If you have never read The Tale of Genji, my advice is, DON’T START WITH TYLER. That’s what I did: I started with Tyler. That was a mistake.
Continue reading Which translation of the Tale of Genji should I read?
Tag: literature
Don Quixote by Cervantes (translated by P.A. Motteux)
The language in this translation helped transport me to another time and place where I was entertained by all manner of well-meaning but misguided behavior. What made the silliness tolerable was that the narration doesn’t force the reader into the character’s perspective. I could sit back comfortably and laugh because the character is always over there, on a stage, so to speak. I like omniscient narrators; I don’t like unreliable narrators. Here’s what our omniscient narrator says about Don Quixote (page 14):
[H]e rode so softly, and the sun’s heat increased so fast, and was so violent, that it would have been sufficient to have melted his brains had he had any left.The elevated language and long, flowing sentence, of which this is just the very tail end, left me unprepared for the apt insult lurking all the way at the end. When I read this joke, I knew I was going to enjoy the novel. I was utterly floored in the second half of the book to learn that the characters are aware that they have been written about. The idea of breaking the fourth wall is older than I would ever have guessed! The narrator goes to great lengths to insist that he is now narrating the ONE TRUE SEQUEL, never mind those bumbling copycats who had tried, between the publication of Part 1 and the publication of Part 2, to steal the author’s glory and book sales.
When and Why I Read Don Quixote
I was too tempted by the price! Bought it for 50% off SG$5.89. But according to the rules I've been trying to follow for a couple of years now, if I buy it, I can't just put it aside for another day. Last in, first out. Means I have to read it. So that's what I'm doing!
Genre: Classic Literature (Spain)
Date started / date finished: 05-Apr-20 to 18-May-20
Length: 768 pages
ISBN: 9781853260360
Originally published in: 1605/1615/1712/1993/2000/2008
Amazon link: Don Quixote
Which translation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment should I read?
I read the Garnett translation. I was happy with it, to the extent that “happy” is the right word to describe the experience of reading what I found to be a depressing novel.
What is the BEST translation of Crime and Punishment?
I did some research on the available translations, which I have presented in a long, illustrated post on my other website, We Love Translations, called “Which translation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment should I read?”
That post compares in-print translations. I count seven in-print translations of thirteen total, listed here:
| # | Translator | Year | Publisher |
| Frederick Whishaw | 1885 | ||
| 1. | Constance Garnett | 1914 | Heinemann |
| David Magarshack | 1951 | Penguin | |
| Princess Alexandra Kropotkin | 1953 | ||
| Jessie Coulson | 1953 | Norton | |
| Michael Scammell | 1963 | Washington Square | |
| 2. | Sidney Monas | 1968 | Signet |
| Julius Katzer | 1985 | Raduga | |
| 3. | David McDuff | 1991 | Viking |
| 4. | Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky | 1992 | Knopf |
| 5. | Oliver Ready | 2014 | Penguin |
| 6. | Nicolas Pasternak Slater | 2017 | Oxford |
| 7. | Michael R. Katz | 2018 | Liveright (Norton) |
I recommend the Garnett translation of Crime and Punishment.
Buy Garnett / Wordsworth paperback from Amazon
Buy Garnett / Wordsworth ebook from Amazon
I love books. I love languages. I built welovetranslations.com. Visit to learn more about translations of Crime of Punishment!
Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Constance Garnett
I didn’t particularly like Crime and Punishment… it was third-person omniscient but drifted into unreliable narrator territory because the protagonist is crazy, and you spend a lot of time watching him very closely as he goes around in circles being indecisive. I find his behavior dull at best and really frustrating at times—which is perhaps the point, but it’s unpleasant and rather drawn-out. I think I was expecting more overt philosophy, but there’s only a couple of scattered bits.
I read the Constance Garnett translation of Crime and Punishment. If you are trying to decide on a translation, check out my post over at Medium on which translation of Crime and Punishment you should read.
More on what I liked about the translation and didn’t like about the novel below.
Continue reading Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Constance Garnett
When and Why I Read Crime and Punishment
I was too tempted by the price! Bought it for 50% off SG$5.89. But according to the rules I've been trying to follow for a couple of years now, if I buy it, I can't just put it aside for another day. Last in, first out. Means I have to read it. So that's what I'm doing!
Genre: Classic Literature (Russian)
Date started / date finished: 28-Mar-20 to 05-Apr-20
Length: 485 pages
ISBN: 9781840224306
Originally published in: 1867/2000
Amazon link: Crime and Punishment
Dubliners by James Joyce
I am, still, not a fan of James Joyce.
I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a high school student. When I re-read it again recently for the Hungry Hundred Book Club I asked myself, more than once, why I’d even bothered, not having liked it the least little bit the first time around.
Enough was enough, I told myself. Lesson learned. I was never going to read more Joyce. Life’s too short to spend time trying to like stuff I don’t actually like, regardless of how ‘important’ the stuff purports to be. But then, I read more Joyce anyway! Why did I do that?!
