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[LKB]

I'm truly sorry to hear that. I lived in France for almost two years and I have very fond memories of that extended sojourn. Great country history-, art- and landscape-wise, beautiful language which I speak fluently, exquisite cuisine, excellent wines and beers, joie de vivre and on top of them all I was young and madly in love --- I greatly relished the whole experience and I will jump at the next opportunity to visit France again, especially Grenoble, where I was based.

I'm glad your time there was so positive. 

My best European experiences were in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, The Netherlands and England.

Belgium and Italy were OK, though l only had relatively little time there to explore. Maybe someday...

[Florestan]

I'm glad your time there was so positive. 

in a certain way, it was the best time of my life --- but this intense nostalgia has surely got something to do with the fact that I was 20 years younger. 

My best European experiences were in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, The Netherlands and England.

I lived in The Netherlands too, for almost a year, but my experience there was nothing like the French one. Out of respect for my Dutch friends here I will not elaborate on that.

I've visited Switzerland, Austria and Germany as well and enjoyed them. Coincidentally, in this exact order (the enjoyment, that is, not the time of visit). 

Belgium and Italy were OK, though l only had relatively little time there to explore. Maybe someday...

Italy is my favorite country, period. I was charmed, hooked, bewitched and floored on the spot the very moment I first set foot in Italy, specifically in Venice. No, really, I had a most uncanny feeling of coming home and I am sure that if it's true that we all lived another life, I must have lived mine in Venice. I also visited Rome, Naples and Florence and greatly enjoyed them. If I had to choose a foreign country to settle in for life, it would be Italy.

Belgium is nice, too, especially Dinant, a charming little city surrounded by mountains (Belgian scale mountains, that is).

Well, add to France's spell on me the fact that, being based there, I was able to make all the above-mentioned trips. 

But I digress greatly, this is the wrong thread for such effusions. 

[Mandryka]

I've got a bit of a history with this puppy. When I was at school I studied Greek, and the 15 year old me  could struggle his way through bits of Euripides and Xenophon. One day the teacher gave us a bit of Homer to look at and, like, it's real hard. It's one of the reasons I decided to do maths and physics rather than classics at 6th form.

At uni I mixed a lot with classicists because I studied philosophy. At the time Oxford had a rapid introduction to Greek for Latinists who hadn't done Greek at school. I remember a friend telling me that the aim was to get them to the point where they could have a good go at Homer after three terms. And because of that, at the back of my mind has always been the thought that I'd like to read the Iliad in Greek before I die.

Then in my 30s I had a go at reading it in English -- Pope or Chapman, I can't remember which. Some parts of it really stuck --  Hecuba speaking to Hector before he goes to fight Achilles, the battle with Scamander, Priam in Achilles' tent.

Well, I noticed a course on it at London's City Lit -- remote with zoom, starts Wednesday, 10 hours over 5 weeks, they're using this translation, so I thought, why not? If I enjoy it, I may well take lessons in classical Greek. It's now or never I guess.

And reading the first two chapters, the translation is really well written -- how true it is to Homer I can't say. It's an incredibly good story. I just hate that bastard Agamemnon! And that bitch Hera  . . .

[JBS]

I've got a bit of a history with this puppy. When I was at school I studied Greek, and the 15 year old me  could struggle his way through bits of Euripides and Xenophon. One day the teacher gave us a bit of Homer to look at and, like, it's real hard. It's one of the reasons I decided to do maths and physics rather than classics at 6th form.

At uni I mixed a lot with classicists because I studied philosophy. At the time Oxford had a rapid introduction to Greek for Latinists who hadn't done Greek at school. I remember a friend telling me that the aim was to get them to the point where they could have a good go at Homer after three terms. And because of that, at the back of my mind has always been the thought that I'd like to read the Iliad in Greek before I die.

Then in my 30s I had a go at reading it in English -- Pope or Chapman, I can't remember which. Some parts of it really stuck --  Hecuba speaking to Hector before he goes to fight Achilles, the battle with Scamander, Priam in Achilles tent.

Well, I noticed a course on it at London's City Lit -- remote with zoom, starts Wednesday, 10 hours over 5 weeks, they're using this translation, so I thought, why not? If I enjoy it, I may well take lessons in classical Greek. It's now or never I guess.

And reading the first two chapters, the translation is really well written -- how true it is to Homer I can't say. It's an incredibly good story. I just hate that bastard Agamemnon! And that bitch Hera  . . .

Is it a prose translation?

