acommonreader.st
One Minute Stories by István Örkény, selected and translated by Judith Sollosy (Budapest, Corvina Books Ltd.) I had been reading about some Hungarian plays and ran across István Örkény’s name several times. The more I read about him the more I wanted to read something by him. I selected a collection of his shortest works […]
A few weeks ago I wanted to see how the boys (ages 6 and 9) would react to learning Latin…were they too young? Would they even be interested? We’re not quite a quarter of the way through William E. Linney’s Getting Started with Latin: Beginning Latin for Homeschoolers and Self-Taught Students of Any Age but […]
Off the Beaten Track in the Classics by Carl Kaeppel (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1936) Update: I have included links to the posts in the list of chapters. I may include links to other books that tie in with the chapter posts (such as N. M. Penzer’s essay on Poison Damsels) as I get to […]
Off the Beaten Track in the Classics by Carl Kaeppel (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1936) Except for the account of the west coast of Africa with Cerne and the trade in Attic pottery, to which we have already referred, the Periplus of Scylax is not a particularly exciting work, nor has it any pretensions to […]
Chevengur by Andrei Platonov (Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1978), translated by Anthony Olcott Posts on the novel: Links on Platanov and Chevengur: helpful posts and articles, not intended to be all-inclusive A note on translations: when Robert Chandler’s translation comes out I will happily read this again. In the meantime, read Chandler’s ideal translator of […]
Chevengur by Andrei Platonov (Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1978), translated by Anthony Olcott This will be the hardest post on Chevengur since it gets to the heart (and main character) of the novel, the town. The difficulty lies in both the complexity of the message and some ambiguity Platonov leaves in the story. I’ll apologize […]
Chevengur by Andrei Platonov (Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1978), translated by Anthony Olcott In reply to a comment from Miguel I ended up linking three articles related to Platonov and translator Robert Chandler, info I think worthy of its own post. The first article is an interview with Chandler at the Guardian, mostly focused on […]
I received an email from Shane Solow pointing me to the Herodotus Project, “an ongoing project documenting in photographs many of the places and artifacts mentioned by Herodotus (c 500 – c 425 BCE) in his Inquiries. This site is updated monthly with photographic tours that are hyperlinked with the text.”
Off the Beaten Track in the Classics by Carl Kaeppel (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1936) Now the poison-damsel legend is that of a girl who, being poison herself but immune to it, brings death to all she comes in contact with; in some forms of the legend her mere look is fatal, in others it […]
Chevengur by Andrei Platonov (Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1978), translated by Anthony Olcott I’ll apologize in advance for lack of moving the story forward… After Kopenkin and Sasha leave Chernovka, Sasha heads home and experiences the first fruits of the New Economic Policy. Shumilin, the person Sasha was to report to about possible spontaneous developments […]