What are you currently reading?

[Geo Dude]

Foundation and Empire.

[Wakefield]

.[asin]B004FYZ3KY[/asin]

Robert Levine - Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back [Kindle Edition]

A book exposing the position of the media (against the technology industries, here called "parasites"), in the battle for the copyright. 

And also these:



George Steiner - Los logócratas [original title: Les logocrates, Éditions de l'Herne, 2002]



Exactly this Spanish translation:



G.B. Shaw - Manual de socialismo y capitalismo para mujeres inteligentes

[Bogey]

Second in the series of the Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov mystery series.

[Geo Dude]

Now reading:

[Octave]

Can anyone recommend a superior English translation of Dostoyevsky's HOUSE OF THE DEAD?  There is always Constance Garnett, but I know readers---multi-lingual or otherwise---are more vicious about their translation preferences than we all are about our preferred interpretations of musical works.   
This is a FD work I have never read, one of the very few afaik; the Janacek connection is drawing me to it belatedly.

[Brian]

Can anyone recommend a superior English translation of Dostoyevsky's HOUSE OF THE DEAD?  There is always Constance Garnett, but I know readers---multi-lingual or otherwise---are more vicious about their translation preferences than we all are about our preferred interpretations of musical works.   
This is a FD work I have never read, one of the very few afaik; the Janacek connection is drawing me to it belatedly.

Justifiably: Constance Garnett took a lot of liberties with Dostoevsky's prose at a time when critics thought (oh so foolishly!) that Dostoevsky's prose needed a lot of help. This is why many of her translations sound so, well, Victorian - that and the rumors that if she didn't know a word, she skipped it.

Some of the highest-grade levels of Dostoevsky snob (e.g. David Foster Wallace) are frustrated by ALL translations of his work, but I like the Pevear & Volokhonsky translations. That duo has unfortunately not done House of the Dead, so my recommendation would be the Oxford copy:

[asin]0199540519[/asin]

Haven't actually read/compared, but I almost always find Oxford's translations good and their notes/explanatory essays valuable.

[AdamFromWashington]

Blood Meridian, right now. I love it, but darn, it's really violent!

[Octave]

Justifiably: Constance Garnett took a lot of liberties with Dostoevsky's prose at a time when critics thought (oh so foolishly!) that Dostoevsky's prose needed a lot of help. This is why many of her translations sound so, well, Victorian - that and the rumors that if she didn't know a word, she skipped it.

Some of the highest-grade levels of Dostoevsky snob (e.g. David Foster Wallace) are frustrated by ALL translations of his work, but I like the Pevear & Volokhonsky translations. That duo has unfortunately not done House of the Dead, so my recommendation would be the Oxford copy:

Haven't actually read/compared, but I almost always find Oxford's translations good and their notes/explanatory essays valuable.

Thanks for that suggestion, Brian; I will act on it.  DFW: "How does one 'fly at' someone?"  (from his Dostoevsky-via-Joseph-Frank essay, paraphrased from memory)
I too have really liked the P&V translations of the central canon (or at any rate the most famous books); at any rate, I have relied upon those translations, as they are all I know aside from the Garnetts, which did seem stiff to me.

[Brian]

Thanks for that suggestion, Brian; I will act on it.  DFW: "How does one 'fly at' someone?"  (from his Dostoevsky-via-Joseph-Frank essay, paraphrased from memory)

(which I intend to re-read, by the way, as Joseph Frank died Feb. 27)

[Lisztianwagner]

After reading The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Turn of the Screw, I've almost finished Wordsworth/Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads.

[Karl Henning]

Great stuff, Ilaria.

[Lisztianwagner]

Great stuff, Ilaria.

Thank you, Karl.

I should start thinking what I could read next.....

[Geo Dude]

My sci-fi search delves further into the past.  Right now I'm reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas out of this volume (on Kindle):



It contains a set of five new translations of some of Verne's novels.  I actually switched from the Mercier translation to this one mid-book and the difference is astounding.

Prior to that I read Frankenstein, the 1818 version.  It was wonderful.

[Octave]

A friend of mine read one of the individual works by Verne in Walter's annotated translation and said it was fantastic; I'm guessing this nice omnibus volume doesn't have all the annotations as well.  I will have to get to it

Geo Dude, where do you find out about SF/speculative/fantastic fiction that you want to read?  Just curious if there are any particularly good resources for kicking off the cross-referencing machine.

[Geo Dude]

Geo Dude, where do you find out about SF/speculative/fantastic fiction that you want to read?  Just curious if there are any particularly good resources for kicking off the cross-referencing machine.

http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/ is a great resource.  Tons of knowledgeable people there about various genres and time periods of speculative fiction who are generally friendly, even if they can occasionally be a pugnacious lot.  Sort of the GMG of the speculative fiction world.

[Octave]

Thanks for that tip, it's appreciated.

[Cato]

A revisit to the 4-volume epic Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann.

In today's Wall Street Journal there is an article about the influence of screenwriters on novelists: a certain Derek Haas, screenwriter of the remake of 3:10 To Yuma, advises "Keep it tight, keep those pages turning!"

I had just read Thomas Mann's nearly one-page description of the bearing and face of Eliezer, which includes the following 2 sentences on p. 322 of the Modern Library translation by John Woods:

When one tried to imagine the person of that ancient wanderer and friend of God,* the features of Eliezer's face might have lent assistance, not only because they were as grand and imposing as his whole figure and bearing, but even more importantly because they also had something unique about them, a soothing universality, a divine vagueness, that made it easier to transfer his image to some venerable unknown out of the primal past...His still dark eyebrows ran in narrow, low arcs from the shallow onset of the nose to the temples, while the almost lashless eyelids, both upper and lower, were so heavy and somehow swollen that they looked like lips from between which the black orbs of his eyes bulged.

* i.e. Abraham

Obviously opposed to keeping it "tight," Thomas Mann expands things ("a soothing universality, a divine vagueness,"  "the black orbs of..." ).  But note the richness thereby gained, how the mystery of Eliezer is increased, how his "somehow swollen" eyes become tongues between "lips" and so capable of silent speech, all adding to his mystical connection to the divine.

I am sure Mr. Haas would complain about the redundancy ("...both upper and lower" after "eyelids" and "the black orbs of" rather than just using "eyes") and the length of the sentences.

The purposes of the two authors are, however, quite different.

[Geo Dude]

Thanks for that tip, it's appreciated.

Glad to help.  Let me know if you sign up there.

By the way, in case you're not an ebook user I should warn you that the reviews on that Verne omnibus indicate that the paper version is huge.

[Octave]

Thanks for the Verne paper/glue warning, GD. 

Cato or whoever-among-Mannomanes, has anyone had some personal experience comparing the translations of Mann's DOCTOR FAUSTUS by Lowe-Porter and by Woods, respectively?  I've not read the book, but I'm thinking about it soon, as a summer project.  I think I heard one account that Mann himself liked the Lowe-Porter, but I cannot remember the source of this anecdote.  I don't think Mann set aside the time to try the Woods.

[Octave]

Re: screenwriters: I think most of the truly great film directors ignore them, as they perhaps should.  I would like to see narrative advice from great film editors.  The closest I've gotten is from the fascinating Walter Murch, though he's too humble a workman to actually condescend to give novelists tips.  He also has better taste than that Hollywood whore quoted in the WSJ; Murch raves about Curzio Malaparte, making me wonder if he's intent to draw nourishment from those sources instead of simply dictating necessary shortcuts.