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What I've recently finished since my last post:
Poly-Olbion! The last couple "songs" are a bit disappointing: the last vividly described landscape, and indeed the last piece in the narrator's persona aside from connective tissue, was the fens of Lincolnshire -- I suspect Drayton of having never traveled further north. The Lake District was particularly short-shrifted in this regard. Amusingly, the Wikipedia article seems to think I'm a weirdo for reading it all the way through -- apparently, the thing to do is dip in for specific locations, like with a guidebook. Hmph.
Kyoto in the Momoyama Period by Wendell Cole, being a survey of the political and social history of the city during the reunification phase of the Warring States era under Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu -- a significant cultural period during which much of what we think of as "traditional Japanese" culture, including clothing styles and shoin-zukuri architecture, developed. Old-style cultural history (published 1967) but a decent example of same.
A Little Book of Du Fu, being the print edition of the translations from http://chinese-poems.com with more supporting material. Still good. Many, many formatting issues.
The Sonnets of Europe: A Volume of Translations edited by Samuel Waddington, an 1888 anthology that, not without cause, devotes half its space to Italian poems. I can't comment on the translators' accuracy, which given the ethos of their times might be suspect, but the results are generally good English poetry. I wouldn't mind an undated anthology that carries things forward to something closer to contemporary and with more attention to non-Romance languages.
The Saga of Hervor & King Heidrek the Wise trans. by Peter Tunstall, one of the legendary sagas (rather than a family saga of settlers in Iceland). Unfortunately, once Hervor has her adventure as the viking "Hervard," which includes tracking down her father's barrow and wresting a cursed sword from his ghost, she all but disappears as the story switches over to her son. Not that there's anything wrong with going home, putting away the sword, and taking up embroidery, but after a kick-ass introduction like that, I want more of her. (Just like one wants more of Tomoe-gozen, but never mind.) While her same-name granddaughter is also a shield-maiden, one who gets to fight the Huns, she gets even less time. (Does anyone know fanfic in which Hervor and Tomoe meet?)
What I'm reading now:
Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto, translated by William Stuart Rose -- one of my every-so-often rereads, but with another translation than my usual Reynolds. I started this last autumn but got stuck 3/4 through, at the start of canto 36, in the middle of my least favorite episode -- the one in which all the little ways that Ariosto ironically undercuts his ostensible heroine come to a head, turning her into a humiliated idiot. (Icon is in honor of her memory.) But onward. I got through that and am back to galloping along -- now up to canto 43, and in the home stretch.
Spirit's Princess by Esther Freisner -- somehow, I hadn't noticed that in her series of mythic princesses, she'd taken up Himiko. Very much the Chinese-source version of late-Yayoi culture, which is to be expected given Himiko herself doesn't appear in the traditional Japanese sources. I wince, though, every time there's a name that uses a Chinese reading of a character, given this is pre-literacy and pre-sinification. So far, a slow read -- she has a lot of childhood to cover. There are signs of things picking up once she starts shaman training.
Lost Horizon by James Hilton, a best known for being the novel in which Shangri-La was invented (with such details as a Frank Capra movie adaptation and being the first mass-market paperback in America, as Pocket Book #1, taking a back seat). I'd always understood Shangri-La as somewhere in the southern Tibetan Plateau if not an actual Himelayan valley, but the lost protagonist believes he is somewhere north in the Kun-lan range. Regardless of that, though: orientalism a-hoy! And a very weird brand of orientalism, too -- at first it looks like the lamasery is presenting Eastern Wisdom touched up with a few Modern Western Material Conveniences (as if social and material culture can be easily untangled), but no, it's stranger than that, as the current order was founded by, of all things, a Christian missionary, and what it offers is not in itself Wisdom but a practice of life-extension (with some lower-case-wisdom along the way). Even worse: said practice is not available to locals, but only low-landers. Cultural appropriation AND erasure, all in one convenient snack. Hilton is a good writer, good enough to make it a compelling read until this became clear, and making the protagonist a Great War vet was a good touch, given the themes of various types of engagement with the world. Am ~2/3 through but squinting hard.
Still working through the Merwin/Lento Collected Haiku of Yosa Buson, into summer and starting to argue more with the translations -- finding ways to reword that come closer to the original terseness while still keeping a poetic rhythm; it's better than many translations in this regard, but it's still a bit irritating -- and McCraw's Du Fu's Laments from the South, which is slow picking, especially when there's actual poetry from Merwin to turn to. I should probably also mention that I'm halfway through The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (Quiller-Couch edition) by reading a handful of poems at a time, now and then.
I'm not sure if what I'm doing with it counts as "reading," but I've started folding models from Advanced Origami by Michael LaFosse. As an origamist, LaFosse is very much on the origami-as-art end of the spectrum, which means lots of wet-folding and customized papers, especially after the first couple models. The surrounding text, however, has wet-folding tips and instructions for customizing and making paper -- though I'm not going to be up for papermaking for *cough* a while, let alone making paper good enough for folding, so I may not "finish" the book, like, ever. The models so far have been tastier than expected.
Officially DNF: The Mind of Mr. J.G. Reeder by Edgar Wallace -- for reasons. The Little Book of Society Verse edited by Fuess and Stearns -- which is vers de société in the stricter sense (the collection's from 1922), and while it has a lot of light verse favorites, the density of condescension was just way too high to deal with.
What I might read next:
For a shorter book, poking at the first couple chapters would count as having started it, but in A Dream of Red Mansions it's more like scouting -- or maybe preparing a base camp is a better metaphor. This edition, fwiw, is translated by Gladys Yang & Yang Hsien-yi and is in desperate need of a family tree diagram. (The internet has not helped me here -- all I can find are in Chinese.) The Maoist introduction deserves a post of its own.
