11 ms·

Could the greatest works of literature be undiscovered?

118 points by diodorus 4y ago

Jun8 4y ago
The paper that this article is based on: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abl7655 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abl7655. On a tangential note: Corpus of Classical Texts that we have is really small, e.g. (http://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignorantiam.html http://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignora...): "... But the entirety of extant literature in Greek and Latin through to, say, the Late Empire is probably enough to fill a single small bookstore. It's a lot, sure. But a single person could probably read all of it. Even if you added to that all the personal correspondences unearthed in papyri and on wax tablets, and all the inscriptional material I doubt that it is impossible for a human to read all of it. I certainly wouldn't want to. I can't think of anyone who would want to, really. How many grave inscriptions would they have to read? How many tabulae in which a soldier in Britain sends for underwear or something? Still, it would be doable. Once you push the threshold of "ancient Romans" through into the very ass-end of Late Antiquity, though, it is quite plainly impossible for a single human to read it all. In fact, "Ancient Latin" represents less than one percent of all that has been written in the language. We pigeonhole this language as "ancient" because 19th century ideas about what "real" Latin is have — in a highly warped form — delimited the general sense of what Latin is, and can be, how it can be learned, and how it can be read." See also this answer in Latin SE: https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/16669/is-this-the-entire-corpus-of-latin-up-to-200-ad https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/16669/is-this-the-....
- jcranmer 4y ago
  > But the entirety of extant literature in Greek and Latin through to, say, the Late Empire is probably enough to fill a single small bookstore. This is the entirety of extant Greek/Latin literature, with a full English translation: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f4/1f/1e/f41f1eeffc2127a467dfdfbbfe8441d0.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f4/1f/1e/f41f1eeffc2127a467df... (citing https://acoup.blog/2021/03/26/fireside-friday-march-26-2021-on-the-nature-of-ancient-evidence/ https://acoup.blog/2021/03/26/fireside-friday-march-26-2021-...). It's not so much a "single small bookstore" as it is "a large bookshelf".
delaaxe 4y ago
There is a tremendous amount of literature on the very early mythology of the human race still being discovered today in the Sumerian tablets
- metadaemon 4y ago
  Do you have any recent examples of this? I'm extremely interested in this time period!
  - christkv 4y ago
    If you’ve not seen it you might enjoy https://youtu.be/d2lJUOv0hLA https://youtu.be/d2lJUOv0hLA
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
syndacks 4y ago
I'm convinced there are some savant-level writers out there who have written the worlds greatest novels, and we will never get to read them. I'm thinking of the person who is so enlightened that they feel no need to share it (for monetary or social gain). Or the person who has such imposter syndrome that they never bothered to share. Or the person who finished the novel and burnt it down.
- honkler 4y ago
  in general, there may (actually, must) be geniuses who have dropped out of society.
  - giantg2 4y ago
    Eg Ted Kaczinski
    - honkler 4y ago
      you know what, i had him in mind when i was writing that comment. A true inspiration. PS: it's spelled "Kaczynski"
  - jl6 4y ago
    You don’t have to drop out of society to be an unknown genius. You just have to direct your genius at something non-public. I know a number of incredible people just quietly getting on with being excellent at something super-niche and never seeking publicity.
    - danenania 4y ago
      I’d go even further and say that in most cases these days, even true genius is likely to be overlooked unless it coincides with a gift for self-promotion. Only the absolute rarest of masterpieces can rise above the noise just based on the brilliance of the work itself. And even then, there’s a pretty good chance someone better at marketing will just copy it and receive all the credit.
HidyBush 4y ago
I mean, go and look who were the most famous authors 200 years ago and you will not recognize one name. The amount of legendary writers we have lost to time and moldy paper is huge
- wolverine876 4y ago
  Taken literally, that seems unlikely - Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, the Bible, etc. But I wonder how many we would recognize.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I suspect famous means famous in their time. We know some of them just from pure output (think Charles Dickens) - but think of all the contemporaries of Cervantes we don’t know - the very people he was making fun of with Don Quixote.
- cafard 4y ago
  In 1822, Byron, Coleridge, and Wordsworth were alive and writing. In Germany, Goethe was alive and still writing. In France, Chateaubriand was publishing.
sharkjacobs 4y ago
If a lost folio of some forgotten contemporary of Shakespeare were discovered, a collection of plays which were more entertaining, moving, and inspiring than the works of Shakespeare, plays which more convincingly depicted the range and depth of the human experience, which were more surprising and delightful and sobering, which were by some objective measure "better" plays than Shakespeare's, then I still think that Shakespeare's plays would probably be "greater" and more worthy of study and consumption A big, big part of what makes Shakespeare's plays and sonnets "great" is that they've been the foremost works of English literature for hundreds of years. They're known to everyone who attended school in an English speaking country, they've shaped and influenced our language, culture, and every work of literature which followed. Being familiar with the works of Shakespeare is necessary context for a thousand phrases and references that you'll encounter every day. And the "value" which a reader or watcher can extract from the works of Shakespeare can be enhanced by the hundreds of years of critics and audience who have already written about and engaged with his works.
- scotty79 4y ago
  So fame creates value?
  - distrill 4y ago
