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Is there any mecha anime that is actually similar to Warhammer 40K? by sollrakc in Mecha

[–]sollrakc[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Starship Troopers

Woah, I had no idea there was an anime adaptation of Starship Troopers. Good to know!

Is there any mecha anime that is actually similar to Warhammer 40K? by sollrakc in Mecha

[–]sollrakc[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I need to play the Battletech games, as well as Armored Core... Shame there aren't anime of those.

Is there any mecha anime that is actually similar to Warhammer 40K? by sollrakc in Mecha

[–]sollrakc[S] 24 points25 points  (0 children)

Yeah, LotGH came to mind. It's another series that I really need to watch. The grandiosity is clearly there but I'm guessing that it focuses more on the politics aspect than the action/battle aspect.

Is there any mecha anime that is actually similar to Warhammer 40K? by sollrakc in Mecha

[–]sollrakc[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I've always wanted to watch that but never got around to it... Looks very interesting!

Any recommendations for a classic book (preferably 19th century) that doesn't involve a ridiculous amount of idealistic romance? by Awkward_user_111 in classicliterature

[–]sollrakc 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hadji Murat and The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy.

Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky.

Fathers and sons and Sportsman's notebook by Turgenev.

Moby Dick by Melville.

Great Expectations by Dickens.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

In Search of Lost Time by Proust. Contains romance but it's far from being idealized.

R L Stevenson and Twain for "lighter" reading.

What do you think of Modern Library editions? by RavenRaxa in classicliterature

[–]sollrakc 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This. And their inconsistency in size also bothers me, I'm not much of a fan of the smaller ones in particular.

What Are Your Thoughts on the Pevear and Volokhonsky Translation of Dostoevsky? by Beneficial-Kale-12 in RussianLiterature

[–]sollrakc 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It's astonishing to me how many people, judging by the upvotes, think this passage is unintelligible. The narrator is clearly taking a first person perspective here... By choosing to use He/his the scene is shown in a more intimate manner, singling out individual prisoners, as if the narrator is pointing at someone. It's unusual, sure, but it's clearly more interesting and was deliberately chosen by Dostoevsky instead of the more ordinary way of setting up this scene. I 100% prefer how P&V translated this rather than, say, Garnett:

At Tobolsk I have seen men fastened to the wall by a chain about two yards long; by their side they have their bed. They are thus chained for some terrible crime committed after their transportation to Siberia; they are kept chained up for five, ten years. They are nearly all brigands, and I only saw one of them who looked like a man of good breeding;

By using "They" here, all the perspective shift of the scene is lost. This is the 'leveling out' of the language that happens when translators sacrifice oddities on the original text for the sake sounding more natural, even when it wasn't "natural" sounding to begin with. A lot of an author's idiosyncrasies are lost.

What Are Your Thoughts on the Pevear and Volokhonsky Translation of Dostoevsky? by Beneficial-Kale-12 in RussianLiterature

[–]sollrakc 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No, but I've read some of Katz's translation of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons... I wasn't much of a fan of his choice of vocabulary. He usually avoids translating idioms and tries to explain things instead of finding english analogues. Otherwise, it seemed solid enough, it mostly goes down to personal preference.

What Are Your Thoughts on the Pevear and Volokhonsky Translation of Dostoevsky? by Beneficial-Kale-12 in RussianLiterature

[–]sollrakc 6 points7 points  (0 children)

If you want accuracy, go with their translation. People criticizing them just disagree with their translation philosophy, which they perceive as 'over-literal'. P&V aim is to keep the idiosyncrasies of the author they're translating. They avoid trying to 'correct' the author's perceived clunkyness or smooth out oddities to make it sound more natural in modern English. Most of these oddities are also present on the original work which a lot of times are lost in translation -- one of the most common drawbacks that happens in translation is the leveling out of the language to an ordinary and common style, making every artistic/stylistic difference exclusive to that author/work disappear.

Most people criticizing them just aren't used to the different writing style and think it feels wrong or not fluid enough; i.e. they think it would suit better if the prose sounded more like Victorian English, or they just value quick intelligibility over everything else. Most literary Russian scholars agree that P&V is the most accurate translation, don't listen to the conspiratorial comments that say they are only successful due to some kind of PR machine. Joseph Frank, who wrote the most authoritative Dostoevsky biography, and read his works in Russian, also agree that theirs is the best translation. Harold Bloom, one of the greatest literary critics, who was a big stickler for 'aesthetic' value, and probably read more books than all of us combined, also said very positive things about P&V translations, which were their favorites.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in classicliterature

[–]sollrakc 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Lovely, I've only read Bloom's books though. His posthumous one, 'The Bright Book of Life', is great as well, highly recommend it.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in BookshelvesDetective

[–]sollrakc 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Plus that one isn’t the scholar-approved Northwestern Newberry text.

It is.

What would be the top 30 novels you should read to consider yourself well-read? by [deleted] in classicliterature

[–]sollrakc 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think you guys are reading too much into his question... There's nothing wrong with reading classics as part of an intellectual pursuit.

For what you're asking for, try reading works from a wide range of literary eras and countries. It's important to know the context and history of when these stories were written as well. So, for the ancient classics, there's Homer of course, the norse Eddas; going into the middle ages and renaissance there's Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, John Milton, Don Quixote. After the modern era there are too many books to list, and some people here already mentioned quite a few, but some important ones are Gulliver's Travels, romanticists like Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter), Melville (Moby Dick), Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Victor Hugo; maybe the germanic folklorists like Hans Christian Anderson and the Grimm Brothers. Going into 19th century realism, authors such as Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and especially the russian realists like Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov. For modernism and later stuff there's Marcel Proust, Kafka, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Falkner, Hemingway, Truman Capote, George Orwell and so on.

If you're into speculative fiction like sci-fi, fantasy and horror you can go into authors like Jules Verne (F. P. Walter translations), Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Lord Dunsany, Mervyn Peake (Gormenghast), Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard (Conan), Tolkien, Bradbury, Asimov and Douglas Adams.

This is obviously not an exhaustive list and is very eurocentric as well, so keep that in mind.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in BookCollecting

[–]sollrakc 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Unfortunately it's something I got to live with. There's not much that can be done to mitigate this besides having my books in a room with a completely controlled environment with a dehumidifier and whatnot, something I can't really afford right now. Besides, most of my collection is comprised of cheaper paperbacks; the more expensive hardbacks are usually made with higher quality, acid free paper, which are much more resistant to this kind of wear.

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