3 ms·
I speak 4 languages and have read literature for 3. The depth and diversity of modern english fiction has no parallel, at least for the genres I enjoy(sci-fi,
by fooker 8y ago
I speak 4 languages and have read literature for 3.
The depth and diversity of modern english fiction has no parallel, at least for the genres I enjoy(sci-fi, fantasy, alternative history, thrillers).
- doc_gunthrop 8y agoSurely it helps that English borrows heavily from the Romance languages, among others.
- nyolfen 8y agosome people are so earnest to cast aside or denigrate their culture in a display of cosmopolitan/xenophilic signaling.
- gaius 8y agosome people are so earnest to cast aside or denigrate their culture in a display of cosmopolitan/xenophilic signaling I literally cannot even conceive of a French or Arabic or Chinese or any other language community in the world feeling guilt that maybe their language is too popular and spoken by too many people.
- grey-area 8y agoRussian and French 19c literature are the two obvious counter-examples. I admire the attempt to reframe the question in terms that allow you to claim English is pre-eminent though.
- fooker 8y agoPlease name 10 popular high fantasy novels spanning multi thousand pages in French and Russian.
- ddebernardy 8y agoNot the OP, but FWIW Jules Verne was French...
- dorchadas 8y agoSo, basically, if they don't have the breadth of literary genres that English does, they're not as good. That's a horrible metric to judge literature and literary value by.
- fooker 8y agoI never mentioned anything about 'good' or 'judge'. My point was about breadth, which is factual to the best of my knowledge.
- grey-area 8y agoQED
- ozim 8y agoWhat is your native language? Mine is Polish, for sci-fi I could not enjoy Stanislaw Lem translated to English. On the other hand I really enjoyed translation of H.P. Lovercaft to Polish. I find Douglas Adams "Hitchhiker's guide to galaxy" lot less funny in Polish. There was also really bad (in my opinion) translation of "Lord of the rings" to Polish which tried to translate proper names, but there was different one which I read and left names unchanged. I am just thinking how many experiences I am missing while I am not knowing many other languages. Now I live in The Netherlands and learn Dutch, I cannot properly enjoy literature even though I read books, but on my language level everything is bland and I see just words to be understood. So I don't get double meanings like I could already get while reading English.
- fooker 8y agoMy native language is Bengali, far removed from English. I speak French and Spanish too, but not as well as English. You are right about translated literature, though that was not my primary point.
- simias 8y agoThe genres you list are very popular in the English world. It's fine of course but to use that to argue for a supremacy of English language literature doesn't strike me as a very solid argument. It would be like saying that Comics are superior to Bandes Dessinees because you enjoy super heroes a lot. Or that American cuisine is the best because you love hamburgers, tex mex and slow cooked meat. Nothing wrong with that but it's very subjective. The American cultural machine is also incredibly powerful so it can impose its themes everywhere around the world, which also leads to this optical effect, you end up using it as the yardstick to judge everybody else's cultural output. Beyond that I find this entire thread discussing the potential superiority of English literature frankly odd and rather meaningless. Anybody who can take English, French, German, Russian, Japanese and, say, Chinese literature and pick a winner is frankly an idiot. How can you even begin to judge something like that? We're talking about centuries and centuries, thousands of notable writers, millions of pages, hundreds of genres, from poetry to plays to novels to biographies. Who wins, Jacques Prévert or Tolkien? Yukio Mishima or Isaac Assimov? Mikhail Bulgakov or John Grisham? Fernando Pessoa or JK Rowling?
- fooker 8y agoI am not arguing for the supremacy of English literature, just the volume and breadth of those genres, which you apparently agree with.