Guh.
The NYT just ran an article about judging people on the quality of their personal libraries, as though this is some shocking new thing. Really, are there people who don't do that? (Sez the woman who dated a guy who didn't read for fun and who owned I'm guessing maybe 30 books total, but to be fair he was fantastisch in most of the other departments.) I'm with the Jezebel commenters who cite Kundera and Rand on their lists of run-fast-run-far dating dealbreakers, although if the overall library is diverse enough you can kind of maybe forgive it. On the positive side, namedropping The Master and Margarita is a-ok numbah one, finding out that a coworker had read Foreign Devils on the Silk Road made me happy for an hour, and I was tempted sore to perma-borrow a vintage cloth-bound edition of Paradise Lost that someone showed me recently, by force if necessary, because huffing dustmites? Is my anti-drug.
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Kundera? Really? What's wrong there? But then I've only read, and no longer own, Unbearable Lightness, so what do I know.
But I'm with you on the Rand, up until your qualification. There's absolutely nothing else in someone's library that can make up for Ayn Rand. Nothing. Run, don't walk.
Any points for friends who blog Rilke poems?
Dating without Kundera. "Milan Kundera is the Dave Matthews of Slavic letters, a talented hack, certainly a hack who's paid his dues, but a hack nonetheless. And by his own admission, this is his worst book. If you strip off the exoticism of Brezhnev-era Czechoslovakia (this rinses off easily in soapy water), you are left with a book full of vapid characters bouncing against each other like little perfectly elastic balls of condensed ego. And every twenty pages the story steps outside for a cigarette so that the author can deliver a short philosophical homily...This is particularly galling given the A-team of Slavic authors just waiting to get their chance in the American dating ring, authors who've written funny, sexed-up books of great literary merit and philosophical depth that are fun to read no matter the mental wattage at your disposal." (Oh how I love Idle Words.)
I have to be fair about the Rand. Sometimes you keep books that meant a lot to you as a kid even if you've way outgrown them, and I suspect that Hesse still lurks somewhere on my own shelves (theory: at 17, most of us read either Hesse or Rand and take them very very seriously; adulthood is the process of coming to terms with the subsequent embarrassment). Any positive mention of Rand in conversation with an adult, however, and I'm knocking back my drink and out the door.
I love that poem, but the translations of the second sentence never seem exactly right. "Der Sommer war sehr gross" expresses not so much size ("The huge summer"--pleh) as an extreme; "The summer was fantastic" gets a bit closer but is both clunky and still not entirely right. Apparently the only solution is to sprech Deutsch, and that seems like an awful lot of work.
¿"perma-borrow"?
You probably should have refrained from either saying this or pointing me to your blog if your scheme involved me gladly putting that book in your hand again.
Oh, no. You're brighter than that. You must have another plan. Great, now I'll have that to worry about.
*sigh*
I get no compensatory presumption of innocence for confessing the temptation on which I did not act? How sad.
Admittedly I read that Kundera close to twenty years ago and remember absolutely nothing about it. Well, I remember being at the Hyundai dealer for some service or something, and reading it in the waiting room there. Woulda been very late 1988 or sometime in 1989.
(And for no good reason, I remember that I saw the movie version of Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I still remember fondly, on February 27, 1988. With Gordon. In the afternoon. At Tysons Corner. We saw Frantic that evening with Babs at Skyline.)
But very much lots o' agreement with you on Rilke and translation, or poetry translations in general. I don't ever memorize or recite poets whom I totally adore like Rilke or Federico García Lorca, because I only know them in translation. And I grieve that I'm missing so much of the beauty in the originals. But, as you point out, not a whole lot of alternatives.
It's worth learning Spanish just to read Garcia Lorca in the original. We got drummed through "Bodas de Sangre" and "La Casa de Bernarda Alba" more times than I care to remember, but oh Lo' could that man write. "Romance Sonambulo" gets all the love, but "Cancion de jinete" gives me shivers.
On the lighter side, a friend came to class complaining about how obscure GL could be. "All that stuff where the mother's whining about how her son likes oranges--what was that?"
"Um, what?"
"You know, all 'malditas sean las navajas.' It's just fruit!"
"Actually, it's knives she's worried about. Navajas, not naranjas."
"...What are the odds that you'll let me forget this?"
"Slim. Very slim indeed."
(theory: at 17, most of us read either Hesse or Rand and take them very very seriously; adulthood is the process of coming to terms with the subsequent embarrassment)
*coughcough* 15, and it was Atlas Shrugged, and I was a very unpleasant person for about three weeks afterward. Then I got over it. Gah.
All the same, I would still recommend one read Rand at some point, if only to know what she's saying, so as to refute it with reasonable authority.
I got Hesse at Governor's, where they exposed us to masses of Joyce, Hesse, Kurosawa, Fellini, Plato, Friel, Palestrina, Mozart, and God knows what else, with concerts and alllll the typical college culty flicks for balance ("Harold and Maude"? A world of check). It was like a preview of college without the student loans. The glee of realizing that we'd be having 60-page reading assignments for each of three classes each day? Borderline illicit.
There were Rand aficionados at GS, but they tended to be clannish and vaguely fungoidal. I assumed that there was some correlation between their personalities and their politics and steered well clear. Isn't life too short?
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