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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   936 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 15, 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.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up al-Gharbi's We Have Never Been Woke. It's more scholarly and less popular than expected. The title apparently means that for all the woke signalling being done, actual wokeness is more about appearances and ambition than anything.

I just started Jane Austen’s Emma. I’ve been meaning to read more ”proper” books for a while and I recently watched and loved Clueless (1995) which turns out to be a very well regarded modernized adaptation of Emma to a 90s high school setting. Thus getting an annotated ebook seemed a natural choice (for the high, high, price of $4.50). Wish me luck, lol.

Some googling for translations has also revealed an interesting example of elitism in literary circles. People recoil at the very idea that someone would translate older English language Classics to modern late 1900s / 2000s English and tell you to just suck it up with the overly complicated sentence structure and completely changed meaning of words. However translating to a foreign language - which throws the sentence structure to wind and streamlines it significantly - is somehow perfectly fine. Goddamn elitists…

Goddamn elitists…

Checking in.

If you can't read Austen you aren't really literate in English. Annotations are fine, adaptations are fine, but you should be able to read it without some Reader's Digest bowdlerization of it.

I guess I'm not really literate then. Of course, I assume this means that you in turn can read eg. Dostoevsky in the original Russian editions without problems, right? Afterall, by your measure anything else would be "bowdlerization".

And just to be clear, I'm not talking about some "simple English" version but simply updating those words and terms that have changed their meanings in the last 200 years (and there are enough that the first chapter alone has 34 foonotes!) and making minor changes to some of the overly complex sentence structure so you don't have to keep a dozen different things in mind just to be able to parse a single sentence.

But more to the point I simply cannot understand this view where nobody, not even non-native speakers, should be allowed to have an easier to read version available for them that stays authentic to the original's spirit and it would be better that all those people simply not read at all such books.

Dostoevsky in the original Russian

Or, more precisely, Dostoevsky with dialogues jumping between original Russian, French, English, and German. His upper-class characters jump between the four languages in their conversations, as they would in real life at the time. No properly-educated young lady would speak Russian without at least a hint of a French accent.

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