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Thread: 36 Books That Changed the World

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    Quote Originally Posted by archives View Post
    If listing books that changed the world Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica should be high on the list
    A great insight.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Cypress View Post
    Dickens seems like an eminently plausible choice to be on a list of the worlds most important books.


    You know what else I realized? Missing from this list is Newton's Principia Mathematica. That is an egregious oversight, since it was a watershed moment in western history, almost unprecedented in its influence on modern intellectual thought - and the very foundation of the Enlightenment.
    Indeed it is....surprised I missed.
    You're Never Alone With A Schizophrenic!

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    Quote Originally Posted by iolo View Post
    I can only score 23 - and some for those only dipped into! I think there ought to be a lot more novels, and I must admit I think my own feelings are much more affected by poems! Educated people, I'm afraid, are at one in not giving as twopenny about what half-educated children think of ill-taught Shakespeare! 'The Merchant of Venice', though, is drear!
    You've got me smoked.

    I can count on one hand the number of works on that list that I actually have personal experience with.

    Most of the rest of them I am familiar with only through lectures and seminars by professors of literature and historical scholars.

    I thought it was a little odd that some seminal works of the western literary tradition were absent from that list. Homer's Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid, Edward Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I mean, these are major works that are widely acknowleged as masterpieces - indeed, touchstones - of the western canon.

    Well, you gotta draw the line somewhere, but I was surprised that the Odyssey beat out Iliad. I got the impression from noted professors of literature and history that Odyssey was sort of a red headed step child to Iliad.

    Final observation: The holy trinity of Newton, Darwin, and Einstein seem to have a stranglehold as the reigning tsars of the western empirical tradition. But this list reminds me that it was really Francis Bacon who, first and foremost, successfully initiated the assault on late Medieval scholastic intellectual tradition -- and almost single handidly laid the groundwork for divorcing natural philosophy (aka, science) from theology, and moving the west away from stale deductive reason based on the presumption of authority, towards inductive reasoning and dynamic collaborative science based on testing and validation.

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    I suppose I tend to prefer the Odyssey because the relentless killing puts me off the Iliad, but, yes, it ought to be there. So should the Mabinogion, most of Tolstoy's work, the Greek tragedies and a lot more. I know almost nothing of Chinese literature, little of Arabic, and any list that leaves out whole cultures is bound to be limited. We're only human, and therefore a wash-out at lists!

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    Quote Originally Posted by iolo View Post
    I suppose I tend to prefer the Odyssey because the relentless killing puts me off the Iliad, but, yes, it ought to be there. So should the Mabinogion, most of Tolstoy's work, the Greek tragedies and a lot more. I know almost nothing of Chinese literature, little of Arabic, and any list that leaves out whole cultures is bound to be limited. We're only human, and therefore a wash-out at lists!
    English translations of related Indo-European language literature is challenging at best to capture the beauty, pacing, and meaning found in the native tongue. English translations of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, or Goethe probably often do not do the original works full justice.

    I can't even imagine how much a translation of a work from a non-Indo European language like Arabic, Chinese, or Japanese would pale in comparison to the original.

    It is possible that is why the West is so weak and unfamiliar with world literature outside the Indo-European language literary tradition.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Cypress View Post
    English translations of related Indo-European language literature is challenging at best to capture the beauty, pacing, and meaning found in the native tongue. English translations of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, or Goethe probably often do not do the original works full justice.

    I can't even imagine how much a translation of a work from a non-Indo European language like Arabic, Chinese, or Japanese would pale in comparison to the original.

    It is possible that is why the West is so weak and unfamiliar with world literature outside the Indo-European language literary tradition.
    '
    When I was on a Chinese course, the instructors used to fall about laughing at Ezra Pound's translations, however well they went down with Western readers, but thought Arthur Whalley was okay. As far as I can tell from Cymraeg/'Welsh' as rendered into English, a lot of literature comes under the old saying that Poetry is what won't translate. I like the idea of making an imitation myself, but of course you don't get the stuff a literal translation will give. Good reason to learn other languages, I suppose, but I lack gifts in that area. Grrr!

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    Quote Originally Posted by iolo View Post
    '
    When I was on a Chinese course, the instructors used to fall about laughing at Ezra Pound's translations, however well they went down with Western readers, but thought Arthur Whalley was okay. As far as I can tell from Cymraeg/'Welsh' as rendered into English, a lot of literature comes under the old saying that Poetry is what won't translate. I like the idea of making an imitation myself, but of course you don't get the stuff a literal translation will give. Good reason to learn other languages, I suppose, but I lack gifts in that area. Grrr!
    I need to figure out a way to work the word "Cymraeg" into conversation. You learn something new everyday! I am starting a course on Celtic history, so am looking forward to learning about your distant cousins in Brittany, Cornwall, and northwestern Spain.

