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Gareth Rees

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Gareth Rees
Fri 07:20
For author tags and work tags there's no special usage guidance (the work tag goes on questions about the work, the author tag on questions about the author or their works) so for more information it's better for people to use Wikipedia or other resources.
Gareth Rees
Fri 07:20
It's not worth creating a tag wiki (in my opinion) unless there's information about the use of the tag on the site that didn't fit into the summary. I think canon is the kind of case where a tag wiki makes sense (we're using one tag to cover four senses of "canon", and explanations of these senses had to be abbreviated to fit the summary).
Gareth Rees
Thu 16:10
Just a heads-up that a new(ish) user is making many suggested edits on tag wikis, typically by copy-pasting text from the tag summary, for example. I guess this is some kind of reputation farming strategy; it is therefore surprising to see these edits get approved.
Gareth Rees
Jul 17 14:33
I was at a performance of Coriolanus the other day, and the actor playing Cominius spoke "We render you the tenth, to be ta’en forth" (1.7) with two syllables in "ta'en", which struck me as unnecessary—if you're going to pronounce the word with two syllables, you might as well say "taken" since the reason for dropping the k was to make it fit in one.
Gareth Rees
Jul 17 14:27
3
A: Scansion of a line in Yeats' "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death"?

Gareth ReesIt’s a convention in English verse that an occasional iambic foot can contain two unstressed syllables instead of one, if the two unstressed syllables can, in theory or practice, be “elided” (that is, merged or blended together). John Crowe Ransom presented this as the first of a list of four cus...

Gareth Rees
Jul 17 14:27
@bobble Italian is another language where elision is governed by rules. However, English is a stress-timed language, meaning that the stressed syllables are roughly equally spaced, and so squeezing in an occasional extra unstressed syllable doesn't disturb the rhythm. This means that English poets don't need rules telling them what's permissible. I wrote about this in this answer:
Gareth Rees
Jul 15 19:16
@verbose I did include Bowring, but I missed Kline. I'm very sorry about the omission. I'm also sorry I didn't manage to address your concerns when I edited the question. I am sure that there is a good question there, but I didn't find it today. I will try again later, or of course any member of the site is also welcome to try.
Gareth Rees
Jul 15 12:06
I've done the same for the Goethe question which was also attracting close votes. As above, if you voted to close in its previous form, please consider retracting your vote.
Gareth Rees
Jul 15 11:29
@Bookworm I've edited the Castle question so that it can be answered objectively, as I recommended above. If you voted to close in its original form, please consider retracting your vote.
Gareth Rees
Jul 15 07:29
(I don't know where "the person intending to answer unilaterally pick some of the available translations" comes from: this doesn't correspond to anything I wrote.)
Gareth Rees
Jul 15 07:28
@verbose I suggest we change the question from "What is the best translation of The Castle?" to "What are the qualities of (or differences between) the translations of The Castle?" There are four translations (Muir, Underwood, Harman, Bell) so this would be practical to answer.
Gareth Rees
Jul 14 08:31
@verbose I suggest we edit such questions to change them from "which translation is best?" to "what are the qualities of the translations?" The latter is objectively answerable, while being useful to the OP and maybe also to others.
Gareth Rees
Jul 13 16:38
10
A: Does anybody know good English translations of Goethe's poems from German?

Gareth ReesIntroduction An earlier version of the question (which has since been rephrased) asked for the translations “that are considered most definitive”. But this is a mirage: you shouldn’t expect to find a definitive translation of a poem. The reason is that poetry compresses multiple features—literal ...

