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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1861 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 8, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm going through Conrad's Lord Jim. Backlog not moving.

I just finished Romain Gary's The Dance of Genghis Cohn, a genuinely mind-blowingly brilliant literary work that I only heard about because I saw it in the book review section of a vintage 1968 Playboy magazine I was reading. It's a buddy-cop novel set in the 1960s about the ghost of a Jewish comic that haunts the SS officer turned police chief who shot him, who have to solve a series of murders of naked men found around their German town. The best book I've read this year so far.

I also read Mann's Death in Venice, which...what the fuck? It's just that? This is a well known literary book I've run into mentions of many times, and it turns out it's just a book about an old German who spends the whole book mooning after a "beautiful" twelve year old Polish boy. I was less disgusted by Lolita. Just, what the fuck how was this published in 1912 Germany?

I'm starting the Canterbury Tales which is kinda leaving me flat. I think the translation I'm reading, which is the one leftover from the great books course I took in undergrad sixteen years ago, is kinda bad. It uses a lot of minced oaths, which just seem odd. It uses the word "screw" a lot to mean "have sex with" which just takes me out of the piece, it should be either "make love to" or "fuck," any other term is unpoetic to me. Stuff like that. I'm trying to do one tale a night, and the good news is the book is just a few of them, so I can switch translations soon, does anyone have a favorite? I prefer poetic beauty to accuracy.

If you're reading the Nevill Coghill version, which is old, he used the iambic pentameter of the original, which is possibly why the word screw is used. This is, ironically, an attempt at maintaining the poetic integrity of Chaucer. Try the David Wright version.

I'll check that out! My version, which I purchased for a great books course back in freshman year undergrad, is by Beidler. He doesn't do a poetic translation, but still rhymes occasionally, which I find off putting. If you aren't going to rhyme the whole time, I feel like you can never rhyme, because when I get a few rhymes I start expecting them to continue.

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