Lilacs Out of the Dead Land, What Are You Reading? Spring 2022

ah ok sorry didn't realise it was contemporary

Thought people did this as way of showing off their erudition or at least mock erudition. It was definitely done quite often back in the day.

I guess it can be done now as a way of harkening back to that old tradition.

Take a look at The Recognitions, for example. First two things you see are a quote in Latin and a quote in German from Faust.

I guess it can have a narrative function, as with films - the narrator hears people talking in a foreign language, but doesn't know what they're saying, and nor does the monolingual reader, thereby building suspense, or identification with the fictional protagonist.

There was supposedly a time when Every Schoolboy Knew Latin so there’s that as well. I never studied it, although I did click on the Duolingo course a few times, but I feel like if I stare at it long enough it starts to make sense. For instance, just went to a Clozemaster collection of Common Latin Phrases and seeing things like

De (et coloribus) non est disputandum.

What do you mean by that?

looks like there's a word missing to me (i did study latin, up to A-level, where i did very badly bcz i didn't do the revision lol)

the more common phrase is: de gustibus non est disputandum, concerning taste there is no argument (meaning there's no point arguing)

coloribus means colour

a better translation is "there's no argument against someone's tastes"

(not sure where colours come into it, apparently it was already a cliche in ancient rome and no one knows who said it first)

this guy has cut back on using latin apothegms bcz he's used all the ones he knows

Yes, the full quote was De gustibus (et coloribus) non est disputandum. Was trying to clean up some format and a very important word went missing.

Guess my point might have been that there are some Latin phrases and cliches that are pretty familiar even to the general public whereas others would be recognizable to those with an Old Skool education or playing catchup to such.

parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus

"Nunquam minus solus, quam cum solus," is now become a very vulgar saying. Every man and almost every boy for these seventeen hundred years has had it in his mouth. But it was at first spoken by the excellent Scipio, who was without question a most worthy, most happy, and the greatest of all mankind.

parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus

Then there’s that one attributed to Galen that probably belongs on I Love TMI.

As Mark S said: I don't see where colour comes into it.

I don't know what your other Latin sentences mean.

this guy has cut back on using latin apothegms bcz he's used all the ones he knows

This is a good theory!

google translate is surprisingly good at a first rough aproximation!

= go to google, type in "latin english" (without the quotemarks): then drop the phrase you want to read into the "latin" space and a translation will apear in the "english" space -- tho it's sometimes a bit literal

Think the colour part is some interior decorating thing.

"You cannot argue with taste, but honey, that puce is just hideous."

Lol.

Most if not all of the Latin phrases mentioned so far you can just search the whole thing and find a translation, usually with commentary.

“This screensaver is killing me.”

There are probably over a hundred latin 'tags' so common across a fistful of european cultures that they're like the various taglines from Shakespeare known to most English speakers.

People in other European countries may know 100+ Latin phrases.

Having lived in England a long time, I would suggest that a majority of people in England do not.

James Redd: Yes, one can use Google Translate to translate phrases from foreign languages. This is often highly useful. But I didn't particularly want to be doing it twice per page while reading this novel (which I generally read away from a computer).

my ereader has French, Spanish and English dictionaries built in, which is handy when reading, say, Cormac McCarthy

i'm actually quite interested in which phrases have got bedded into which languages -- which of the following do the french or the dutch or the swedes also say?

status quo, de facto, persona non grata, bona fide, sui generis, sine qua non, ad infinitum, et cetera…

and what -- of similar ilk -- do they say that we don't?

googling says french also uses: ad hoc, vice versa, de jure/de facto and bona fide

Sorry about that, the pinefox. Believe it was sinkah who first mentioned Google Translate, I didn’t specify a particular search engine or software. Feel like this whole discussion is at risk of turning into a mise en abyme.

Wonder if someone can make a bad joke about a French band that is the equivalent of Status Quo.

my pitch for that band is little bob story

Ha, never even heard of them but they seem to fit the bill.

I guess it can have a narrative function, as with films - the narrator hears people talking in a foreign language, but doesn't know what they're saying, and nor does the monolingual reader, thereby building suspense, or identification with the fictional protagonist.

Wonder if someone can make a bad joke about a French band that is the equivalent of Status Quo.

Ça plane pour moi.

Pinefox, pinevixen

I looked up one of the first long Latin sentences at the beginning of that book and had a lot of fun doing so. Wonder if I should post my results here or start another thread or maybe just revive one of the three extant ones about Latin.

mihi labitur!

(technically belgian but)

ego rex lecti sum!