Gareth Rees
Jun 24 13:05
There's a "mare di serpi" on page 133. I might write this up this evening, unless you get there first!
Gareth Rees
Jun 24 12:59
@ClaraDíazSanchez I think Aldrovandi is referring to Balbi's Viaggio dell'Indie orientali (1590).
Gareth Rees
Jun 8 20:51
@ClaraDíazSanchez Well, maybe—or maybe Quixote was so good that it transcended national differences!
Gareth Rees
Jun 8 18:53
@ClaraDíazSanchez Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) has an allusion to Quixote, as do Jonson's Epicoene (1609) and The Alchemist (1610). These were all before Shelton's English translation was published in 1612.
Gareth Rees
May 25 10:43
@Randal'Thor Pubpeer does send notifications to the authors, if it knows their e-mail addresses, for example, if they appear in the metadata for the published paper. In this case, however, the paper doesn't include contact details for the authors, so they won't receive notifications.
Gareth Rees
May 24 19:12
@verbose Pubpeer accepted my comment discussing some of more interesting misinterpretations of Bleak House in Carlson et al.
Gareth Rees
May 20 18:39
I think it's an issue that we could reasonably leave unsolved until someone asks a question about a work written under the pen name. We don't have to solve all problems in advance
Gareth Rees
May 20 17:15
@elenabrownПодгорная One would need a score of 5 in vladimir-nabokov to suggest that vladimir-sirin should be a synonym, so I can't do it
Gareth Rees
May 20 08:58
There have been a few suggested tag edits that added a wiki, which I didn't realise when I approved them, for example the-mule-bone has an excerpt (which I corrected) and also a wiki (which is wrong but I missed it)
Gareth Rees
May 20 08:54
Right, so my position is that we should add excerpts to prevent deletion, but it is pointless to write wikis unless there is something special about the way we use the tag.
Gareth Rees
May 20 08:53
Even if the tag has a summary?
Gareth Rees
May 20 08:52
@bobble Wikipedia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license, so if we copy it we need to attribute it. But in general I think it's pointless to create tag wikis here unless there's something special about the use of the tag that we need to document. Otherwise we're just creating busy-work for ourselves. People can always visit Wikipedia if they need more information.
Gareth Rees
May 19 07:04
@verbose Both of the study institutions are in Kansas so maybe this is revealing a problem with the way reading is taught at schools in that state.
Gareth Rees
May 19 07:04
@verbose The study contains a few other mistakes that seem to be due to in the authors and not the subjects. Their claims "follow the fog as it moves", "shipyard in the Holborn District", "Essex marshes, 51 miles away" also seem wrong. Not critical to reading the novel but I would have expected better.
Gareth Rees
May 18 20:33
Interesting study: Carlson et al. (2024). Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities. CEA Critic 86:1. Reminiscent of Practical Criticism (1929) by I. A. Richards: "An overtone of despairing helplessness haunts the protocols" vs "subjects became more and more lost as they continued to read"
Gareth Rees
May 15 07:50
@verbose The 1769 Oxford version modernized the spelling and punctuation, fixed some mistakes, and was a bit more careful about the use of italics to indicate words that have no equivalent in the source texts. By 1769 there were better editions of the Greek New Testament. Wikipedia has a comparison of 1 Corinthians 13:1–3 which shows a lot of changes but all very minor
Gareth Rees
May 15 06:54
@verbose "Authorized Version" is a bit of a misnomer as the Church of England has never had an official or authorized translation. (The Catholic Church authorized the Vulgate at the Council of Trent 1563 but this was after the English Reformation.) So Anglicans are free to choose a translation and although the 1611 King James and 1769 Oxford translations were important for a long time, I think the 1978 New International Version is probably most popular now.
Gareth Rees
May 14 19:34
@verbose It's easier to be helpful here than at ELU due to the volume of questions: they get ten or twenty times as many questions as we do.
Gareth Rees
May 12 13:30
Suggestion: replace the gilbert-and-sullivan tag with w-s-gilbert. Questions about Arthur Sullivan's music should be asked on music.stackexchange.com (for example). (Contra Hamlet, music is not literature.)
Gareth Rees
May 11 07:11
"And we will have in, somewhere, a literary person, who thinks it so dull and unpoetical to try and fathom the mysteries of nature. (I can do this type of idiot rather well; I know several of him.)" — Dorothy L. Sayers, letter to Robert Eustace
Gareth Rees
May 10 11:42
@ClaraDíazSanchez Perhaps the difficulty is recognizing that "Epstein's statues" are statues by Epstein, not statues of Epstein?
Gareth Rees
May 4 11:05
@Randal'Thor As you wish.
Gareth Rees
Apr 29 09:38
Yes, a question on "The Ballad of the Brown Girl" would be great. I've been wondering about the relation to "The Nut-Brown Maid"
Gareth Rees
Apr 29 09:36
@verbose This is why different perspectives are valuable.
 

 Discussion between Gareth Rees and La…

Imported from a comment discussion on literature.stackexchange...
Gareth Rees
May 25 15:50
I think a recap might help. Originally you wrote, "I'm asking you [Mithical] to say Christian religion rather than church". I pointed out that "church" already has the required sense. Of course, in your own writing you would prefer "religion", but that does not mean that Mithical is wrong. I'm sorry if I come across as lecturing, but this seems like a simple point—there are often different ways to express an idea, and different writers might choose different words
Gareth Rees
May 25 15:27
@Lambie Mithical is allowed to comment on this story in their own words, and is not obliged to use your words
Gareth Rees
May 25 15:26
@Lambie I also apologise to you for the mistake.
Gareth Rees
May 25 15:24
When a word has multiple senses, writers can choose the sense they want and it's up to readers to do their best to interpret. We shouldn't demand that writers use words only in our own preferred sense
Gareth Rees
May 25 15:22
@Lambie In sense 4a, "church" means "The whole body of Christians collectively", not one of its branches — that would be sense 5a "A particular Christian body, community, or denomination".
Gareth Rees
May 25 15:21
@Mithical Sorry about the confusion, of course I meant Mithical, not verbose.
Gareth Rees
May 25 15:20
If you are now objecting to the pleonasm, I take it that you withdraw the original objection?
Gareth Rees
May 25 15:18
@Lambie On the pleonasm point: if we take "church" in the sense 4a as I suggest above, there is some redundancy. But the redundancy is necessary to indicate the correct sense of "church". If one wrote "church" on its own then it would be ambiguous. So a little pleonasm is needed.
Gareth Rees
May 25 15:15
@Lambie Can you check the question again? I find the phrase "Christian church"
Gareth Rees
May 25 15:14
@Lambie Verbose writes in the first paragraph of the question, "Ralokae, ... describes why he is not a fan of the Christian church"
Gareth Rees
May 25 15:13
@Lambie That is sense "5a. A particular Christian body, community, or denomination" (OED). But as I said above, I think verbose is using the word in sense 4a.
Gareth Rees
May 25 15:13
@Lambie I think it's implicit in "The whole body of Christians collectively" that the church in question is Christian.
Gareth Rees
May 25 15:13
@Lambie I think verbose is using "church" in the sense "4a. The whole body of Christians collectively" (OED). As Mithical says, it's a synecdoche (container for contents).