Scottish Nous

The World's Ugliest Bookshelf

The Penguin Classics Library available at Amazon for $7,989.50 does not make for a sophisticated looking bookshelf.  It seems a customer has uploaded this image of what looks like a library fit only for someone who doesn't read.  I think I might kill myself if my bookshelf looked like that.  I'd much rather pay $1 - $3 for a decent used book with some character than the $8 apiece Amazon is charging for this hideous monstrosity.  Part of the fun of reading is the book buying.  I surmise that those who make this purchase have never discovered how much fun reading can be.

Nihilismus

I finished up The Idiot today, after switching translations towards the end.  I'm not sure what I think of the highly praised Pevear and Volokhonsky translation.  It seems a bit rough in places, and I found some of their word choices and sentence structuring suspiciously awkward, although for all I know that may be due to a desire to remain more faithful to the Russian.  For example, they make Ippolit (Hippolite) say to Prince Myshkin:

Aha! No, you're not at all as simple as they recommend you to be!

That seems wrong.  And perhaps this was just an typographical error:

Woman know woman.

In any case, what is very nice about the translation are the extensive endnotes.  If you read them all, it feels like you're reading an academic paper rather than a novel.  Here's one gem:

The term "nihilism," first used philosophically in German (Nihilismus) to signify annihilation, a reduction to nothing (attributed to Buddha), or the rejection of religious beliefs and moral principles, came via the French nihilisme to Russian, where it acquired a political meaning, referring to the doctrines of the younger generation of socialists of the 1860s, who advocated the destruction of the existing social order without specifying what should replace it.  The great nineteenth-century Russian lexicographer Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl (1801-72), normally a model of restraint, defines "nihilism" in his Interpretive Dictionary of the Living Russian Language as "an ugly and immoral doctrine which rejects everything that cannot be palpated."  The term became current in Russia after it appeared in the novel Fathers and Sons (1862), by Ivan Turgenev (1818-83), where it is applied to the hero, Bazarov.  The nihilist literary critic D. I. Pisarev (1840-68) was a great disparager of poetry, especially of Pushkin and his "cult of women's little feet."

The translation is worth purchasing for the endnotes alone.  The above example is just amusing, but most of them are exceedingly helpful.  Had it not been for the endnotes, I'm ashamed to admit I would have missed a few choice instances of irony.

Nabokov Does Coleridge?

To the current reading list posted here, two books have been added.  Lovejoy's The Revolt Against Dualism and Nabokov's The Gift.  The former is eminently reasonable (at least, thus far), and the latter is pure literary porn.  Nabokov exploits language like the worst of perverts.  Compare this passage (it's all one sentence) with a bit of Coleridge:

... and when, as now, his mind tumbled like this, that is, when he recalled the fifty-odd poems that had just come out, he would skim in an instant the entire book, so that in the instantaneous mist of its madly accelerated music one could not make any readable sense of the flicking lines - the familiar words would rush past, swirling amid violent foam (whose seething was transformed into a mighty flowing motion if one fixed one's eyes on it, as we used to do long ago, looking down at it from a vibrating mill bridge until the bridge turned into a ship's stern: farewell!) - and this foam, and this flickering, and a separate verse that rushed past all alone, shouting in wild ecstasy from afar, probably calling him home, all of this, together with the creamy white of the cover, was merged in a blissful feeling of exceptional purity...

Here is about 1/5 of "Kubla Khan", excerpted, though with the ordering retained:

And from this chasm with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced...

[nine lines skipped]

And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny-pleasure dome with caves of ice!

I don't do literary criticism or comparative literature, so if you don't think there is any resemblance or similarity here, I won't care if you tell me so.