[lit-ideas] Re: Morc Huck Pump
- From: Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2008 00:52:55 -0400
>>Benn's review of Rilke
Read Gottfried's _Primal Vision_ long ago but the contents didn't stick
in memory, just the gray, trade paperback cover. It could've been the
translation.
Maybe translation causes some texts to seem much more interesting, or
alternately much less interesting, than they really are. For example, I
have been assured that _The Alchemist_ by Paulo Coelho is considered
absolute garbage in Brazilian Portuguese and is widely despised there,
Yet his book is very popular in the US.
Even less interestingly, there's a book called _The Technological
Unconscious in German Modernist Literature: Nature in Rilke, Benn,
Brecht, and Döblin (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and
Culture)_ by Larson Powell. I can imagine that reading such a work would
be like sleeping in a graveyard in late autumn. Not even dogs for
company and a skittish wind like the end of Chopin's second sonata ...
plus literary theory.
With grim resolve,
Eric
_____
The novel of ideas. The novel of manners. The novel of grim witness. The
novel of pure dreaming. The novel of excess. The novel of unreadability.
The comic novel. The romance novel. The epistolary novel. The promising
first novel. The sad, patchwork, grave-robbing, over-my-dead-body
posthumous novel. The suspense novel. The crime novel. The experimental
novel. The historical novel. The novel of meticulous observations. The
novel of marital revenge. The beach novel. The war novel. The antiwar
novel. The postwar novel. The out-of-print novel. The novel that sells
to the movies before it is written. The novel that critics like to say
they want to throw across the room. The science fiction novel. The
metafiction novel. The death of the novel. The novel that changes your
life because you are young and open-hearted and eager to take an
existential leap.
- Don DeLillo, from "A History of the Writer Alone in a Room" (1999)
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
