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Umberto Eco has died

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Re: Umberto Eco has died

#121

Post by huxley »

wobbleblob wrote: post #72
coliveira wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umber Eco was one of the greatest scholars of Middle Age's philosophy. It is a great delight for all of us that he decided to share his knowledge in the form of a Novel. I don't think you can find any other writer capable of translating the thinking of ordinary men from Middle Ages into a book like he did.

It's not medieval philosophy, with "years after that conversation was set", the poster you're replying to means 600 years. The book should not be seen as an historic work.

Anachronistic quotations happened quite often in ancient and medieval writing, so Eco was just having a bit of fun.

I agree that the Name of the Rose is not an historic work (incidentally so did Eco), but plenty of medievalists think that it is good enough to be a useful teaching tool:

http://www.syracuseuniversitypress.syr.edu/fall-2009/postscr...

Re: Umberto Eco has died

#122

Post by huxley »

rumcajz wrote: post #106
wobbleblob wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That book made me feel stupid and uneducated. There was hardly a paragraph without a word I had to look up or a reference I couldn't get. The translator utterly defeated me. I never finished it.

I don't know which translation have you read. The fact is that translators rarely understand all the subtleties of Eco's original, translate it incorrectly and thus the translations are much more confusing than they should be.

English readers were very fortunate to have William Weaver as the translator. Umberto Eco himself said --only half in jest-- that Weaver's translation of the Name of the Rose was better than the original.

Re: Umberto Eco has died

#123

Post by huxley »

pklausler wrote: post #20
officemonkey wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even worse than that... According to Wikipedia: "Spain had adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1582, but England was still using the Julian calendar. Shakespeare's death on 23 April 1616 (Julian) was equivalent to 3 May 1616 (Gregorian). This was 10 days after Cervantes was buried and 11 days after he died."

It's still an astonishing near-coincidence and I'm glad that you mentioned it.

One of Shakespeare's lost works, a collaboration with John Fletcher, was the History of Cardenio which is believed to have been based on a section of Don Quixote.

Don Quixote was quite popular in English so it's kind of exciting to think of Shakespeare reading Don Quixote.

Re: Umberto Eco has died

#124

Post by edko »

carlob wrote: post #116
galfarragem wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always recommend Italo Calvino. An underrated Italian writer IMHO. The Baron In The Trees or the Invisible Cities are a good start.

While Calvino is great, I wouldn't call someone who won a Nobel prize for literature underrated .

Calvino did not win the Nobel. The latest Italian to win it was Dario Fo.

Re: Umberto Eco has died

#125

Post by trevelyan »

schoen wrote: post #13

One remarkable thing about The Name of the Rose is that the characters in it don't think and talk like modern people who happen to have been transported into the Middle Ages. They seem to think differently -- about what's possible, what people can expect from life, how you know things, what counts as an argument... Possibly my favorite part: "What you say is very fine, Adso, and I thank you. The order that our mind i…

Because books speak of books, as with the manuscript, which is a letter about a book about a book about another book, until at the lowest level the story speaks of even more lost works, whose ideas survive through the hand of a scribe who does not understand them. And the burning of the library becomes a burning bush, releasing not destroying knowledge, for it is the light that matters.

It is my favourite of his as well. And thank you for sharing the joke about Wittgenstein. :)

Re: Umberto Eco has died

#126

Post by edko »

visakanv wrote: post #107
r0muald wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just one of many possible quotes giving a measure of how overrated Eco was and will be for the decades to come. An intellectual focusing mostly on showing himself as much more intelligent than others, either by literary exhibitionism, nonsense metaphors on subjects he barely understood and ultimately a love for manipulation of language. That said, his ability to do all those things with perfect execution and…

Interesting. Mind recommending someone else we ought to read instead?

I have read all of Eco's novels and enjoy his work very much. Other authors I like are Borges, Calvino, and Mulisch.

Re: Umberto Eco has died

#127

Post by trevelyan »

pmoriarty wrote: post #45
fenomas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yeah. Foucault's Pendulum is to me what Finnegan's Wake is apparently to many others - certainly not a casual read; more something to pick apart slowly and ponder the subtle mysteries of. But even underneath all the digressions and metaphysics, I still find the core story enjoyable as well. Plus it's as brilliant a takedown of conspiracy-theory-thinking as ever the world will see.

"Plus it's as brilliant a takedown of conspiracy-theory-thinking as ever the world will see." How does it compare on that score to The Illuminatus Trilogy[1], written more than a decade before Eco's book? [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminatus

Conspiracy thinking is a cancer: it will destroy you.

Re: Umberto Eco has died

#128

Post by pilsetnieks »

zorpner wrote: post #10

Umberto Eco on operating systems and religion, in 1994: The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counterreformist and has been influenced by the "ratio studiorum" of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells th…

You might also like Neal Stephenson's In the beginning... was the command line (http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html)

Re: Umberto Eco has died

#129

Post by whiddershins »

pmoriarty wrote: post #45
fenomas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yeah. Foucault's Pendulum is to me what Finnegan's Wake is apparently to many others - certainly not a casual read; more something to pick apart slowly and ponder the subtle mysteries of. But even underneath all the digressions and metaphysics, I still find the core story enjoyable as well. Plus it's as brilliant a takedown of conspiracy-theory-thinking as ever the world will see.

"Plus it's as brilliant a takedown of conspiracy-theory-thinking as ever the world will see." How does it compare on that score to The Illuminatus Trilogy[1], written more than a decade before Eco's book? [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminatus

It's perfect to read them one right after the other.

Re: Umberto Eco has died

#130

Post by lgieron »

Retric wrote: post #34
coliveira wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umber Eco was one of the greatest scholars of Middle Age's philosophy. It is a great delight for all of us that he decided to share his knowledge in the form of a Novel. I don't think you can find any other writer capable of translating the thinking of ordinary men from Middle Ages into a book like he did.

I really doubt we know very much about how people thought back then. There are many filters between what was thought, who knew how to write it down, the form people used to express thought in written form, what happened to be copied or survive. Ex: People don't actually believe in Santa Clause, but if you randomly chose 10,000 pages to represent US thought from 1800 to now. Them handed them to scholars in the future…

Historians are not machine learning algorithms, they are capable of deriving much more complex inferences. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't believe Santa Claus was a major religion.
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