    in this instance it creates influence, which is probably very valuable yes.
    - coastflow 4y ago
      To add, the Bible is seen by many scholars as one of the greatest works of literature (and is on the St. John's College curriculum) not because the scholars are religious, but in large part due to its influence on other great works of literature (e.g. Milton's Paradise Lost, Dante's Inferno, much of Dostoevsky's work) and shaping human history.
      - 988747 4y ago
        It's not even about such works as Dante's Inferno, which are directly thematically related to Bible. As with Shakespeare it's all about hundreds of small things, expressions, metaphors. Without Bible words and phrases such as "forbidden fruit", "good Samaritan", "eye for an eye", "Armageddon", "wayward son" lose context, or meaning.
lurquer 4y ago
Great literature, for the most part, is Great only because a selector group of taste-makers has said it’s Great.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  What is that based on? IME, it is Great.
karaterobot 4y ago
> The numbers they published in Science magazine earlier this year don’t make for happy reading, but they corroborate figures arrived at by other methods. The researchers concluded that a humbling 90% of medieval manuscripts preserving chivalric and heroic narratives – those relating to King Arthur, for example, or Sigurd (also known as Siegfried) – have gone. Of the stories themselves, about a third have been lost completely, meaning that no manuscript preserving them remains. It's impossible to say whether the greatest works of literature are undiscovered, or even lost. That's the tragedy of it, that we'll never know. We do know that we've lost a lot, not only from the medieval era, but even in our own lifetimes. Despite digitization and home recording, a ton of media (not just literature) was has been lost in warehouse fires, or even by having the only copies taped over. Or, never even committed to physical media at all. Even today, when we secretly believe everything we do is tracked by somebody, a bad backup system or a decision to cut costs on storage can wipe out years of data. The work of archivists is to save what they can, not to save everything. It's a losing battle.
sammalloy 4y ago
I used to hang out with musicians and play music with them and jam into the late hours of the early morning. Sometimes we would record our jams, but most of the time we would not. Listening to these old recordings, you would occasionally find magic and "endless wonder" (see Warehouse 13 episode "Resonance"), and that got me thinking: how much incredible music has been lost to time, music that wasn’t written down and composed and was never recorded?
- wolverine876 4y ago
  Even if you wrote it down, would that capture the endless wonder?
  - sammalloy 4y ago
    I won’t go into too much detail, but the magic and endless wonder I’m describing was caught on tape. Where it starts to get strange, and this is difficult to describe, is that in the course of playing live music, it turns out, the /music created its own music/. This could only be caught live. You could conceivably attribute this to stochastic sound waves bouncing around and interacting with each other, overtones, distortion, echoes, etc. And what I’m describing isn’t all that unknown. But it was caught on tape. And the music we were hearing wasn’t created by any one of us in an intentional manner. It had taken on a life of its own and became a living entity of some kind. Again, it’s hard to explain, but anyone who goes to concerts or is familiar with a live aural environment knows that shit happens and it’s often weird and unexplained. A similar phenomenon has been reported by writers, known as writer’s trance. Often times an author will claim that they didn’t actually write the book, it wrote itself. On one level, there’s the question of where ideas come from, but on another, there’s a way these ideas are expressed and manifested that becomes more than just the person creating them. In the example of the music, it felt like the music had taken on a life of its own when the different parts all came into contact with each other. One wonders if the same thing happens after a writer creates the characters and starts having them interact in the story. On the one hand, these ideas only exist in the mind of the writer, but once on the page, they begin to enter other minds, including the minds of the characters themselves. It’s often been said in this regard that fictional literature is the original form of simulation modeling.
ed-209 4y ago
This seems self evident and im sure literature is the least valuable of the treasures lost to time.
lr4444lr 4y ago
Absolutely. Catullus' poems, a mainstay in the modern Latin canon, was rescued from one surviving manuscript found in the bottom of a wine cask IIRC. It's always very exciting when we find some accidentally well preserved archeological site for the chance that we might come across new scrolls.
damontal 4y ago
We almost didn’t have Confederacy of Dunces. The fact that it was published is a miracle. Toole’s mom was persistent enough and managed to get the manuscript in front of someone with just enough patience to give it a look.
- sixstringtheory 4y ago
  Such a good book. One of I think 3 books I’ve read cover to cover in a day. Which, sure, also says something about the particular days I decided to read those books, but still–it’s fantastic. I haven’t had one of those kinds of days in so long. I miss the freedom and relaxation!
spaetzleesser 4y ago
It’s pretty much guaranteed that in most of areas of life there are/were some undiscovered geniuses. If you grew up in Germany during my youth there would have been a good chance you wouldn’t have been discovered if you were the best basketball player of all time. Or it’s very possible that some band write the perfect rock song but never published it. Or that somebody wrote a great book but didn’t bother to get it published.
btrettel 4y ago
