What are you reading?

[Duke of Buckingham]

One Hundred Years of Solitude author Gabriel García Márquez.

The widely acclaimed book, considered by many to be the author's masterpiece, was first published in Spanish in 1967, and subsequently has been translated into thirty-seven languages and has sold more than 20 million copies. The magical realist style and thematic substance of One Hundred Years of Solitude established it as an important, representative novel of the literary Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, that was stylistically influenced by Modernism (European and North American), and the Cuban Vanguardia (Vanguard) literary movement.

[Duke of Buckingham]

A Culture of Freedom: Ancient Greece and the Origins of Europe

By Christian Meier

Oxford University Press

Published 22 September 2011

[Duke of Buckingham]

With Fire and Sword (Polish: Ogniem i mieczem) is a historical novel by the Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz (also the author of QUO VADIS), published in 1884. It is the first volume of a series known to Poles as the Trilogy, followed by The Deluge (Potop, 1886) and Fire in the Steppe (Pan Wołodyjowski, 1888), also translated as Colonel Wolodyjowski. The novel has been adapted as a film several times, most recently in 1999.

With Fire and Sword is a historical fiction novel, set in the 17th century in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Khmelnytsky Uprising. It was initially serialized in several Polish newspapers, chapters appearing in weekly instalments. It gained enormous popularity in Poland, and by the turn of the 20th century had become one of the most popular Polish books ever. It became obligatory reading in Polish schools, and has been translated into English and most European languages.

The series was a vehicle for expressing Polish patriotism in a Poland partitioned and deprived of independence, while avoiding censorship by having a historical background concerning wars with past enemies other than the countries ruling parts of Poland at the time of writing (Russia, Germany and Austria).

[Duke of Buckingham]

The Charge Of The Light Brigade

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
'Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!' he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismay'd ?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro' the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reel'd from the sabre-stroke
Shatter'd and sunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

When can their glory fade ?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder'd.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

[Chron3]

Decision in the Ukraine - Summer 1943
II SS and II Panzerkorps
by Nipe

and

Panzertaktik
German Small Unit Armor Tactics
Wolfgang Schneider

[Duke of Buckingham]

I am tasting the words in my mother language of the most important writer for me. I am rereading Fernando Pessoa, on his Book of Disquiet. I would like the words were mine but then I face me and think what are the words that have never been said ...

From me to you, some quotes of this work of art, I hope you like it:

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”

“There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.”

“My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren't attached.”

“My past is everything I failed to be.”

“I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect”

“I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.”

“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.”

“My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.”

“I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.”

“Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.”

“If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.”

“I've always been an ironic dreamer, unfaithful to my inner promises.
Like a complete outsider, a casual observer of whom I thought I was,
I've always enjoyed watching my daydreams go down in defeat.
I was never convinced of what I believed in.
I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through.
Words were my only truth.
When the right words were said, all was done; the rest was the sand that had always been.”

“I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.”

“To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.”

“We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.”

“Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally. The end result is what matters. What one felt was what one experienced. One retires to bed as wearily from having dreamed as from having done hard physical labor. One never lives so intensely as when one has been thinking hard.”

“To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.”

“There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows….. I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul.”

“I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.”

“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself.
This isn't the case with literature. Literature stimulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.”

“I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.”

“...the painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones; the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad.”

“I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.”

“I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.”

“The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life.”

“I don't know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don't know what to think or what I am.”

“Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.”

“Having never discovered qualities in myself that might attract someone else, I could never believe that anyone felt attracted to me.”

“But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?”

“What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside of me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life--me, so calm and peaceful?”


― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-Disqu.../dp/0141183047

[Duke of Buckingham]

I am rereading "Os Lusíadas", usually translated as "The Lusiads", is a Portuguese epic poem by Luís Vaz de Camões (sometimes anglicized as Camoens).

Written in Homeric fashion, the poem focuses mainly on a fantastical interpretation of the Portuguese voyages of discovery during the 15th and 16th centuries. Os Lusíadas is often regarded as Portugal's national epic, much in the way as Virgil's Aeneid was for the Ancient Romans, as well as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey for the Ancient Greeks. It was first printed in 1572, three years after the author returned from the Indies.

I don't think I can translate that, even the several English translations, are so different and none seems to be adequate to the greatness of the poem. I know that most of the Portuguese can't understand the poem due to the use of Archaic Portuguese and to several figure of speech.

As I was browsing I found in amazon what appears to be a well informed commentary about this issue, which I will quote:

"Had Camoens been "Englishened" shortly after his own lifetime, no doubt some English translator could have grasped the proper tone, meter and spirit for his work to be presented in English grab. However, since he died in 1580, just when Spain absorbed Portugal into the Iberian Union, his poem in praise of the Portuguese exploits in India was not to be Englishened when the English where busy trying to undone what he had praised. Therefore he lost his chance with the English language. As it is, all English translation of Camoens have been at best exercises in creative anachronism (such as Richard Francis Burton's Victorian one) or simply inadequate (such as the Penguin trans., which is _in prose_!). Also, there is the problem that a translation of the high degree required is best achieved between cognate languages (such as the German trans. of Shakespeare, or the Portuguese trans. of the D.Quixote). Be as it is,Camoens didn't fail to attract the attention even of Marx & Engels, who quote the opening section of the Lusiads (in Portuguese) in the _German Ideology_. Therefore I advise reading _any_ English trans., but only to get a foretaste before learning Portuguese and reading the original.Finally, for those who think the poem's "hero" Vasco da Gama to be unintersting: the hero of the poem is the Portuguese people in general, therefore the name of the poem - the _Lusiads_ (from Lusitania, i.e. Portugal) and not the "Gamaeid"."-C. E. R. Mendonça "Carlos Eduardo Rebello de Mendonça"

Well I am reading it again.

[pinhodecarlos]

Reading articles, thesis, reports about gas-lift technology. It will be my main PhD subject.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Reading articles, thesis, reports about gas-lift technology. It will be my main PhD subject.

Your turn to do so Carlos. I will light your life with some nice images from gas-lift technology:

[Duke of Buckingham]

Foundation and Empire a novel written by Isaac Asimov.

I am reading the first half of the book, titled "The General", tells how the experienced General Bel Riose of the Galactic Empire launches an attack against the Foundation ...

I would make one very good movie of the series Foundation and Empire, the book as everything to be a good movie or TV series.

The Foundation novels of Isaac Asimov are one of the great masterworks of science fiction. Unsurpassed for their unique blend of nonstop action, daring ideas, and extensive world-building, they chronicle the struggle of a courageous group of men and women to preserve humanity's light against an inexorable tide of darkness and violence.