Continue reading Dubliners by James Joyce
When and Why I Read Dubliners
The Irish Embassy in Singapore invited local readers to participate in Bloomsday by reading James Joyce's short story collection Dubliners and coming for a discussion on 14 June 2019. I saw it as an opportunity to pursue the question of whether Joyce is really the founder of ALL modern fiction, as has been asserted.
Genre: literary fiction (short stories)
Date started / date finished: 30-May-19 to 05-Jun-19
Length: 150 pages
ISBN: Project Gutenberg 2814
Originally published in: 1914
Gutenberg link: Dubliners
Which English translation or edition of The Count of Monte Cristo should I read?
I love books. I love languages. I built welovetranslations.com. You can read this post on that site!
So you want to read Alexandre Dumas’ classic adventure, The Count of Monte Cristo. And you don’t read French.
No problem. This massive novel has been available in English since the 1840s. You’ll find a copy in any decent library or bookstore, and if you like reading ebooks, you can download the novel for free because it’s not under copyright. That’s sorted, then.
Not so fast!
As soon as you visit the library or bookshop or click over to Amazon, you realize there are a host of publishers offering a myriad of paperback and hardcover editions and dozens of digital versions. What’s the difference?
Unexpurgated, unabridged, abridged, children’s, illustrated, and film versions are available. Keep reading to learn how to choose an edition that’s right for you.
Continue reading Which English translation or edition of The Count of Monte Cristo should I read?
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
A more accurate title for this novel might be: The Adventures of the Strangely Wise and Poetical Free Spirit Huckleberry Finn, and the Hapless Runaway Slave Jim, Interrupted by the Heartless Cloudcuckoolander Tom Sawyer.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was required reading in my 10th-grade English class. I didn’t like it. Years later, now that I’ve re-read it, I still don’t like it, but I have more insight into what makes it a good book as well as what annoys me about it.
See below for the strengths of the book and what annoyed me about it, a plot summary (with SPOILERS), and what stood out as well as when and why I read it.
Continue reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore, translated by Surendranath Tagore
Not a lot happens in The Home and the World, but a lot is felt and thought and said. The novel explores male and female gender ideals, the changing role of women in the modern world, and approaches to political change. It showcases contrasting character traits: patience and impulsivity, thoughtfulness and recklessness, candor and cunning, generosity and jealousy, conscientiousness and ambition, practicality and idealism.
The main character, Bimala, is an Indian woman caught in a love triangle with her mild, loving husband Nikhil and the charismatic, impetuous nationalist Sandip. She has always had a place in the home, but what is her place in the world?
See my Backlist books post on Asian Books Blog for more on this Bengali novel. See below for what stood out when I read it.
Continue reading The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore, translated by Surendranath Tagore
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Being neither a young male Irish Catholic nor an English major and at least one even slightly acclaimed novel short of an artist, I felt lost slogging through this “more approachable” work of Joyce’s.
In praise of what I find to be an impenetrable text, Shmoop says:
This novel, the first in Joyce’s whopping hat-trick of great novels, is both shorter and more approachable than either of Joyce’s later masterpieces (for which we humbly thank him). Portrait of the Artist really unleashed the massive power of Joyce’s innovation and unconventionality upon the literary world.
Why I found A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man hard to read
Fiction has character, setting, plot, and style. When any one of these four elements is developed at the expense of the other three, you get strange fiction. Sometimes it’s good strange and sometime it’s bad strange. Joyce’s fiction is primarily characterized by style—innovative and unconventional style. The literary world considers Joyce’s fiction good strange. For me, A Portrait of the Artist was bad strange.
I’m more of a nineteenth-century Realist than a twentieth-century Modernist or Post-modernist. I don’t like unreliable narrators, stream-of-consciousness narration, or magical realism. Joyce is known for free indirect speech, which is a kind of stream-of-consciousness narration.
The edition I read in high school had an introduction and notes built in, but many free and “thrift” editions, like the one I just finished reading, do not. It would have been better (though slower) to read the novel alongside some kind of notes (e.g., CliffsNotes or SparkNotes).
See below for what stuck out as well as when and why I read it.
Continue reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
1984 by George Orwell
I re-read the dystopia 1984 in preparation for a talk I gave on language.
The main ideas I remembered from having read the novel at least twenty years ago were:
- the government reduced the size of the English vocabulary (to control thought)
- the government was constantly destroying and rewriting the nation’s news articles (to control facts)
I found those ideas so compelling that I forgot all about the main character’s love interest and the secret horror that proved to be his undoing.
Of course, the novel is also famous because it says that:
- totalitarian dictators like the novel’s “Big Brother” typically keep tabs on their citizens by means of ubiquitous surveillance
- you can (eventually) make anybody believe that two and two are five
See below for what stood out in the novel when I re-read it.