    I think Gabriel Garcia Marquez is fantastic, but of course I am simply reading the English translations, and native Spanish speakers would probably tell me I am missing a substantial amount of context, meaning, and other intangibles.

    I have a cousin who speaks five languages fluently, but they are all related Indo-European languages, and he maintains it is incredibly hard to learn a non-Indo European language. One of his interpreter friends tried to learn Finnish - which evidently is a anomalous non-IE language - and had to give up in exasperation!

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    Quote Originally Posted by Cypress View Post
    I need to figure out a way to work the word "Cymraeg" into conversation. You learn something new everyday! I am starting a course on Celtic history, so am looking forward to learning about your distant cousins in Brittany, Cornwall, and northwestern Spain.

    I think Gabriel Garcia Marquez is fantastic, but of course I am simply reading the English translations, and native Spanish speakers would probably tell me I am missing a substantial amount of context, meaning, and other intangibles.

    I have a cousin who speaks five languages fluently, but they are all related Indo-European languages, and he maintains it is incredibly hard to learn a non-Indo European language. One of his interpreter friends tried to learn Finnish - which evidently is a anomalous non-IE language - and had to give up in exasperation!
    Except with us, the major problem is to get anyone to speak the other Celtic languages, and even with us, people nowadays can all speak English as well, so only real patriots want to put in the heavy labour of bi-lingual conversation. When I was a kid, masses of my relations were monoglot Cymry Cymraeg, but nowadays we rely on cousins from Patagonia for a purer version of the language, in the sense that it is influenced by Spanish, not English. For a linguistic exercise, never mind Gabriel, Garcia, Marquez - try speaking Cymraeg learned as a boy to a cousin who speaks only Spanish by way of someone who speaks Spanish and the 'Welsh' of Patagonia, which is odd - people on the Cardiff bus were practically falling out of their seats. The Bretons and Cornish are not that distant - Cornish/Cernoweg is almost a dialect of Cymraeg, and the problem with Breton is the spelling. My parents didn't teach me Cymraeg, believing the Country was finished, but fortunately they spoke it together when they didn't want me to know what they were talking about, so I learned fast. They wouldn't let Galicia into the Celtic League because the language is gone and they were anxious to avoid racism.
    As to non-European languages, I'm sure the general principle is sound, but Chinese and English are alike in having a very simplified grammar, so I found that easier than Latin or Greek, with which I still struggle rather unavailingly! So it goes!

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    Quote Originally Posted by iolo View Post
    Except with us, the major problem is to get anyone to speak the other Celtic languages, and even with us, people nowadays can all speak English as well, so only real patriots want to put in the heavy labour of bi-lingual conversation. When I was a kid, masses of my relations were monoglot Cymry Cymraeg, but nowadays we rely on cousins from Patagonia for a purer version of the language, in the sense that it is influenced by Spanish, not English. For a linguistic exercise, never mind Gabriel, Garcia, Marquez - try speaking Cymraeg learned as a boy to a cousin who speaks only Spanish by way of someone who speaks Spanish and the 'Welsh' of Patagonia, which is odd - people on the Cardiff bus were practically falling out of their seats. The Bretons and Cornish are not that distant - Cornish/Cernoweg is almost a dialect of Cymraeg, and the problem with Breton is the spelling. My parents didn't teach me Cymraeg, believing the Country was finished, but fortunately they spoke it together when they didn't want me to know what they were talking about, so I learned fast. They wouldn't let Galicia into the Celtic League because the language is gone and they were anxious to avoid racism.
    As to non-European languages, I'm sure the general principle is sound, but Chinese and English are alike in having a very simplified grammar, so I found that easier than Latin or Greek, with which I still struggle rather unavailingly! So it goes!
    Okay, that is the kind of light-shedding intel that still makes it worth it to wade through the racism, half-witted bigotry, and mediocre misogyny that this board is mostly known for. Much obliged!

    According to my preliminary investigations, the history of the Celts in Europe has undergone a radical transformation in the last two decades, so my palms are sweaty with anticipation to learn about it!

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    Man! To think of it I have just read Hamlet. BTW, why is this mentioned in the list of all Shakespearean tragedies??

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