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larryhammerWednesday reading:
Finished:
Chinese Poetry: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres 2nd edition, tr. Wai-lim Yip, who is eloquently cranky in the introduction about translators who ignore that the ambiguous language of classical Chinese is a deliberately created idiom and render only a single meaning, presumed by them to be The One understood by its original audience, by expanding the telegraphic original into grammatical English sentences. Unfortunately, while some of his translations are wonderfully evocative, all too many end up limp instead of tense with ambiguity. While I appreciate having calligraphic original text, literal word-for-word pony, and structured translation all together, I do wonder whether the layout could have been a little better designed. (It is, to be fair, a hard challenge.) Not the best introductory general anthology.
DNF:
Library of Heaven's Path, Heng Sao Tian Ya. High-school librarian transmigrates into the body of a failing teacher at a school for cultivators in a xuanhuan world. If you're looking for the catharsis of repeated revenge fantasies, this is for you. If it's a problem that either the intelligence of characters fluctuates according to the needs of easy plotting or said plotting is done by repeat-looping a handful of irritating tropes, avoid.
In progress:
British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Paula R. Backscheider & Catherine Ingrassia -- on the one hand, it's nicely meaty at 900 pages and I like the organization by kind and topic, as opposed to ye traditional chronological fare, but on the other, some of the editorial work leaves me unsatisfied. You know you're in for a tussle if you're already arguing with the footnotes by page 17,* and some of the stuff praised in commentary is just plain bad. Omissions seem more of a problem: no epics because no excerpts is understandable, but in general the dearth of narrative poems (not to mention satire) is disturbing. This will be a long, slow read (because 900 pages) but the pleasing new discoveries are likely to keep it on my nightstand.
World of Cultivation, Fan Xiang to chapter 786 out of 915, so into the home stretch.
Various other poetry anthologies, to be noted when completed.
* For the record, if with Flaccus you prefer the wine, the reference isn't to G. Valerius Flaccus, author of an unfinished Argonautica, but Q. Horatius Flaccus b.k.a. Horace -- and of all periods of English literature, if the 18th century is your wheelhouse, you need to know him. Also, gaps in your understanding of how the term sonnet has been used historically can result in proclaiming innovations that aren't.
---L.
Subject quote from Hymn Before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni, Samuel Coleridge.
Finished:
Chinese Poetry: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres 2nd edition, tr. Wai-lim Yip, who is eloquently cranky in the introduction about translators who ignore that the ambiguous language of classical Chinese is a deliberately created idiom and render only a single meaning, presumed by them to be The One understood by its original audience, by expanding the telegraphic original into grammatical English sentences. Unfortunately, while some of his translations are wonderfully evocative, all too many end up limp instead of tense with ambiguity. While I appreciate having calligraphic original text, literal word-for-word pony, and structured translation all together, I do wonder whether the layout could have been a little better designed. (It is, to be fair, a hard challenge.) Not the best introductory general anthology.
DNF:
Library of Heaven's Path, Heng Sao Tian Ya. High-school librarian transmigrates into the body of a failing teacher at a school for cultivators in a xuanhuan world. If you're looking for the catharsis of repeated revenge fantasies, this is for you. If it's a problem that either the intelligence of characters fluctuates according to the needs of easy plotting or said plotting is done by repeat-looping a handful of irritating tropes, avoid.
In progress:
British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Paula R. Backscheider & Catherine Ingrassia -- on the one hand, it's nicely meaty at 900 pages and I like the organization by kind and topic, as opposed to ye traditional chronological fare, but on the other, some of the editorial work leaves me unsatisfied. You know you're in for a tussle if you're already arguing with the footnotes by page 17,* and some of the stuff praised in commentary is just plain bad. Omissions seem more of a problem: no epics because no excerpts is understandable, but in general the dearth of narrative poems (not to mention satire) is disturbing. This will be a long, slow read (because 900 pages) but the pleasing new discoveries are likely to keep it on my nightstand.
World of Cultivation, Fan Xiang to chapter 786 out of 915, so into the home stretch.
Various other poetry anthologies, to be noted when completed.
* For the record, if with Flaccus you prefer the wine, the reference isn't to G. Valerius Flaccus, author of an unfinished Argonautica, but Q. Horatius Flaccus b.k.a. Horace -- and of all periods of English literature, if the 18th century is your wheelhouse, you need to know him. Also, gaps in your understanding of how the term sonnet has been used historically can result in proclaiming innovations that aren't.
---L.
Subject quote from Hymn Before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni, Samuel Coleridge.