Why is this book so praised ? 150 pages in it and it's just a guy complaining...

how pleb can you be

>he got a great style and sensibility
>I feel like reading a teenager blog
Pick one.

art is not about the content, but about the way you express it. the banality of the content is something we all experience, otherwise no one would recognize it or find value in it, but honing the skills to put it in a concrete form is what counts, or at least what is accounted for here.

and when the content is despair, it is a particular case because despair itself is preventing you from giving it that concrete form.

>criticizing something you have not read in its original language

>art is not about the content, but about the way you express it
false, you can get away with saying its both but the form is never above the content. if anything the form is subject to it.

No, the form is literally everything, most literature is valueless as intellection.

well yes and no... but i guess generalizing here is useless and it would be an infinite debate, cause each particular case can go in any direction coherently.

i guess it would be more useful admitting that the distinction form/content is a mere artifice that can be analytically useful, but entirely useless when you are facing the thing itself.

Which is why you dont read bullshit.

Hi Friend,

Just a reminder that on Veeky Forums the subject of the thread is usually the book posted in the OP.

Sometimes these books are in the original language and sometimes they are translations. In this case, it is a translation.

As we all know, we should consider translations as works in their own right, as they necessarily require creative liberties to be taken.

Therefore it is not necessary to point out if someone has not read the book in its original language, as all comments and criticisms in this thread pertain to the translated edition.

I hope this comment has been instructional and will serve you for future posts.

Kind regards,

a friendly user

I can agree to that. I personally prefer to make no such distinctions and see the work in full; I just find it strange that people would put the face value of the thing above its internals when the truth is they both work together.

Even though The Book of Disquiet has enough to make it great on a purely aesthetic level, let's not leave "it's just a guy complaining" uncriticized, because it's obviously false.

From descriptions of Lisbon or a thunderstorm to philosophy and politics, TBoD covers a huge range of topics and themes.

You're a huge fucking pleb if you think you can separate form from content. There are millions of art pieces denouncing the horrors of war, there's probably someone doing one right now, but there is only one Guernica.

see

Another user here, I have enough people in my immediate social circle who studied translation to tell you:

This shit is nearly a science now, there are people much smarter than most Veeky Forumsizens producing theories and techniques right now to make sure that a translation loses as little as possible from the original text, and they're so good at it that even if something is lost in translation, the ones to realize it won't be a bunch of degenerate autists on a peruvian medieval woodcutting board.

Because there is no distinction - or rather, a way to judge both separately - at all between "face value" and "internals". I mean, we meme Ulysses all the time here, and it's honestly the ultimate proof of that. The plot is: a jew cuck and a muh books sperg do shit in Dublin for 18 hours.

This is one of my favourite books of all time and I read it in Portuguese as well. I revist it every now and then. I like it so much I don't know what to say, I'm not going to argue on what makes it great specifically, it speaks for itself. I guess if you're not enjoying it just drop it, what do I care.

>they think science will overcome language

lel

If you're not reading it in portuguese I would say just drop it.

The type of people I'm talking about are the ones who say that the form/style takes precedence over the message/content when the truth is they're one in the same like you're saying, it makes no sense to me. You have to consider them as a whole otherwise whats the point.

Just like those guys who say "they read for prose". Ridiculous memery.

daily reminder that >reading translations faggots don't contribute to anything but make this board even worse

>Implying that's what I said at all

Are you fucking dense? I likened it to science to imply there's a whole fucking method and hordes of people aquainted with it, and even then, it's not as rigid as the scientific method.

"Plot" is downright unimportant, I hope you're not implying it isn't.

A book needs (a priori, of course) good prose and good development of it's themes.

Ignore this dude, probably some portuguese memeing one of the only worthwile authors his country produced.

>hordes of people

>he thinks majorities establish the quality of a method

lul

(You)

>A book needs (a priori, of course) good prose and good development of it's themes.
Plot /is/ the development of themes dude. What even is your conception of plot? That's another strange idea I run into often here.

>implying you need to give a positive contribution to correct a mistake that is a negative conception.

Then, there is a very clear plot on the Book of Disquiet and your claim that it's plotless is wrong.

Oh no, I never said once in this thread that it's plot-less.

so, this book is just the diary of a repressed fag right? only that back in the day people were generally cultured, so even faggotry had a decent expression amirite?

>William Beckford needed only three days and two nights in the winter of 1782 to write the tragic history of his caliph. He wrote it in French; Henley translated it into English in 1785. The original is unfaithful to the translation; Saintsbury observes that eighteenth-century French is less suitable than English for communicating the "undefined horrors" (the phrase is Beckford's) of this unusual story.

>covers a huge range of topics and themes

all of which are bernando soares bitching about how hard his life is

>tfw the french version is amazing.

why is english so unadapted to poetry and literary expression in general? having of course great masterpieces that are only exceptions that confirm the rule.

please. I dated a girl doing a translation PhD at one of the best programs in the country, and she was a complete idiot. She only started reading Borges when she entered the program, didn't know shit about philosophy (lol Hegel? who is that?) and her taste was crap. I was talking to one of her friends, who was doing a Comparative Lit PhD and she's all "yeah, i'm interested in the subjectivity of memory in fiction, I wanna write my thesis on that", "Oh, so I take it you've read Proust then?" and she goes "Lol not yet, but I plan on it eventually". Fuck them all, man, fuck them all.

>Because there are lots of keen observations in it beautifully expressed?
>Because many of the fragment are very thought provoking and has the ability to give you a new perspective on things?
>Because you can identify with the thoughts and feelings common to every literary man?

If you don't get it, it can't be explained to you I think

the form is the content, and the content form, asshole

I find it extremely hard to believe someone entering a PhD program would not have read or become at least familiarized with Hegel, in almost any field. The second one is more believable but less damning. Sometimes people read different things in different orders. Maybe she was more interested in memory in Japanese literature or post-war literature or any number of things. Proust wasn't the first to talk about memory, nor was he the last. I'd be disappointed to read a thesis on the subject that didn't address him in some way but it doesn't invalidate her work. I wouldn't assume that people haven't thought about things as much as you have (though I guess that's what I'm doing now)

FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT. (Or so it got phrased by one, R. Creeley,[8] and it makes absolute sense to me, with this possible corollary, that right form, in any given poem, is the only and exclusively possible extension of content under hand.) There it is, brothers, sitting there, for USE.

Says Olson

Yes, very good. I think Pessoa fully recognized that! I have a difficult time with the book myself, but Pessoa's system (the heteronyms in general and several particular ones [Caeiro's role fascinates me the way I think it would any thoughtful artist, not that I am one]) surely approaches brilliance.

its good

the meme is the message asshole

OP here, I'm french too and I have the Christian Bourgeois edition. She's sure fine but I'm not liking the text, it's pretty boring actually.

Nice pic

>I find it extremely hard to believe someone entering a PhD program would not have read or become at least familiarized with Hegel, in almost any field.

This is what continentals ACTUALLY believe.

It's a great book. No bullshit. Nothing tryhard or false. It's basically a novel with all the banana slips and needless dialogue taken out.

if you cant read the original, the french version is still the best option i think.

I'd put money on OP either having never touched the book or having read the entire thing and loved it to death