ivandurak

[ivandurak]

Links for Russian/English Parallel Texts

Here are some links for Russian and English Parallel texts with audio. This includes 2 novels.

Ana Karenina by Tolstoy

Notes from Underground by Dostoyevsky

Other Informative Articles with Audio

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"King Popiel." Czesław Miłosz.

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“A Task” by Czeslaw Milosz

In fear and trembling, I think I would fulfill my life Only if I brought myself to make a public confession Revealing a sham, my own and of my epoch: We were permitted to shriek in the tongue of dwarfs and demons But pure and generous words were forbidden Under so stiff a penalty that whoever dared to pronounce one Considered himself as a lost man.

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Just so you guys know, posting about old shit doesn't mean I want some neonazi following me. Couldn't think of a more pathetic and tryhard ideology.

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It is worth noting that, while the commissioners of the book are named, the laborer is not. In the image, he is indicated by the curious titulus over the left-hand figure’s head: ILLE, literally HE who made it. His name might not matter, but his activity does: this is the one “who suffered this for your name.” He is identified not by a name but by the pointed finger of a pronoun and the noun scriptor. The associated verb is patior, to suffer. It was not easy to make a book. “Ille” is only a pronoun and an occupation. His brothers and sisters studied in this book are freer with their names. They are the monastic book-makers of tenth-century northern Iberia, and they are generous with information. They tell us where they worked, for whom, and how they felt about it. They name themselves and date their activity. They know they will be read, too, and speak directly to those who will hold and use the books they made. They are insistent in their reminders that reading is not just an encounter with “text,” nor even with a book, but also and essentially a relationship with the work of someone’s hands. This is for you, they say; keep me and my labor in mind. This book wants to remember the labor of “Ille” and of many other book-workers like him. It began in response to an invitation extended from a monastery in what is now north-central Spain. At 6 A.M. on Friday, April 11 of the year 945 CE a monastic named Florentius wrote a colophon into what would be the last gathering of the book he was finishing. “If you want to know,” he wrote, “I will explain to you in detail how heavy is the burden of writing” [si uelis scire singulatim nuntio tibi quam grabe est scribturae pondus]. Without waiting for an answer, Florentius laid it out: writing “mists the eyes. It twists the back. It breaks the ribs and belly. It makes the kidneys ache and fills the whole body with every kind of annoyance” [oculis caliginem facit. dorsum incurbat. Costas et uentrem frangit. Renibus dolorem inmittit et omne corpus fastidium nutrit]. Invitation: come feel what it’s like to make a book by hand.

Catherine Brown. Remember the Hand: Manuscription in Early Medieval Iberia.

Emphasis mine.

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writing tip #3590:

the exact length of time you should spend editing your novel is however long it's taking me to edit this one (tbc)

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Imagine, if you can, the surprise of a wolf-spider who, in running through the grass, should stumble over his own outgrown skeleton, so like his former self in all its details that he could scarcely fail to recognize it as his own; for even the transparent cornea of the eye is a part of this outer skeleton and is shed with it, as well as the jaws, sensitive spines, and hairs.

Marian and David Fairchild. Book of Monsters.

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Virgil compares the ghosts of the dead on the shores of Lethe to a swarm of bees.

Edward Hirsch. A Poet's Glossary.

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Ezra Pound called the epic “a poem including history.” Literary or secondary epics—one thinks not just of Virgil’s Aeneid (29–19 B.C.E.), but also of Dante’s Divine Comedy (ca. 1308–1321), Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516), Camões’s The Lusiads (1572), Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590–1596), Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (1581), Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667)—adopted many of the conventions and strategies of the traditional epic, even though they are written poems meant to be read (and reread) rather than oral ones intended to be told and sung. “Homer makes us hearers,” Alexander Pope said, “and Virgil leaves us readers.”

Edward Hirsch. A Poet's Glossary.

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M. I. Finley puts it, “Whatever else the epic may have been, it was not history. It was narrative, detailed and precise, with minute description of fighting and sailing, and feasting and burials and sacrifices, all very real and vivid; it may even contain, buried away, some kernels of historical fact—but it was not history.” The epic is inherently nostalgic. It looks back to greater and more heroic times—the emergence of tribes, the founding of countries, the deeds of legendary figures. It is removed from the contemporary world of the audience and looks back to what Goethe and Schiller called the vollkommen vergangen or “perfect past.” It moves beyond individual experience. It binds people to their own outsize communal past and instills a sense of grandeur.

Edward Hirsch. A Poet's Glossary.

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The shattered fragments of bath-houses and temples had been built into its fabric: pillars, pediments, broken statuary. These, converted to the uses of religio, were the bric-à-brac of what Augustine, two centuries previously, had identified as the order of the saeculum. The word had various shades of meaning. Originally, it had signified the span of a human life, whether defined as a generation, or as the maximum number of years that any one individual could hope to live: a hundred years. Increasingly, though, it had come to denote the limits of living recollection.

Tom Holland. Dominion.

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Columbanus had brought with him from Ireland a novel doctrine: that sins, if they were regularly confessed, were manageable. Penances, calibrated in exacting detail, could enable sinners, once they had performed them, to regain the favour of God. Punitive though Columbanus’ regime was, it was also medicinal.

Tom Holland. Dominion.

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my skill with a blade and ash wood spear baffled the entire bronze aged aegean court

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The origin of drama seems to be the question-and-answer, the give-and-take, between the soloist and the rest of the chorus.

Edward Hirsch. A Poet's Glossary.

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Oliver Wendell Holmes’s satirical poem “Cacoethes Scribendi” (1890) takes up the insatiable disease of writing: If all the trees in all the woods were men; And each and every blade of grass a pen; If every leaf on every shrub and tree Turned to a sheet of foolscap; every sea Were changed to ink, and all earth’s living tribes Had nothing else to do but act as scribes, And for ten thousand ages, day and night, The human race should write, and write, and write, Till all the pens and paper were used up, And the huge inkstand was an empty cup, Still would the scribblers clustered round its brink Call for more pens, more paper, and more ink.

Edward Hirsch. A Poet's Glossary.

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Domin (duramente): Alquist, este es nuestro último momento. Estamos hablando ya casi desde el otro mundo. Alquist, no era un mal sueño liberar al hombre de la esclavitud del trabajo. Del horrible y humillante trabajo que el hombre tenía que sufrir. El trabajo era demasiado duro. La vida demasiado difícil. Y para superar eso… Alquist: No era con eso con lo que soñaban los dos Rossum. El viejo Rossum sólo pensaba en sus impíos trucos, y el joven en sus millones. Y tampoco sueñan con eso tus accionistas. Sueñan con sus dividendos. Y sus dividendos son la ruina de la humanidad.

—Karel Capek. R.U.R. (Robots Universales Rossum).

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De La Puente Luna, J. C. (2007). Los curacas hechiceros de Jauja : batallas mágicas y legales en el Perú colonial. In Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. https://doi.org/10.18800/9789972428302