I’m always astonished by the quantity and prestige of material that remains untranslated, esp from Chinese. I’ve been about halfway through Genji for most of the last five years (I loved the first half though) maybe this post can inspire me to pick it back up!
And in the other direction too! I read a tweet where someone talked about the very first translation of the aeneid into mandarin coming out just this year!
Only about half of Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, the major source on China's first 2500 years, which Kenneth Rexroth said are better than Gibbon, have been translated.
I'd love to read the Tale of Genji sometime. I have The Pillow Book on my "imminent" shelf.
I haven't read Diogenes but the form of the Confucian Analects is also really similar to the Talmud with its "Rabbi X said, Rabbi Y said...". I love stories about modern China and Korea getting really into garbled versions of Judaism the same way western readers are sold the mystical wisdom of the east.
LOL! I think it was inevitable though in the transition to becoming a state religion. Like there's no way Jesus's actual teachings could've become allied to power in the way Christianity ultimately would be.
I haven't read any of the Christian scripture, but I've wondered if Jesus perhaps did not speak metaphorically (though later taken literally) when he said that as you eat your bread & drink your wine, you consume my flesh & blood.
> We read the Great Books because they are influential.
I think we read any book because it is, in some way, influential. We mostly don't read books randomly. We might read a book that is being hyped right now, i.e. a necessarily non-Great Book (or at least not yet). But as you said, it's exactly because these books (or any books) contain truths that are not yet banalities that we read them. So is it really because they are influential that we read them, or because they appeal with a promise of offering us something valuable?
> Indeed, the process by which a Great Book is propagated through history depends on financial and political power
This is how books propagate in general, but it's not what makes them great. Our contemporaries might put great effort and much resources championing a work that would be forgotten a decade later. What makes the Great Books great is their renewed appeal across generations (and indeed across cultures) .
> Western presses have little incentive to translate what is, in the west, a not particularly influential writer.
That's an odd argument. How could a not yet translated author be influential? You'd think then that Western presses have little incentive to translate anything.
I feel compelled to speak up in slight defense of Don Quixote, which I somehow slogged through in the 8th grade having seen a community theater production of Man of La Mancha. It is indeed very boring and winding, and nobody really cares about Sancho's time as a colonial governor and what have you, but it does pick up a bit in the second half after about 700 pages! I'm not sorry I read it, but it's the first time I shed my snobbishness about refusing to read abridged books.
I’m always astonished by the quantity and prestige of material that remains untranslated, esp from Chinese. I’ve been about halfway through Genji for most of the last five years (I loved the first half though) maybe this post can inspire me to pick it back up!
And in the other direction too! I read a tweet where someone talked about the very first translation of the aeneid into mandarin coming out just this year!
Only about half of Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, the major source on China's first 2500 years, which Kenneth Rexroth said are better than Gibbon, have been translated.
I'd love to read the Tale of Genji sometime. I have The Pillow Book on my "imminent" shelf.
I haven't read Diogenes but the form of the Confucian Analects is also really similar to the Talmud with its "Rabbi X said, Rabbi Y said...". I love stories about modern China and Korea getting really into garbled versions of Judaism the same way western readers are sold the mystical wisdom of the east.
Honestly, considering what Jesus was all about, you could say that the Christianity that the west has gotten is pretty garbled itself.
LOL! I think it was inevitable though in the transition to becoming a state religion. Like there's no way Jesus's actual teachings could've become allied to power in the way Christianity ultimately would be.
I haven't read any of the Christian scripture, but I've wondered if Jesus perhaps did not speak metaphorically (though later taken literally) when he said that as you eat your bread & drink your wine, you consume my flesh & blood.
> We read the Great Books because they are influential.
I think we read any book because it is, in some way, influential. We mostly don't read books randomly. We might read a book that is being hyped right now, i.e. a necessarily non-Great Book (or at least not yet). But as you said, it's exactly because these books (or any books) contain truths that are not yet banalities that we read them. So is it really because they are influential that we read them, or because they appeal with a promise of offering us something valuable?
> Indeed, the process by which a Great Book is propagated through history depends on financial and political power
This is how books propagate in general, but it's not what makes them great. Our contemporaries might put great effort and much resources championing a work that would be forgotten a decade later. What makes the Great Books great is their renewed appeal across generations (and indeed across cultures) .
> Western presses have little incentive to translate what is, in the west, a not particularly influential writer.
That's an odd argument. How could a not yet translated author be influential? You'd think then that Western presses have little incentive to translate anything.
I feel compelled to speak up in slight defense of Don Quixote, which I somehow slogged through in the 8th grade having seen a community theater production of Man of La Mancha. It is indeed very boring and winding, and nobody really cares about Sancho's time as a colonial governor and what have you, but it does pick up a bit in the second half after about 700 pages! I'm not sorry I read it, but it's the first time I shed my snobbishness about refusing to read abridged books.
The second half is much much better. I like the part where they start encountering ppl who have read about them :)