> There’s yet another problem: the sheer volume of texts. When it comes to Indian and Buddhist traditions, for example, the number of ancient manuscripts that have survived but are yet to be studied has been estimated at around 10m, though Friedrich says he has seen estimates as high as 30m. There simply aren’t enough scholars with the right expertise, including the necessary language skills, to do the work. I was worried a lot about this during my PhD. Well-cited papers were just the "tip of the iceberg". I did some fairly thorough searches and came across quite a few papers in my field that were important in my view and unfortunately overlooked. The problem doesn't seem intractable to me. More researchers should spend some time searching the literature where they think no one else did. If a certain percentage of people did this, then I think it would benefit everyone including those who don't do particularly deep searches.
- kossTKR 4y ago
  First off i don't understand how this 10-30k number is physically or culturally possible. ( i admit my tired brain thought million first - confusing british/roman systems! ) Also having read sporadically through various dzogchen texts on "dream yoga" which is an older mapping and superset of what we today call lucid dreaming i'm positive that there could be an incredible amount of "useful knowledge" of various "weirder" aspects and concepts of consciousness and dreams waiting for us in some of those texts. Exciting!
  - boomboomsubban 4y ago
    Are you sure it's thousand? "m" is the common British abbreviation for million, while "M" would be the Roman abbreviation for a thousand. Plus, frankly only 10,000 Indian manuscripts seems way too low. India is huge, and has been literate for thousands of years.
  - svat 4y ago
    The number is indeed millions, not thousands! Note that it's the number of manuscripts, not the number of distinct works. Many of the manuscripts would be copies of the same popular works (people preserve whatever's most useful), but there is a long tail of works each preserved in very few manuscripts. The 30-million estimate has been arrived at independently by several people AFAIK, but one of them is David Pingree, and look at e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=pingree+estimate+million+manuscripts https://www.google.com/search?q=pingree+estimate+million+man... for several sources. In particular, this paper by M. D. Srinivas [1] gives several independent estimates of the number of manuscripts, all in millions. There have been 4.2 million manuscripts actually documented already (as of 2019 when the paper was written), and this paper's estimate is that "10 million is indeed a reasonable estimate for the number of Indian manuscripts that are extant […] the number of manuscripts in Sanskrit can be expected to be of the order of 8 million." And although this post is about literature, that paper is about Indian astronomy&mathematics, which is perhaps representative: > We find that of the estimated 9,000 source-works of Indian Astronomy and Mathematics (which are preserved in around 30,000 manuscripts), only about 150 texts were edited, and just 30 texts translated during 1800-1947. During 1948-2019, there has been significant progress and another about 300 texts have been edited and 66 texts translated, many of them with detailed explanatory notes. Thus, only about 450 (or 5% of the estimated 9000 source-texts available) have been edited and published so far; even among the published works, only 96 texts have been seriously studied via translations and explanations with a view to bring out their technical (mathematical-astronomical) content. [1]: https://insa.nic.in/writereaddata/UpLoadedFiles/IJHS/Vol54_3_2019__Art01.pdf https://insa.nic.in/writereaddata/UpLoadedFiles/IJHS/Vol54_3... and https://www.esamskriti.com/essays/pdf/19%20The%20Untapped%20Wealth%20of%20Manuscripts%20on%20Indian%20Astronomy%20and%20Mathematics.pdf https://www.esamskriti.com/essays/pdf/19%20The%20Untapped%20... = ttps://archive.org/details/srinivas2019/page/n1/mode/2up
BMc2020 4y ago
Tomas Moore's account of the events covered in The Vertical Plane have never been found (1 copy, handwritten in latin, hidden for safekeeping). Where is Tomas’s own account, his book that was finished at Oxford and left somewhere in manuscript? We never forget that ‘2109’ said it would be found, and we can only hope that this will happen in our lifetime.
cletus 4y ago
This is an idea that fascinates me and it goes beyond literature. it certainly includes history. One of my favorite examples is cuneiform tablets. Less than 10% of the 500k to 1m tablets recovered have ever been translated. These are particularly interesting because they're some of the earliest examples of surviving written records we have. The Hittite capital Hattusa (IIRC) was lost for millenia. When it was found it was a veritable treasure trove including personal correspondence between the Hittie king and the Egyptian pharoah Ramses II. Nineveh was sacked at one point. A massive fire destroyed the library but baked the clay tablets preserving them. In the early days of Rome, Rome (the city) was sacked by Gauls. This destroyed a lot of the early works of Rome. This affected Rome's expansion (eg Caesar's conquest of Gaul has been argued to be affected by the cultural significance of this sacking). I's one reason why the origins of Rome are somewhat steeped in myth and legend rather than fact such as the apocryphal tale of Romulus and Reemus. Another example are the histories of Alexander the Great. Alexander died under mysterious circumstances at the height of his power (in his early 30s). Several primary sources were written by his inner circle. None have survived. We know this because a Roman named Arrion some 2 centuries later wrote about the campaigns of Alexander citing 3 such sources (all lost) comparing what they agreed on and what they didn't. A lot was lost in the Arab sacking of the Libary of Alexandria. I somewhat agree with some other commenters in that literary significance is more... relative. Put another way: part of their cultural significance comes from them being known, studied, performed and repaeted over centuries.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  In the case of cuneiform, aren't the vast majority of tablets effectively receipts and transaction records? It'd be a bit like stumbling across someone's tax records receipts box in another 8,000 years or so. Presuming thermal paper survives the interval. (Morgan Freeman voice: It won't.)
temp8964 4y ago
This sounds like a problem for AI to solve. The AI can be trained with literature labeled at different level of greatest and then build a model to scan all the literature. Then one day the AI will come out of the cave: I just read a million books, so you don't have to!
- ethanwillis 4y ago
  Sorry, but it's not capable of doing this. There are some endeavors which are fundamentally human.
