A deep irony of all of this is that I was in bed trying to get into The Sun Also Rises and got too caught up in the posting.
The Barrows/Macy translation is the one I'm familiar with and it's an all-timer for me. Some other approachable but excellent options: William Carlos Williams - Spring and All Sylvia Plath - Ariel Theodore Roethke - Words for the Wind Joy Harjo - The Woman Who Fell From the Sky Lucille Clifton - The Book of Light Fernando Pessoa - The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro W.S. Merwin - Garden Time and a shameless self-plug of my own collection - Mystic Orchards
Thanks! I’ll ask you the same question I asked OotyPa: For that Japanese poet, is there anything I need to know about translations? Maybe it’s an overthinking question and there’s only one version, or multiple that are just as good. But, with the conversations I found when I decided to do Rumi, I just wanna do due diligence, lol. Oh wait, this is the guy who wrote a book of essays around basketball, which my bestie absolutely adored. I’m not a sports bitch besides starting to casually pay attention to the WNBA last summer, lol, but maybe I should give it a try?
I have been trying to get back into reading fiction. When I was a kid I was reading literally constantly. It really got kicked off by re-reading Stephen King Dark Tower last year and some other King and then I think I got a little over my skiis trying read real literary shit and never really settled into it. So now I'm trying to get the muscle back in shape with scifi/fantasy stuff again which was really what I was into as a kid. It's cool to have the whole world of non-YA in those genres open up
Yeah he's got a few books. I haven't read the basketball one yet. The Crown Ain't Worth Much is his book of poetry. They Can't Kill Us Til They Kill Us (which I have and still need to read) is a collection of essays. He also has a book about A Tribe Called Quest. EDIT: Some others too, but I don't have them. Crown is worth getting if you want poetry.
Other poetry people I know will say that translations are better than not reading it at all but you should also read it in the original language if you can, even if you're just doing it phonetically. But, that's second hand
Yeah seasons 9-10 in the early 2000's ER went insane with jumping the shark. There was also a whole multiple season arc during that era where it leaves the hospital and follows a bunch of the regular characters doing Doctors Without Borders stuff in Darfur. It stopped really being the same type of show. ER seasons 1-8 are absolute peak network TV though. I think the next all timer ER episode you have coming up is 2x7 Hell Or Highwater. Which is the episode that made George Clooney a star.
Shoutout to the two things that helped me finally start getting reading momentum (a hard thing to build in your 30s, lol), Dayspring by Anthony Oliveira, which I think I shouted out here before. Poetically written nonlinear blend of coming of age story and gay erotica between Jesus and The Disciple He Loved. Really beautiful work! And printed quite nicely. Even committed to printing the words of Jesus (who is never really named) in red, lol. And, Clarice Lispector, specifically A Breath of Life, and The Passion of GH. Both very stream of consciousness, not traditional novels or whatever (I’m not really equipped to talk style that well, lol). The former is a conversation, or maybe more so a pair of overlapping monologues, between a man and the woman he created (kinda Frankenstein-ish), both of whom represent Lispector herself. Compiled after her death. And, the latter about a well off woman who kills a cockroach that startles her and has an entire existential crisis about God and the unknowable depths of existence. Cool shit!
The Passion of GH was actually what I bounced off of lastly before deciding to shift away from higher concept stuff, mostly because I was super into it but felt like I wasn't processing it like I wanted to. Even in the first, like, quarter of the book there were so many passages that were articulations of the way I feel like I understood the 'unknowable depths of existence' while on certain combinations of psychedelics lol. Especially one passage about feeling like you completely understood something, but that articulating it was not only impossible, the very act of attempting to do so would destroy the understanding itself
I’m not a translation expert, so I can’t recommend specific Basho translations. My copy of Narrow Road to the Interior is translated by Sam Hamill but I don’t know specifically of others, though translation is important. But I shop mostly at used bookstores so I usually end up grabbing what’s there, my copies that make up Proust’s In Search of Lost Time series are by different translators, and I think it can help understanding translation by encountering different ones of the same author or work. In college, a classmate had me read his copy of the Borges short story, the Gospel According to Mark, which blew me away, but when I went to buy my own copy a few years later, the translation I found at Barnes & Noble didn’t hit the same way. So it’s important, but I generally just go with what’s there unless an internet search turns up a bunch of experts explicitly denouncing a translation.
I responded real strongly to it from, like, a queer Christian, find myself thinking existentially (without drugs ‘cause I’m boring that way, lol) kinda way. That and A Breath of Life made my brain fire in such a specific way and really washed over me. Weirdly I needed something on that wavelength to bring me back to reading other things.
The first time I tried reading James Joyce in high school, I gave up like two pages in. I didn’t give him another real shot until a couple years ago when I finally committed to Ulysses, which is now one of my all-time favorite works. It’s a difficult book to understand fully, particularly on a first read, but with higher concept stuff sometimes I learned if I’m enjoying it, I just keep on with it and either look up or annotate weirder stuff while plowing ahead anyway despite the aspects I don’t understand, because while I definitely still don’t understand all of Ulysses, or say Infinite Jest, they were still rewarding experiences where understanding can be enriched by having stuck with them and finished the novel. Then any research into the history of the writer or the academic writing about the novel adds a lot, for me.
James Joyce’s Ulysses is a goal book I really wanna eventually tackle, when I think I’m “ready” lol. Specifically because it came up prominently in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, which is such a me reason to wanna read it.
With difficult books, I’m not trying to understand it as much as simply surrender to it and experience it at first. Sometimes the understanding comes later. Sometimes the disorienting effect is intentional. Like with Faulkner, his chiaroscuro-style prose often obscures the bigger picture. But then he comes around many chapters later and summarizes everything neatly within a single line of dialogue, and it contextualizes everything that came before it.
I've become almost entirely a kindle reader, so I am saving Ulysses and Infinite Jest for the time and space that I can tackle the physical copies
I haven’t gotten to Ulysses yet (I absolutely plan to) but I know Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is much more immediate. Still challenging tho. I wrote my undergrad senior thesis on it, and I think I’d sooner recommend that or Dubliners as an intro to Joyce.
I might follow up Hemingway with The Sound and the Fury. Will probabaly run through another Dave Robicheaux novel in between as a palate cleanser
Loved Portrait, read it last year. Dubliners is great too but it has been a while since I've read it.
I have a copy sitting on the windowsill of my classroom. Students last year used it as a prop in a movie they were making and it stayed inside a desk for the rest of the year, where someone drew a penis on the inside cover
I’m definitely down to enjoy something I don’t “get” on (to be glib about it) vibes. I think of how I loved Watchmen on a shallow level as a teenager before later appreciating its formalism and nuanced commentary on the superhero genre & comics medium (two separate things!), though that’s a different beast. Maybe a closer comparison is how Malick’s Tree of Life is what made me realize I like movies, before I was “ready” for it per se. Some of my waiting for certain things is, frankly, being a slow reader with likely undiagnosed ADHD, lol. Certain things that I know will take a long time I wanna wait for, until I’m more confident that my regular reading routine is sturdy. I’m partway into the Emily Wilson translation of the Iliad and will do the Odyssey next. So I can tell myself that’s part of preparing for Joyce, lol.