121–126 of 126 posts
It's funny that most of these that I read start off with a very annoying, cliched "writer" tone. I've always had the impression that authors just can't help buy try to prove how clever they are in the first paragraph at the expense of making the story compelling. It's like everyone has delusions that the book they're writing is going to be the next Moby Dick, so that beginning must be literary dammit.
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An interesting example, one of the best-known book openings in French literature ("Aujourd'hui, maman est morte."), and the difficulties translating the sentence in English: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/lost-in-translat...
Interesting article, and I believe I have a better translation: "Today, my mom died." It sounds better than just "mom" and seems to express the right level of closeness. OTOH I think it's often appropriate to keep "mamma" in Italian movies and texts because it carries a huge amount of connotations, which "maman" doesn't.
Well it's not an accurate translation, 'my' create a distance between the narrator and the mother that you don't have in the original sentence.
You traduction is much more objective than what the author wrote.
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I felt pretty much the same way when reading it. "The Name of the Wind" is rather unusual as a novel because those first chapters are pretty fundamentally different than the rest of the novel. Not just in terms of plot, but I think also the general tone and style. I don't actually have a count, but I think it's a good 50-100 pages before the novel falls into its rhythm. It's not that the beginning is bad (in my opini…
That's really interesting. The first few pages come pretty close to poetry in my opinion. For me its those interludes that raise TNOTW into a class above the normal Harry Potter Copycat Formula that is so popular now. I never even considered the possibility that, those bits would be putting people off. It's pretty clear that its those sections were Patrick Ruthfuss strives for perfection, that is taking so long to co…
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It's not the same thing. On amazon you judge a book by its cover. On this site you judge it by its content
You are judging the book on the basis of a page here. Not much different from judging the book on basis of the cover.
It's funny that most of these that I read start off with a very annoying, cliched "writer" tone. I've always had the impression that authors just can't help buy try to prove how clever they are in the first paragraph at the expense of making the story compelling. It's like everyone has delusions that the book they're writing is going to be the next Moby Dick, so that beginning must be literary dammit.