Aucassin and Nicolette by an Out-of-the-Box Medieval Author

Aucassin et Nicolete was written in medieval France, but it’s not your typical roman d’amour.

I haven’t actually read any other medieval romances. My expectations of “typical” are all formed on stereotype. In many ways, Aucassin and Nicolette meets those fairy tale stereotypes. On the other hand, something goes quite “wrong” in this love story, for Aucassin seems to be a selfish weakling, a man frozen into inaction when things don’t go as he expected, and Nicolette is constantly called on to be the true heroine of the story.

I first read Aucassin and Nicolette during my first or second year of college for a history class. I loved it! I found it again this week for the Really Old Classics Challenge, and I still love it. Because I think Nicolette is such an awesome heroine, going beyond the stereotypes of Medieval France, I’ve decided to also count Aucassin and Nicolette as my first work for the Women Unbound Challenge.

Continue reading »

Reading in Spanish (Neruda’s Poetry and La casa en Mango Street by Cisneros)

Pablo Neruda’s early poetry (specifically, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair) does not have much to do with Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street. Neruda was a Chilean who wrote love poetry (in Spanish) in the early 1900s at the age of 20. Hispanic-American Sandra Cisneros wrote in the 1980s a short volume (in English) of connected short stories about a Hispanic girl in Chicago. But I read both these works in Spanish (the Cisneros in translation) this month, and so the tenuous relationship between them is the language I read them in. Continue reading »

Beauty and the Beast + The Complete Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault

The Once Upon a Time III Challenge has a “Short Story Weekend” mini-challenge, so I thought I’d visit some fairy tales. To my surprise, the copy of Charles Perrault’s Complete Fairy Tales that I found was less than 200 pages and written for children, so I breezed through all of them very quickly. Many of Perrault’s stories are retellings of other’s stories. My favorite was “Beauty and the Beast.” Continue reading »

Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales

Reading Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales was a repetitive process. My 630-page leather edition (from Barnes and Noble Books; not same version as the Amazon link at left) included numerous retellings of stories very similar; it felt as if the compilers were taking translations from multiple sources. Then again, maybe the Grimm brothers wrote down similar stories with similar themes multiple times for their readers. They were, after all, trying capture the folk tales of the era; maybe those folk tales were likewise repetitive.

The Barnes and Noble edition I read did not include an introduction, so my experience was simply with the stories themselves. Despite the repetition of stories, I highly enjoyed reading the collection, especially as I took them slowly, reading a few stories (up to 20 or 30 pages) a day, mostly in the evening before bed. True “bedtime stories.”

But these stories probably aren’t for children, unless the children are pretty thick-skinned. (Note that I classify it, on this site, as Fiction, not Children’s Literature.) Grimm’s stories had blatant morals (such as how laziness leads to your death and wicked stepmothers who abuse children must, in the end, meet their horrendous end) and gruesome violence (such as stepmothers who decapitate stepchildren, girls so desperate to get a man they cut off their toes, and travelers who blind starving fellow travelers as payment for food).

Nevertheless, I still enjoyed the retreat into a world in which the animals one meets on the path are really princes in disguise, in which the dead come back to life, and in which magical fairies and witches regularly rescue those who really are deserving of assistance.

I don’t want to live in the world of the Brother’s Grimm. The violence and retribution is horrendous. Yet, the fairy aspects of the tales made some of them magical, and I look forward to visiting other fairy tales in the future – including Charles Perrault and Hans Christian Andersen.

Have you read Grimm? What was your verdict: Violent or Magical? I, personally, am torn between the two. Continue reading »

Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges

Ficcciones by Jorge Luis Borges is about  170 pages in Spanish; the English translation of the same book is about 120 pages (within Borges’ Collected Fictions). Why, then, has this me taken weeks to get through?

Borges’ writing style is powerful. In some sense, I’m glad I struggled through Borges just to get a feel for his different style. But unlike Nabokov’s powerfully written stories, Borges’ well-written stories are weird. I seriously can’t think of any other word to describe them. I overall did not like them, and I will never read more Borges. Continue reading »

Reading The Iliad by Homer, trans. by Robert Fagles

Reading The Iliad (trans. by Robert Fagles) isn’t like reading a modern-day novel: I think it did take a level of concentration I’m not accustomed to. But that just proved to me that the “difficult pleasure” of reading is highly worth experiencing.

The Robert Fagles translation was poetic and rhythmic. Once I became accustomed to reading poetry, I felt it was highly readable. Continue reading »

The Iliad by Homer, trans. Robert Fagles: Love and Hate But Mostly Love

I thought reading The Iliad by Homer (translated by Robert Fagles) would be a chore. Even after I reviewed four different translations and chose one I felt was “best,” I told myself I would have to read at least one chapter a day, just to get through it before it was due at the library. I thought The Iliad would be horribly boring.

I was wrong.

I admit that the first few chapters were hard to get into – I wasn’t used to the characters, and because it began in medias res, I felt a little lost; also, it is a poetic style I am not accustomed to reading. Besides, the second chapter included a list of the boats and characters (a back story) that seemed to drag on and on.

But by the fourth or fifth chapter, I found myself immersed in the story: not only did I empathize with the characters and enjoy the somewhat morbid action-packed battle scenes, but I loved the lilt and feel of the poetry. And while I can’t say whether or not Fagles’ translation was the most accurate of all translations, I certainly found the poem to be beautifully poetic as well as highly readable.

All of that said, I feel I have a love/hate relationship with this book. Continue reading »

The Iliad by Homer: The Story

When I decided to read The Iliad, I knew essentially nothing about it.

All I knew was that it was Greek, it was written by Homer, and that it was somehow a precursor to The Odyssey (which I read in high school). Having read The Iliad, I can say now that while it certainly is Greek, the author is officially unknown, and the characters, setting, and plot are completely different from those in the The Odyssey. The Iliad is its own story. It also has a different feel than I expected, focusing on anger, war, and revenge, as well as virtue and honor.

These thoughts are only from my one read of the poem; I don’t promise that they are accurate. Now I see why studying the classics is a life-long endeavor! Continue reading »

Iliad in Translation

What am I looking for when I read the Iliad this month? I’ve been wondering that, especially now that I have four translations before me. As I mentioned when I wrote about Aesop’s writers last week, a translation can make a big difference in how a story is portrayed.

I’m not against a literal translation, but does it really matter to me if what I read is exactly how Homer wrote it? At the same time, I’m not afraid of Greek literature and I want to get the most accurate, but readable, experience of the Iliad.

So, what’s the difference between these four translations? I decided to read the translator’s notes and the first few pages and determine which one(s) are worthwhile for me. Continue reading »

Ingenuity and Authority: Who Really Wrote Aesop’s Fables?

A few months ago, I read a version of Aesop’s Fables that I found online at Project Gutenberg, written and published in the early 1900s. I thought I’d read Aesop’s Fables.

I was interested, then, to read in chapter two (“Ingenuity and Authority”) of Seth Lerer’s Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter that Aesop’s fables differ markedly from generation and generation. The history of Aesop’s fables (the Aesopica), then, illustrates how the translators changed the message of a translated text, especially in literature for children. This prompted a question: How are the authors’ purposes and translators’ objectives subversively included in modern children’s literature, and does it matter? Continue reading »