(i think this project deserves its own thread)

xpost my ereader has French, Spanish and English dictionaries built in, which is handy when reading, say, Cormac McCarthy What ereader is that, koogs? Does sound handy.

and German, Italian and Portuguese

it's a kobo. Clara hd, but the firmware is common to most of them.

you still have to look things up a word at a time but it'll give you the gist.

Okay, off we go: Qui prior egressus est, Iacobus Rufus erat: A thread for all things Latin

>>> I looked up one of the first long Latin sentences at the beginning of that book

Which book? Do you mean THE NORFOLK MYSTERY? I hope so.

I finished THE NORFOLK MYSTERY. The Latin phrases continued to the end, still often untranslated and not understood by me. I note that while this is broadly frustrating, it need not be all bad. There is something to be said for a varied linguistic texture, escaping monolingualism and encountering other languages, to be sure. Still, I'm not sure that dropping in endless phrases from a language that almost nobody knows is a very effective aesthetic strategy.

The main thing I add about this novel is that the series, THE COUNTY GUIDES, while at some level detective stories, seem only partially engaged with that generic project. There is a crime or a murder, it is solved, there are interviews of a sort (though these usually under the guise of research for the County Guides). But I don't think that this novel would fare very well by the rules of the Detection Club, as it doesn't really present coherent evidence or sufficient clues for the reader to solve the mystery before the detective does. Generically these are novels half-engaged in the detective genre, which are also historical novels (pastiche to a degree, also with in-jokes and things that mean more to later readers) and, in a relatively gentle way, comedy. Their other big feature is to contain tons of information; they are to a large extent a celebration of the multitudinous world of fact.

The Champs Elysees... It's like that pond a British novelist talks about, at the bottom of which, in layered deposits, lie the echoes of the voices of every passerby who has daydreamed on its banks. The shimmering water preserves those echoes forever and, on quiet evenings, they all blend together.

This is from Flowers of Ruin by Patrick Modiano but do any of you know what British novelist he's on about?

(...if any - it would hardly be uncharacteristic if this just turned out to be an evocative reference to nothing)

I don't. I suppose it could be an evocative reference to nothing, or it could well be a genuine reference to a not very well known novel that not many of us have read or remember.

Nice image but it strikes me that passers by wouldn't be daydreaming on its banks and that people daydreaming on its banks would be doing so silently. (No idea either.)

i finally finished season of migration to the north. i'm a little flabbergasted tbh. it's hard to know what to say about it, other than i can't stop thinking about it. one thing is don't recall ever reading a novel so compelling.

I had never heard of that book until now. Sounds like an essential read.

it's wild. beautifully written. accomplishes this feat where it's "about colonialism" but winds so deep into it that the subject disperses into i don't even know what, a subterranean network of images and events? all of these different intractable relations.

William Shakespeare - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Antonio Moresco - Distant Light
Juan Carlos Onetti - The Shipyard
Antonio Di Benedetto - The Silentiary

The Silentiary is the 3rd book of Di Benedetto's fiction to be translated alongisde Zama and a book of his short stories (Esther Allen is translating one more of his 'trilogy' which will come out next year). I loved Zama very much and this is probably even better. Di Benedetto might've sharpened his concision and directness just a touch, in this tale of a man's battle against man-made noise. The one review I've read (in the Nation) cites Kafka and Dostoevsky but the writing is very different, there isn't a battle against a bureaucracy (though his enemy cannot be fought against: you either endure or fall, and you can guess what happens). I finished it alongside a re-read of Onetti's Shipyard (also published in the early 60s) and this is Latin American literature at its best. The narrator goes back to the town he left long ago, he is offered to manage a Shipyard but its just a thread to hang the various torments of the mind which Onetti's prose takes you through. Both are short, intense, with Onetti having more 'plot', and if they are doing a sort of existential crisis I can tell you no one at that time was doing it better. A great time to be alive, it is not. For the reader, it is.

I also read Moresco's Distant Light, the only novel by this Italian writer to be translated (he apparently went onto write a Pynchon-y book that hasn't been translated yet), and this is like a well written episode of the X-Files. A man in a small town is walking about and finds a spot of Distant Light. Night after night, which he traces it all back to a child who is living on his own, is a good cook and goes to Night School. Its fun. Then onto another of Shakespeare's plays.

>> i finally finished season of migration to the north
> I had never heard of that book until now

me neither. but less than 3 hours later i was recycling old copies of the Guardian Review and someone mentioned it in her favourite books.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/22/leila-aboulela-books-that-made-me

Started In Dubious Battle, my first Steinbeck novel since high school.

Finished a few smaller things, also finished Prynne’s new Snooty Tip-Offs. Trying to decide whether to read poems or a novel next, think I might go with the latter and read Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli. Anyone read it?