I bought and read the Lattimore translations as a college student, as well as his Hesiod and the Greek dramatist series on which he collaborated.
Loved them enough that I've never felt the need to get any newer translation.

The Theomachy section is fun, especially the part in which Aphrodite flees in tears back to Olympus after one of the Greeks (Diomedes, I think) stabs her hand: Homer thumbing his nose at the Greek pantheon.

[Mandryka]

Is it a prose translation?

I bought and read the Lattimore translations as a college student, as well as his Hesiod and the Greek dramatist series on which he collaborated.
Loved them enough that I've never felt the need to get any newer translation.

The Theomachy section is fun, especially the part in which Aphrodite flees in tears back to Olympus after one of the Greeks (Diomedes, I think) stabs her hand: Homer thumbing his nose at the Greek pantheon.

It's prose. It's the translation the course is using.

[Ganondorf]

Started a new Henry James book - this time in Finnish translation (not the one in the image above). I normally would have opted for the original but this just stood out in library and I thought what the hell. I can at any case read it later in English. This is one of the rather small amount of Henry James works that have been translated to my language. James's personal style may not quite come across in translation (as far as I can tell) but this has been fairly engaging so far.

[SimonNZ]

Started:



Read various parts previously, but never the whole thing right through before.

Long since made peace with the fact that I'm never going to be someone who gets through it in unmodernized Middle English.

[vers la flamme]

Picking up The Crossing again, in memoriam Cormac McCarthy. I love his work, but I've never been able to get all the way through this one.

[Florestan]

An excellent article by Isaiah Berlin:

The 'Naiveté' of Verdi

[ritter]

An excellent article by Isaiah Berlin:

The 'Naiveté' of Verdi

Will read it with interest, Andrei. Thanks for the link, and good evening to you.

Azorín (nom de plume of José Martínez Ruiz) was a leading figure of the Spanish generación del 98, and widely considered the greatest prose stylist in Spanish in the 20th century, although his reputation —or, rather, his visibility— has declined in the past couple of decades. His books had a prominent place in my father's library.

Prompted by the 150th anniversary of his birth on on 8 June 1873, I am now reading for the first time his essay Castilla (1912). Beautifully written, this is not a sentimental description of "eternal Castile", but more a philosophical, profound approach to this part of Spain, its peoples and customs, with wider themes, such as the passing of time, also being addressed. The first chapters, e.g., deal with railroads.

I'm reading it in a 1982 reprint of the lavish 1943 anthology of Azorín's work published by Biblioteca Nueva (a long-established, superb publishing house that was almost criminally driven to bankruptcy by new owners and management team early this century  ).

[Florestan]

(can be read online at archive.org)

Extremely amusing, but... dare I say it? Heck, I dare: I find myself in perfect agreement with some of those pronouncements, especially with regard to Beethoven in general and to Brahms's First Symphony in particular. 

[Florestan]

Azorín (nom de plume of José Martínez Ruiz) was a leading figure of the Spanish generación del 98, and widely considered the greatest prose stylist in Spanish in the 20th century, although his reputation —or, rather, his visibility— has declined in the past couple of decades. His books had a prominent place in my father's library.

Azorín is the author of one of my favorite witticisms ever penned, which I quote by memory:

The Spaniard's idea of legality consists in possessing an officially stamped and signed paper stating that the owner thereof is entitled to do whatever he pleases.

[Florestan]

My reading in the last three days.



Six Characters in Search of an Author
Tonight We Improvise
To Clothe the Naked

My first encounter with Pirandello's theatre and I am mightily impressed. All these dramas are very good but I especially liked Tonight We Improvise not only because it extensively uses and quotes operatic music (specifically Verdi) but also because the interesting discussion of the difference between text and performance and how the latter might often be, nay, is, more important than the former applies, mutatis mutandis, to music as well. A most interesting play and obviously a tour de force to stage well.



The Double

Despite the subject matter, which is the slow but inexorable descent into madness of an otherwise dull and unremarkable fellow, I enjoyed this a lot because it has what Dostoevsky rarely displays: humour aplenty. I chuckled reading this short novel more than I did in the combined reading of The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Demons. This is probably the work in which he comes closest to Gogol.

[ritter]

My reading in the last three days.



Six Characters in Search of an Author
Tonight We Improvise
To Clothe the Naked

My first encounter with Pirandello's theatre and I am mightily impressed. All these dramas are very good but I especially liked Tonight We Improvise not only because it extensively uses and quotes operatic music (specifically Verdi) but also because the interesting discussion of the difference between text and performance and how the latter might often be, nay, is, more important than the former applies, mutatis mutandis, to music as well. A most interesting play and obviously a tour de force to stage well.