hyperpallium2 4y ago
It's nice to imagine a text in itself can be great, without context or commentary, without the patina of prestige.
lostgame 4y ago
This is extremely similar to the field of music for me. As a vinyl DJ, hip hop producer, and turntablist, one of the greatest joys is finding one of those rare LPs that just never was heard, and - even better - that juicy sample in it. Obviously there’s gotta be unknown literature out there that’s brilliant. :)
zxcvbn4038 4y ago
Years ago in high school I observed that there appeared to be no great works of literature that were not in the public domain - because the school book publishers don’t want to pay royalties to anyone, and to a lesser degree nobody wants to do literary analysis of a living author who can dispute their interpretation! Admittedly a little cynical but I think there is a lot of truth to both. I was also annoyed at all the “yoda speak” translations of ancient literature we had to read whereas any student would be graded down for not putting their parts of speech in the English order. Then you have things like Candide that would be considered super offensive in the US - where a friend of mine once had a summer job airbrushing away cow udders from a school textbook because the state of Texas (which buys the most text books) felt they were too suggestive. (A few decades ago but Texas still decides what goes in most school text books by virtue of being the largest consumer)
- eesmith 4y ago
  I don't think there's that much truth to your observation. "The Great Gatsby" only entered the public domain last year, while its Wikipedia entry says it "was part of the assigned curricula in the near majority of U.S. high schools". "'The Grapes of Wrath' is frequently read in American high school and college literature classes due to its historical context and enduring legacy" says its Wikipedia page, and it's still in copyright. In 1981, "Catcher in the Rye", according to its Wikipedia entry "was both the most censored book and the second most taught book in public schools in the United States." Salinger didn't die until 2010.
cat_plus_plus 4y ago
Nah? The really greatest works were copied many times and committed to memory to be preserved even during multi-generation subjugation. At least greatest in meeting practical, emotional and spiritual needs of contemporaries, our historical interest today is not the most important thing in the world.
lfpeb8b45ez 4y ago
Can a possibility be possible?
dmd 4y ago
Off topic, but phrases like "it is said that the books took six months to burn. We can’t know if this is true." bother me. Of course we can know if that is true. This is like saying "it is said the books, upon burning, all turned into unicorns, sang silly songs, and flew to the moon. We can't know if this is true." The physics of combustion hasn't changed in the last 2000 years.
ThinkBeat 4y ago
Nearly all books published in the last two hundred years are unobtainable. Millions of books have gotten far enough to earn the backing of a publisher. They have a small print run of say 100 - 500 copies. If sales are dismal usually the books go on "regular" sale and if that does not work, then once a year the (Norwegian) bookstore dumps them out for $1 a piece. If they still have not sold, they get dumped into a recycler and will never be read or seen ever again. I love going to the yearly sale and buying books for $1 per book. I do feel sad when I look at the bin. All the blood, sweat and tears an author has invested into it. Writing it, sending them out, getting rejected from publishers but finally finding one that will publish it. That must be a proud moment. Becoming a "real" author with a published book. Maybe getting recognized? Instead, it becomes a sad tale of loss. Seeing your book out there for $1 and still not getting picked up. I have discovered a few books I got for $1 that I thought were great. I note them in my blog and try to harass friends into reading it. I have been scanning and putting out my grandfather's books. Technically the publisher owns all rights, but I doubt they care anymore. I am not saying he was a great author or that his books will be "discovered" but at least they are available for free should someone want to read one. It is my dream that a system can be made globally so that all books published are made available for free online once some period time has passed. For books that ended up in the recycler the publisher could let them be published sooner. The national library would put it out on their website and someone can enjoy a few of them later on. The cost of storing en ebook is cheap. Granted storing millions is not that cheap but worth it to preserve more of the culture and perspectives from the past. The national library in Norway has copies of most books published after some date. They are also allowed to, perhaps supposed to publish books online (yay) once they enter the public domain. (yay). The national library does not have the resources to follow up on it. I talked to a couple of the librarians. Someone needs to keep track of when a book enters the public domain. It appears the rules surrounding that in Norway are a bit complex. It would be helpful for them if the publisher sent them a signal when a work enters the public domain, but they have no interest in doing that. If someone such as I write a letter to request a book and someone finds it worth their time to go check on it, they have to contact the publisher and try to figure out what the story is. A majority of books available digitally at the national library are "streamable". They have a picture of each page. Often not a good photo. A lot harder to read than an eBook. They can in most cases if the publisher agrees to publish an eBook of it but again, it is a question of having enough manpower to manage all of it. Hopefully one day.
fourtrees 4y ago
I think it's important to note that that contemporary language death at the hands of the major lingua francas (you know who you are) is wiping out great and possibly very old works of oral 'literature'. Quite a few of our surviving great epics, sagas, and lyric(s) originated as oral works. With the death of collapse of these languages, from the Amazon to Siberia to Africa to Europe, these works (not to mention the loads of historical and cultural revealed in them) have or will shortly go entirely extinct. Not too much we can do about it though.