---L.
Poly-Olbion! The last couple "songs" are a bit disappointing: the last vividly described landscape, and indeed the last piece in the narrator's persona aside from connective tissue, was the fens of Lincolnshire -- I suspect Drayton of having never traveled further north. The Lake District was particularly short-shrifted in this regard. Amusingly, the Wikipedia article seems to think I'm a weirdo for reading it all the way through -- apparently, the thing to do is dip in for specific locations, like with a guidebook. Hmph.
Kyoto in the Momoyama Period by Wendell Cole, being a survey of the political and social history of the city during the reunification phase of the Warring States era under Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu -- a significant cultural period during which much of what we think of as "traditional Japanese" culture, including clothing styles and shoin-zukuri architecture, developed. Old-style cultural history (published 1967) but a decent example of same.
A Little Book of Du Fu, being the print edition of the translations from http://chinese-poems.com with more supporting material. Still good. Many, many formatting issues.
The Sonnets of Europe: A Volume of Translations edited by Samuel Waddington, an 1888 anthology that, not without cause, devotes half its space to Italian poems. I can't comment on the translators' accuracy, which given the ethos of their times might be suspect, but the results are generally good English poetry. I wouldn't mind an undated anthology that carries things forward to something closer to contemporary and with more attention to non-Romance languages.
The Saga of Hervor & King Heidrek the Wise trans. by Peter Tunstall, one of the legendary sagas (rather than a family saga of settlers in Iceland). Unfortunately, once Hervor has her adventure as the viking "Hervard," which includes tracking down her father's barrow and wresting a cursed sword from his ghost, she all but disappears as the story switches over to her son. Not that there's anything wrong with going home, putting away the sword, and taking up embroidery, but after a kick-ass introduction like that, I want more of her. (Just like one wants more of Tomoe-gozen, but never mind.) While her same-name granddaughter is also a shield-maiden, one who gets to fight the Huns, she gets even less time. (Does anyone know fanfic in which Hervor and Tomoe meet?)
What I'm reading now:
Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto, translated by William Stuart Rose -- one of my every-so-often rereads, but with another translation than my usual Reynolds. I started this last autumn but got stuck 3/4 through, at the start of canto 36, in the middle of my least favorite episode -- the one in which all the little ways that Ariosto ironically undercuts his ostensible heroine come to a head, turning her into a humiliated idiot. (Icon is in honor of her memory.) But onward. I got through that and am back to galloping along -- now up to canto 43, and in the home stretch.
Spirit's Princess by Esther Freisner -- somehow, I hadn't noticed that in her series of mythic princesses, she'd taken up Himiko. Very much the Chinese-source version of late-Yayoi culture, which is to be expected given Himiko herself doesn't appear in the traditional Japanese sources. I wince, though, every time there's a name that uses a Chinese reading of a character, given this is pre-literacy and pre-sinification. So far, a slow read -- she has a lot of childhood to cover. There are signs of things picking up once she starts shaman training.
Lost Horizon by James Hilton, a best known for being the novel in which Shangri-La was invented (with such details as a Frank Capra movie adaptation and being the first mass-market paperback in America, as Pocket Book #1, taking a back seat). I'd always understood Shangri-La as somewhere in the southern Tibetan Plateau if not an actual Himelayan valley, but the lost protagonist believes he is somewhere north in the Kun-lan range. Regardless of that, though: orientalism a-hoy! And a very weird brand of orientalism, too -- at first it looks like the lamasery is presenting Eastern Wisdom touched up with a few Modern Western Material Conveniences (as if social and material culture can be easily untangled), but no, it's stranger than that, as the current order was founded by, of all things, a Christian missionary, and what it offers is not in itself Wisdom but a practice of life-extension (with some lower-case-wisdom along the way). Even worse: said practice is not available to locals, but only low-landers. Cultural appropriation AND erasure, all in one convenient snack. Hilton is a good writer, good enough to make it a compelling read until this became clear, and making the protagonist a Great War vet was a good touch, given the themes of various types of engagement with the world. Am ~2/3 through but squinting hard.
Still working through the Merwin/Lento Collected Haiku of Yosa Buson, into summer and starting to argue more with the translations -- finding ways to reword that come closer to the original terseness while still keeping a poetic rhythm; it's better than many translations in this regard, but it's still a bit irritating -- and McCraw's Du Fu's Laments from the South, which is slow picking, especially when there's actual poetry from Merwin to turn to. I should probably also mention that I'm halfway through The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (Quiller-Couch edition) by reading a handful of poems at a time, now and then.
I'm not sure if what I'm doing with it counts as "reading," but I've started folding models from Advanced Origami by Michael LaFosse. As an origamist, LaFosse is very much on the origami-as-art end of the spectrum, which means lots of wet-folding and customized papers, especially after the first couple models. The surrounding text, however, has wet-folding tips and instructions for customizing and making paper -- though I'm not going to be up for papermaking for *cough* a while, let alone making paper good enough for folding, so I may not "finish" the book, like, ever. The models so far have been tastier than expected.
Officially DNF: The Mind of Mr. J.G. Reeder by Edgar Wallace -- for reasons. The Little Book of Society Verse edited by Fuess and Stearns -- which is vers de société in the stricter sense (the collection's from 1922), and while it has a lot of light verse favorites, the density of condescension was just way too high to deal with.
What I might read next:
For a shorter book, poking at the first couple chapters would count as having started it, but in A Dream of Red Mansions it's more like scouting -- or maybe preparing a base camp is a better metaphor. This edition, fwiw, is translated by Gladys Yang & Yang Hsien-yi and is in desperate need of a family tree diagram. (The internet has not helped me here -- all I can find are in Chinese.) The Maoist introduction deserves a post of its own.
---L.