that I was answering about, published in 1947 but the collection is from 1971).

I felt it doesn't make sense to have a tag for that, since people's expertise would be in individual authors' works not a later collection where you happened to see them, and meta seems to agree.

I can get rid of the tag without bumping any posts, using mod tools to merge it into belarusian-language, but that's hard to reverse so I just wanted to double-check before doing it. Am I missing anything, or is the like-water-like-fire tag indeed just an anthology tag, for a collection of works that aren't found only in that collection?

Tsundoku

12:32

@User1865345 Rabindranath Tagore was also the first Nobel Prize laureate about whom we had a topic challenge. By number of questions, it was the most successful topic challenge up to that point.

User1865345

@Tsundoku wow. It's a coincidence I happened to come across an old copy of I won't let you go by Tagore, translated by Ketaki Kushari Dyson. When I googled a bit, I came to know he was conferred thr Nobel this day.

Just recently I found out that he even wrote quite a few haunted short stories. I don't know if those were translated or not.

2 hours later…

Bookworm

14:41

Q: What were the works of Tagore that Mistral commented on?

Mistral's first published collection, Desolación, contains a number of prose works in addition to her poetry. In one of them, "Commentarios a poemas de Rabindranath Tagore", Mistral wrote commentaries on three lines written by Tagore: Sé que también amaré la muerte. Yo me jacté entre los hombres...

identification-request spanish-language rabindranath-tagore gabriela-mistral

User1865345

14:55

@Bookworm wow. Coincidence? A Question on Tagore 🥳

And quickly answered by @Randal'Thor 😯👏🏻👏🏻

4 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

18:38

This Q&A puzzles me. I find the question unclear, the answer's relevance even more unclear, and the twelfth-night tag bizarre.

3 hours later…

Tsundoku

21:41

@Randal'Thor I have removed the Twelfth Night tag, since the question does not mention that play. The only way I can make sense of the question itself is that most of it is a preamble to the actual question, i.e. where is the intent of the quote from the dedication reflected in Shakespeare's plays.

1 hour later…

Bookworm

22:58

Q: What is the significance of the 'one word' in Gabriela Mistral's poem Una palabra

In Gabriela Mistral's poem Una palabra (literally "one word"), the speaker says (in the first stanza, from the translation in Mapping a different star: five poems by Gabriela Mistral), I have one word in my throat and I can’t get it out, can’t get free of it however hard its throb of blood pushe...

poetry spanish-language interpretation gabriela-mistral

bobble

23:26

@Tsundoku I've though about this on and off and the answer is I have enjoyed literature this year but am unable to point to any one specific book, so I won't answer the question.

I have a general distaste for questions asking for my favorite X/best X anyways

(that's a personal issue)

Tsundoku

23:42

So did nothing stand out? (I mean positively.)

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