118 points by diodorus 4y ago

Jun8 4y ago

The paper that this article is based on: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abl7655 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abl7655. On a tangential note: Corpus of Classical Texts that we have is really small, e.g. (http://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignorantiam.html http://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignora...): "... But the entirety of extant literature in Greek and Latin through to, say, the Late Empire is probably enough to fill a single small bookstore. It's a lot, sure. But a single person could probably read all of it. Even if you added to that all the personal correspondences unearthed in papyri and on wax tablets, and all the inscriptional material I doubt that it is impossible for a human to read all of it. I certainly wouldn't want to. I can't think of anyone who would want to, really. How many grave inscriptions would they have to read? How many tabulae in which a soldier in Britain sends for underwear or something? Still, it would be doable. Once you push the threshold of "ancient Romans" through into the very ass-end of Late Antiquity, though, it is quite plainly impossible for a single human to read it all. In fact, "Ancient Latin" represents less than one percent of all that has been written in the language. We pigeonhole this language as "ancient" because 19th century ideas about what "real" Latin is have — in a highly warped form — delimited the general sense of what Latin is, and can be, how it can be learned, and how it can be read." See also this answer in Latin SE: https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/16669/is-this-the-entire-corpus-of-latin-up-to-200-ad https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/16669/is-this-the-....

jcranmer 4y ago
> But the entirety of extant literature in Greek and Latin through to, say, the Late Empire is probably enough to fill a single small bookstore. This is the entirety of extant Greek/Latin literature, with a full English translation: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f4/1f/1e/f41f1eeffc2127a467dfdfbbfe8441d0.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f4/1f/1e/f41f1eeffc2127a467df... (citing https://acoup.blog/2021/03/26/fireside-friday-march-26-2021-on-the-nature-of-ancient-evidence/ https://acoup.blog/2021/03/26/fireside-friday-march-26-2021-...). It's not so much a "single small bookstore" as it is "a large bookshelf".

delaaxe 4y ago

There is a tremendous amount of literature on the very early mythology of the human race still being discovered today in the Sumerian tablets

metadaemon 4y ago
Do you have any recent examples of this? I'm extremely interested in this time period!
- christkv 4y ago
  If you’ve not seen it you might enjoy https://youtu.be/d2lJUOv0hLA https://youtu.be/d2lJUOv0hLA
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

syndacks 4y ago

I'm convinced there are some savant-level writers out there who have written the worlds greatest novels, and we will never get to read them. I'm thinking of the person who is so enlightened that they feel no need to share it (for monetary or social gain). Or the person who has such imposter syndrome that they never bothered to share. Or the person who finished the novel and burnt it down.

honkler 4y ago
in general, there may (actually, must) be geniuses who have dropped out of society.
- giantg2 4y ago
  Eg Ted Kaczinski
  - honkler 4y ago
    you know what, i had him in mind when i was writing that comment. A true inspiration. PS: it's spelled "Kaczynski"
- jl6 4y ago
  You don’t have to drop out of society to be an unknown genius. You just have to direct your genius at something non-public. I know a number of incredible people just quietly getting on with being excellent at something super-niche and never seeking publicity.
  - danenania 4y ago
    I’d go even further and say that in most cases these days, even true genius is likely to be overlooked unless it coincides with a gift for self-promotion. Only the absolute rarest of masterpieces can rise above the noise just based on the brilliance of the work itself. And even then, there’s a pretty good chance someone better at marketing will just copy it and receive all the credit.

HidyBush 4y ago

I mean, go and look who were the most famous authors 200 years ago and you will not recognize one name. The amount of legendary writers we have lost to time and moldy paper is huge

wolverine876 4y ago
Taken literally, that seems unlikely - Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, the Bible, etc. But I wonder how many we would recognize.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I suspect famous means famous in their time. We know some of them just from pure output (think Charles Dickens) - but think of all the contemporaries of Cervantes we don’t know - the very people he was making fun of with Don Quixote.
cafard 4y ago
In 1822, Byron, Coleridge, and Wordsworth were alive and writing. In Germany, Goethe was alive and still writing. In France, Chateaubriand was publishing.

sharkjacobs 4y ago

If a lost folio of some forgotten contemporary of Shakespeare were discovered, a collection of plays which were more entertaining, moving, and inspiring than the works of Shakespeare, plays which more convincingly depicted the range and depth of the human experience, which were more surprising and delightful and sobering, which were by some objective measure "better" plays than Shakespeare's, then I still think that Shakespeare's plays would probably be "greater" and more worthy of study and consumption A big, big part of what makes Shakespeare's plays and sonnets "great" is that they've been the foremost works of English literature for hundreds of years. They're known to everyone who attended school in an English speaking country, they've shaped and influenced our language, culture, and every work of literature which followed. Being familiar with the works of Shakespeare is necessary context for a thousand phrases and references that you'll encounter every day. And the "value" which a reader or watcher can extract from the works of Shakespeare can be enhanced by the hundreds of years of critics and audience who have already written about and engaged with his works.

