Grand unified books thread

[Jacob]

I read that the show trial part at the beginning of the English translation is buried in the middle of the Chinese version as a flashback

Interesting. I wouldn't normally expect a translation to restructure the book.

[Admiral Yi]

A couple fun factoids from Beevor's D-Day.  More French people were killed by the Allies than Brits were killed by German bombing.  The infamous Colonel Massu was a junior officer in the famous 2eme division blindee.

[crazy canuck]

Well ya, not many German bombers over Normandy on D-Day. 

[Savonarola]

I finished reading The Viking Book of Poetry of the English Speaking World, first edition from 1941, revised in 1958.  It's comprehensive, so it's interesting to see what was thought of as "Canonical" in those days.  Elizabeth Barrett Browning only had a couple works in; I expected that since she was re-evaluated with the waves of feminist scholarship beginning in the 1970s.  My 1990s edition of the Norton Anthology of British Literature has her complete verse novel "Aurora Leigh" in it (which I don't think is very good.  In my opinion it's just not an idea that worked; and since no other major poet tried to write a verse novel I don't think that's a fringe opinion.)  Anne Bradstreet was also missing; I had assumed that she was always "One for Team America," but now I think maybe she was also rediscovered with the women's movement.

The poets are listed by the year they were born.  That surprised me in some places; I didn't ever think of Stephen Crane and William Butler Yeats as contemporaries or John Keats and Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Of course Keats and Crane died young and Yeats and Emerson were best appreciated in their old age.

I learned that some of the earliest middle English poems are Christmas carols; which is why "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" or "Tidings of Comfort and Joy" have archaic language in them.

Most of the poets at the end of the book were born at the final years of the 19th century; and while going through that period I kept thinking of the Blackadder line about the man who was "Sick of the war, the blood, the noise, the endless poetry."  Though I did discover this one by GK Chesterton that I liked:

Elegy in a Country Churchyard

The men that worked for England
They have their graves at home:
And birds and bees of England
About the cross can roam.
 
But they that fought for England,
Following a falling star,
Alas, alas for England
They have their graves afar.
 
And they that rule in England,
In stately conclave met,
Alas, alas for England
They have no graves as yet.

[Jacob]

It seems disaffection with the governing classes existed even back in 1900s...

[Sheilbh]

Little John Carey summary which gives some context:

GK Chesterton was not very fond of politicians. "It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged," he once remarked. The obstinacy and intransigence of politicians had, he believed, brought about the First World War, in which his younger brother, Cecil, had died. Cecil had joined the Highland Light Infantry as a private soldier, and was wounded three times, returning to action each time. He was buried in the Terlincthun British Cemetery, Wimille.

Chesterton's elegy takes its title from Thomas Gray's more famous elegy, which condemns great historical conquerors who:

...wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind.

Chesterton's poem is more limited in scope, and prompted by a particular personal loss. But it voices something permanent about the feelings of the ruled towards their rulers.

And on that and the "endless poetry" it makes me think of Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child, which isn't his best novel but I enjoyed it. It starts with an upper class minor poet, Cecil Valance, visiting the middle class home of his (intimate) university friend in the summer of 1913, then moves through the twentieth century in the lives of gay men in the twentieth century in some way shaped by that minor poet and his connections - the school in later set up in his family home, the literary biographer, the family etc.