...

I had the chance to see Tonight We Improvise staged here in Madrid, and it was great theatre. Pirandello is really something!

...

The Teatro Español here in Madrid (the city's oldest playhouse, and one of the most prestigious theatrical institutions in the Spanish speaking world) produced Luigi Pirandello's late Questa sera si recita a soggetto (Tonight we Improvise, or Esta noche se improvisa la comedia in Spanish translation). This is a part of the author's "trilogy of the theatre within the theatre", along with Six Characters in Search of an Author and Each in His Own Way. A convoluted but highly interesting and entertaining plot about a stage director asking his actors to improvise a theatrical adaptation of Pirandello's novella Leonora, addio! (with clear operatic references). The limit between what his happening to (or is being said by) the actors or their characters becomes very difuse. The producer Ernesto Caballero made some adaptations of te text to include references to modern life (or to Spanish culture, the work being particularly Sicilian in its origin), and humour was present throughout most of the play (despite the tragic ending). All this worked admirably, and the crew of actors (many well-known from TV appearances in Spain) functioned very well together in this choral piece. A fun evening in the theatre! I've always come out impressed from the theatre whenever I've seen a piece by Pirandello!


The simple but rather effective sets by Monica Boromello.

...

Buonasera, Andrei!

[Florestan]

I had the chance to see Tonight We Improvise staged here in Madrid, and it was great theatre. Pirandello is really something!

Buonasera, Andrei!

Servidor vostro, sior si.

I have a question: when you say "tragic end", you refer to what? Surely not the play itself, which strikes me as rather in the Commedia dell'arte vein, with its obligatory and humorous final wink to the audience, which not even Goldoni dispensed with.. 

[ritter]

Servidor vostro, sior si.

I have a question: when you say "tragic end", you refer to what? Surely not the play itself, which strikes me as rather in the Commedia dell'arte vein, with its obligatory and humorous final wink to the audience, which not even Goldoni dispensed with.. 

I don't have the text, but doesn't one of the female characters commit suicide near the end? Perhaps the director of the production I saw tinkered with the text...

[Florestan]

I don't have the text, but doesn't one of the female characters commit suicide near the end? Perhaps the director of the production I saw tinkered with the text...

Heart failure, actually --- but it's the ending of the improvisation, not of the play... Actually, the line between text and peformance, art and life are so blurred in this play... I would certainly love to see it staged. It was actually staged in Romania many decades ago, years before 1989, to high critical acclaim, my parents saw it, blessed be their memory.

[Florestan]

The Double

Despite the subject matter, which is the slow but inexorable descent into madness of an otherwise dull and unremarkable fellow, I enjoyed this a lot because it has what Dostoevsky rarely displays: humour aplenty. I chuckled reading this short novel more than I did in the combined reading of The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Demons. This is probably the work in which he comes closest to Gogol.

Actually, now that I think about it, dull and unremarkable as Goliadkin is, he's also more humane and likeable than all other characters, because he alone is humble and compassionate, and maybe this is precisely why he goes mad.

[vers la flamme]

My reading in the last three days.



Six Characters in Search of an Author
Tonight We Improvise
To Clothe the Naked

My first encounter with Pirandello's theatre and I am mightily impressed. All these dramas are very good but I especially liked Tonight We Improvise not only because it extensively uses and quotes operatic music (specifically Verdi) but also because the interesting discussion of the difference between text and performance and how the latter might often be, nay, is, more important than the former applies, mutatis mutandis, to music as well. A most interesting play and obviously a tour de force to stage well.



The Double

Despite the subject matter, which is the slow but inexorable descent into madness of an otherwise dull and unremarkable fellow, I enjoyed this a lot because it has what Dostoevsky rarely displays: humour aplenty. I chuckled reading this short novel more than I did in the combined reading of The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Demons. This is probably the work in which he comes closest to Gogol.

I busted out laughing my ass off when Mitya Fyodorovich was talking to the cops, trying to clear his name after he is arrested on suspicion of killing his dad, and saying way too much. That part is comedy gold.

I'm reading the infamous Shostakovich/Volkov Testimony. Fraudulent to some degree or another though it may be, Volkov's Shostakovich is so humane and likable that my current opinion is only that I wish deeply that it were a fully authentic picture of the man. I love all the praise in memoriam Glazunov—makes me realize I ought to hear his music. I have Laurel Fay's supposedly more factual Shostakovich bio on the table and I intend to read it next.

[SimonNZ]