scotty79 4y ago
So fame creates value?
- distrill 4y ago
  in this instance it creates influence, which is probably very valuable yes.
  - coastflow 4y ago
    To add, the Bible is seen by many scholars as one of the greatest works of literature (and is on the St. John's College curriculum) not because the scholars are religious, but in large part due to its influence on other great works of literature (e.g. Milton's Paradise Lost, Dante's Inferno, much of Dostoevsky's work) and shaping human history.
    - 988747 4y ago
      It's not even about such works as Dante's Inferno, which are directly thematically related to Bible. As with Shakespeare it's all about hundreds of small things, expressions, metaphors. Without Bible words and phrases such as "forbidden fruit", "good Samaritan", "eye for an eye", "Armageddon", "wayward son" lose context, or meaning.

lurquer 4y ago

Great literature, for the most part, is Great only because a selector group of taste-makers has said it’s Great.

wolverine876 4y ago
What is that based on? IME, it is Great.

karaterobot 4y ago

> The numbers they published in Science magazine earlier this year don’t make for happy reading, but they corroborate figures arrived at by other methods. The researchers concluded that a humbling 90% of medieval manuscripts preserving chivalric and heroic narratives – those relating to King Arthur, for example, or Sigurd (also known as Siegfried) – have gone. Of the stories themselves, about a third have been lost completely, meaning that no manuscript preserving them remains. It's impossible to say whether the greatest works of literature are undiscovered, or even lost. That's the tragedy of it, that we'll never know. We do know that we've lost a lot, not only from the medieval era, but even in our own lifetimes. Despite digitization and home recording, a ton of media (not just literature) was has been lost in warehouse fires, or even by having the only copies taped over. Or, never even committed to physical media at all. Even today, when we secretly believe everything we do is tracked by somebody, a bad backup system or a decision to cut costs on storage can wipe out years of data. The work of archivists is to save what they can, not to save everything. It's a losing battle.

sammalloy 4y ago

I used to hang out with musicians and play music with them and jam into the late hours of the early morning. Sometimes we would record our jams, but most of the time we would not. Listening to these old recordings, you would occasionally find magic and "endless wonder" (see Warehouse 13 episode "Resonance"), and that got me thinking: how much incredible music has been lost to time, music that wasn’t written down and composed and was never recorded?

wolverine876 4y ago
Even if you wrote it down, would that capture the endless wonder?
- sammalloy 4y ago
  I won’t go into too much detail, but the magic and endless wonder I’m describing was caught on tape. Where it starts to get strange, and this is difficult to describe, is that in the course of playing live music, it turns out, the /music created its own music/. This could only be caught live. You could conceivably attribute this to stochastic sound waves bouncing around and interacting with each other, overtones, distortion, echoes, etc. And what I’m describing isn’t all that unknown. But it was caught on tape. And the music we were hearing wasn’t created by any one of us in an intentional manner. It had taken on a life of its own and became a living entity of some kind. Again, it’s hard to explain, but anyone who goes to concerts or is familiar with a live aural environment knows that shit happens and it’s often weird and unexplained. A similar phenomenon has been reported by writers, known as writer’s trance. Often times an author will claim that they didn’t actually write the book, it wrote itself. On one level, there’s the question of where ideas come from, but on another, there’s a way these ideas are expressed and manifested that becomes more than just the person creating them. In the example of the music, it felt like the music had taken on a life of its own when the different parts all came into contact with each other. One wonders if the same thing happens after a writer creates the characters and starts having them interact in the story. On the one hand, these ideas only exist in the mind of the writer, but once on the page, they begin to enter other minds, including the minds of the characters themselves. It’s often been said in this regard that fictional literature is the original form of simulation modeling.

ed-209 4y ago

This seems self evident and im sure literature is the least valuable of the treasures lost to time.

lr4444lr 4y ago

Absolutely. Catullus' poems, a mainstay in the modern Latin canon, was rescued from one surviving manuscript found in the bottom of a wine cask IIRC. It's always very exciting when we find some accidentally well preserved archeological site for the chance that we might come across new scrolls.

damontal 4y ago

We almost didn’t have Confederacy of Dunces. The fact that it was published is a miracle. Toole’s mom was persistent enough and managed to get the manuscript in front of someone with just enough patience to give it a look.

sixstringtheory 4y ago
Such a good book. One of I think 3 books I’ve read cover to cover in a day. Which, sure, also says something about the particular days I decided to read those books, but still–it’s fantastic. I haven’t had one of those kinds of days in so long. I miss the freedom and relaxation!

spaetzleesser 4y ago

It’s pretty much guaranteed that in most of areas of life there are/were some undiscovered geniuses. If you grew up in Germany during my youth there would have been a good chance you wouldn’t have been discovered if you were the best basketball player of all time. Or it’s very possible that some band write the perfect rock song but never published it. Or that somebody wrote a great book but didn’t bother to get it published.

btrettel 4y ago

> There’s yet another problem: the sheer volume of texts. When it comes to Indian and Buddhist traditions, for example, the number of ancient manuscripts that have survived but are yet to be studied has been estimated at around 10m, though Friedrich says he has seen estimates as high as 30m. There simply aren’t enough scholars with the right expertise, including the necessary language skills, to do the work. I was worried a lot about this during my PhD. Well-cited papers were just the "tip of the iceberg". I did some fairly thorough searches and came across quite a few papers in my field that were important in my view and unfortunately overlooked. The problem doesn't seem intractable to me. More researchers should spend some time searching the literature where they think no one else did. If a certain percentage of people did this, then I think it would benefit everyone including those who don't do particularly deep searches.

