dietl, on 11 October 2013 - 05:13 PM, said:
Morgoth, on 11 October 2013 - 06:46 AM, said:
I must say that I liked the first part much more but that's surely only because it's a bit easier to understand. There is so much you can get out of reading this masterpiece and it's really beautifully written.
Morgoth, you read 2 different translations, did you find any discrepancies between these versions? I recon it must be really hard to translate the text.
Yes, there are several. In one translation my signature was much less elegant for instance. I prefer the Penguin version I think, but I have never read the German version and so cannot comment on which is the most loyal to the source material. Penguin I think is the most elegant.
I also prefer part 1. I'd not say I know it by heart, but I have read it enough for it to be not far from the truth. Part two I think I've only read twice. Even though I've read up as much as I can on Goethe's life, I still do not find it more than a little dated. A great story, but not unmoored from time as part 1.
Many may scoff at this, but I find The Sorrows of Young Werther to be another excellent book of his, and you should try it out.
dietl, on 12 October 2013 - 05:52 PM, said:
Ivan Ilych is mostly about living a good live, death and society and I think it wasn't really written for someone like me Maybe I could appreciate it more when I'm closer to death or something. It suffered a bit from translation, but I can't be sure, I don't speak Russian and I read it in English, which is also not my mother tongue. All in all it's still a very good book.
Die Verwandlung was more to my taste. It deals with the same major themes as the Tolstoy story bit in a quite different way and still leaves a lot of room for interpretation. While reading you get the impression that Kafka really thought hard about how it's like being an insect. I liked it very much and is way better than Kafkas Der Prozess imo, although it's been some years since I read it.
Next is Die Ermordung einer Butterblume (engl.:The murder of a buttercup) by Alfred Döblin and I really look forward to finding out who killed the poor little thing and why. Who knows, maybe it deserved to die a horrible death, maybe it was all an accident, maybe someone threw an apple at it....
I personally found The Death of Ivan Ilych to be my best experience with Tolstoy. It's a beautiful, eye opening story in my opinion, but as with all great literature, tastes vary. Kafka is brilliant too, but to be honest the sheer frustration he makes me feel (in a good way, mostly) makes his stories a little too depressing for my everyday reading.
I've never read The murder of a buttercup. Should I?