kossTKR 4y ago
First off i don't understand how this 10-30k number is physically or culturally possible. ( i admit my tired brain thought million first - confusing british/roman systems! ) Also having read sporadically through various dzogchen texts on "dream yoga" which is an older mapping and superset of what we today call lucid dreaming i'm positive that there could be an incredible amount of "useful knowledge" of various "weirder" aspects and concepts of consciousness and dreams waiting for us in some of those texts. Exciting!
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  Are you sure it's thousand? "m" is the common British abbreviation for million, while "M" would be the Roman abbreviation for a thousand. Plus, frankly only 10,000 Indian manuscripts seems way too low. India is huge, and has been literate for thousands of years.
- svat 4y ago
  The number is indeed millions, not thousands! Note that it's the number of manuscripts, not the number of distinct works. Many of the manuscripts would be copies of the same popular works (people preserve whatever's most useful), but there is a long tail of works each preserved in very few manuscripts. The 30-million estimate has been arrived at independently by several people AFAIK, but one of them is David Pingree, and look at e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=pingree+estimate+million+manuscripts https://www.google.com/search?q=pingree+estimate+million+man... for several sources. In particular, this paper by M. D. Srinivas [1] gives several independent estimates of the number of manuscripts, all in millions. There have been 4.2 million manuscripts actually documented already (as of 2019 when the paper was written), and this paper's estimate is that "10 million is indeed a reasonable estimate for the number of Indian manuscripts that are extant […] the number of manuscripts in Sanskrit can be expected to be of the order of 8 million." And although this post is about literature, that paper is about Indian astronomy&mathematics, which is perhaps representative: > We find that of the estimated 9,000 source-works of Indian Astronomy and Mathematics (which are preserved in around 30,000 manuscripts), only about 150 texts were edited, and just 30 texts translated during 1800-1947. During 1948-2019, there has been significant progress and another about 300 texts have been edited and 66 texts translated, many of them with detailed explanatory notes. Thus, only about 450 (or 5% of the estimated 9000 source-texts available) have been edited and published so far; even among the published works, only 96 texts have been seriously studied via translations and explanations with a view to bring out their technical (mathematical-astronomical) content. [1]: https://insa.nic.in/writereaddata/UpLoadedFiles/IJHS/Vol54_3_2019__Art01.pdf https://insa.nic.in/writereaddata/UpLoadedFiles/IJHS/Vol54_3... and https://www.esamskriti.com/essays/pdf/19%20The%20Untapped%20Wealth%20of%20Manuscripts%20on%20Indian%20Astronomy%20and%20Mathematics.pdf https://www.esamskriti.com/essays/pdf/19%20The%20Untapped%20... = ttps://archive.org/details/srinivas2019/page/n1/mode/2up

BMc2020 4y ago

Tomas Moore's account of the events covered in The Vertical Plane have never been found (1 copy, handwritten in latin, hidden for safekeeping). Where is Tomas’s own account, his book that was finished at Oxford and left somewhere in manuscript? We never forget that ‘2109’ said it would be found, and we can only hope that this will happen in our lifetime.

cletus 4y ago

This is an idea that fascinates me and it goes beyond literature. it certainly includes history. One of my favorite examples is cuneiform tablets. Less than 10% of the 500k to 1m tablets recovered have ever been translated. These are particularly interesting because they're some of the earliest examples of surviving written records we have. The Hittite capital Hattusa (IIRC) was lost for millenia. When it was found it was a veritable treasure trove including personal correspondence between the Hittie king and the Egyptian pharoah Ramses II. Nineveh was sacked at one point. A massive fire destroyed the library but baked the clay tablets preserving them. In the early days of Rome, Rome (the city) was sacked by Gauls. This destroyed a lot of the early works of Rome. This affected Rome's expansion (eg Caesar's conquest of Gaul has been argued to be affected by the cultural significance of this sacking). I's one reason why the origins of Rome are somewhat steeped in myth and legend rather than fact such as the apocryphal tale of Romulus and Reemus. Another example are the histories of Alexander the Great. Alexander died under mysterious circumstances at the height of his power (in his early 30s). Several primary sources were written by his inner circle. None have survived. We know this because a Roman named Arrion some 2 centuries later wrote about the campaigns of Alexander citing 3 such sources (all lost) comparing what they agreed on and what they didn't. A lot was lost in the Arab sacking of the Libary of Alexandria. I somewhat agree with some other commenters in that literary significance is more... relative. Put another way: part of their cultural significance comes from them being known, studied, performed and repaeted over centuries.

dredmorbius 4y ago
In the case of cuneiform, aren't the vast majority of tablets effectively receipts and transaction records? It'd be a bit like stumbling across someone's tax records receipts box in another 8,000 years or so. Presuming thermal paper survives the interval. (Morgan Freeman voice: It won't.)

temp8964 4y ago

This sounds like a problem for AI to solve. The AI can be trained with literature labeled at different level of greatest and then build a model to scan all the literature. Then one day the AI will come out of the cave: I just read a million books, so you don't have to!

ethanwillis 4y ago
Sorry, but it's not capable of doing this. There are some endeavors which are fundamentally human.

hyperpallium2 4y ago

It's nice to imagine a text in itself can be great, without context or commentary, without the patina of prestige.

lostgame 4y ago

This is extremely similar to the field of music for me. As a vinyl DJ, hip hop producer, and turntablist, one of the greatest joys is finding one of those rare LPs that just never was heard, and - even better - that juicy sample in it. Obviously there’s gotta be unknown literature out there that’s brilliant. :)

zxcvbn4038 4y ago

Years ago in high school I observed that there appeared to be no great works of literature that were not in the public domain - because the school book publishers don’t want to pay royalties to anyone, and to a lesser degree nobody wants to do literary analysis of a living author who can dispute their interpretation! Admittedly a little cynical but I think there is a lot of truth to both. I was also annoyed at all the “yoda speak” translations of ancient literature we had to read whereas any student would be graded down for not putting their parts of speech in the English order. Then you have things like Candide that would be considered super offensive in the US - where a friend of mine once had a summer job airbrushing away cow udders from a school textbook because the state of Texas (which buys the most text books) felt they were too suggestive. (A few decades ago but Texas still decides what goes in most school text books by virtue of being the largest consumer)

eesmith 4y ago
I don't think there's that much truth to your observation. "The Great Gatsby" only entered the public domain last year, while its Wikipedia entry says it "was part of the assigned curricula in the near majority of U.S. high schools". "'The Grapes of Wrath' is frequently read in American high school and college literature classes due to its historical context and enduring legacy" says its Wikipedia page, and it's still in copyright. In 1981, "Catcher in the Rye", according to its Wikipedia entry "was both the most censored book and the second most taught book in public schools in the United States." Salinger didn't die until 2010.

cat_plus_plus 4y ago

Nah? The really greatest works were copied many times and committed to memory to be preserved even during multi-generation subjugation. At least greatest in meeting practical, emotional and spiritual needs of contemporaries, our historical interest today is not the most important thing in the world.

lfpeb8b45ez 4y ago

Can a possibility be possible?

dmd 4y ago

Off topic, but phrases like "it is said that the books took six months to burn. We can’t know if this is true." bother me. Of course we can know if that is true. This is like saying "it is said the books, upon burning, all turned into unicorns, sang silly songs, and flew to the moon. We can't know if this is true." The physics of combustion hasn't changed in the last 2000 years.

ThinkBeat 4y ago

Nearly all books published in the last two hundred years are unobtainable. Millions of books have gotten far enough to earn the backing of a publisher. They have a small print run of say 100 - 500 copies. If sales are dismal usually the books go on "regular" sale and if that does not work, then once a year the (Norwegian) bookstore dumps them out for $1 a piece. If they still have not sold, they get dumped into a recycler and will never be read or seen ever again. I love going to the yearly sale and buying books for $1 per book. I do feel sad when I look at the bin. All the blood, sweat and tears an author has invested into it. Writing it, sending them out, getting rejected from publishers but finally finding one that will publish it. That must be a proud moment. Becoming a "real" author with a published book. Maybe getting recognized? Instead, it becomes a sad tale of loss. Seeing your book out there for $1 and still not getting picked up. I have discovered a few books I got for $1 that I thought were great. I note them in my blog and try to harass friends into reading it. I have been scanning and putting out my grandfather's books. Technically the publisher owns all rights, but I doubt they care anymore. I am not saying he was a great author or that his books will be "discovered" but at least they are available for free should someone want to read one. It is my dream that a system can be made globally so that all books published are made available for free online once some period time has passed. For books that ended up in the recycler the publisher could let them be published sooner. The national library would put it out on their website and someone can enjoy a few of them later on. The cost of storing en ebook is cheap. Granted storing millions is not that cheap but worth it to preserve more of the culture and perspectives from the past. The national library in Norway has copies of most books published after some date. They are also allowed to, perhaps supposed to publish books online (yay) once they enter the public domain. (yay). The national library does not have the resources to follow up on it. I talked to a couple of the librarians. Someone needs to keep track of when a book enters the public domain. It appears the rules surrounding that in Norway are a bit complex. It would be helpful for them if the publisher sent them a signal when a work enters the public domain, but they have no interest in doing that. If someone such as I write a letter to request a book and someone finds it worth their time to go check on it, they have to contact the publisher and try to figure out what the story is. A majority of books available digitally at the national library are "streamable". They have a picture of each page. Often not a good photo. A lot harder to read than an eBook. They can in most cases if the publisher agrees to publish an eBook of it but again, it is a question of having enough manpower to manage all of it. Hopefully one day.

fourtrees 4y ago

I think it's important to note that that contemporary language death at the hands of the major lingua francas (you know who you are) is wiping out great and possibly very old works of oral 'literature'. Quite a few of our surviving great epics, sagas, and lyric(s) originated as oral works. With the death of collapse of these languages, from the Amazon to Siberia to Africa to Europe, these works (not to mention the loads of historical and cultural revealed in them) have or will shortly go entirely extinct. Not too much we can do about it though.