How hard will it be? Did any ESL-bros here try it? How did it go?
>>24720283Pretty boring sometimes, but okay overall.
>>24720283I'll just read a German translation. You won't get all the nuances in English anyway, so why even bother? At least in your native language you have a native understanding.t. German
>>24720287It bothers me that the characters are speaking my language even though they're from another country. I guess I'm just too autistic, I just think it's nice reading what the actual characters are saying and what the author actually wrote instead of someone's rendition of it in your own language.
Knowledge of native English is way less important to it than English literacy
>>24720289Okay. I don't have a problem with reading German translations (aka German versions) of classics of world literature. It's still enjoyable for me.
>>24720283>as an ESLis it even famous for being hard to read in terms of the prose?
I'm an ESL myself but I still decided to read Infinite Jest, Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon in English because I think way more stuff gets lost in translation than in my non native understanding of the language.The bright side is I can read Quixote in old Spanish, as it was intended.
>>24720297It's considered one of the hardest novels in English AFAIK.
>>24720320isn't that ulysses
>>24720321Never heard of that one.
>>24720297Anyone native English speaking 10 year old child can handle it, so it can't be that difficult.
>>24720363>10 year olds can handle itNow that's just an outright lie.
Which one is harder, Dickens or Melville?
>>24720375dickens isn't challenging, only loathesome
>>24720320It only really has a reputation for being daunting because of its length and because plotfags are filtered by Ishmael’s digressions. The actual prose isn’t that hard.>>24720283What English books have you read? Not ESL, but just to give you a sense of its style/difficulty relative to other English language works, if you can read other 19th century writers like Mark Twain or Charles Dickens, then you’ll have no problem with Moby-Dick’s prose.
>>24720290Knowledge of 19th century American culture is probably the most important thing, like when a character is introduced as a quaker or a puritan that has huge implications
>>24720283Moby-Dick is not that hard, if you struggle you can just re-read a chapter Because they are not that long.
>>24720425That’s probably not as essential if you’re reading a Norton Critical Edition which I imagine explains all those things in the notes
>>24720384Sometimes he's pretty challenging to me, especially when he's writing descriptions and using old or obscure vocabulary.
>>24720425What's a quaker? I know a puritan is someone that takes Biblical ethics way too seriously.
>>24720527Christian denomination. They’re mostly known for their archaic speech, lack of swearing, non-violence, and opposition to slavery. In Moby-Dick, these aspects are important to keep in mind because Ishmael points out the irony of people who profess non-violence taking up such a violent profession as whaling.
Big Dick > Moby's Dick
>>24720527Quakers are a religious group seen as super wholesome but the book explores some of the complexity of their identity. "I protested my innocence of these things. I saw that under the mask of these half humorous innuendoes, this old seaman, as an insulated Quakerish Nantucketer, was full of his insular prejudices, and rather distrustful of all aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the Vineyard" That's Ishmael reacting to the captain of the Pequod, who he's trying to impress so he can get the job on the boat. Ishmael says he has some experience on a merchant ship and the Captain bascially calls him a pussy, saying that experience is nothing compared to what we'd be putting you through. Narrator is calling out how this old seaman masks his judgmental attitude with jokes, but underneath he’s got that classic Quaker/Nantucket vibe. Stiff, moralistic, and very insular. Historically, Quakers were pacifist, super religious, and big on simplicity and equality. But by Melville’s time, a lot of Nantucket Quakers were running the whaling industry, so there’s this tension between their peaceful religious roots and the violent, profit-driven reality of hunting whales. The Quakers are known to be this group of pious, relatively progressive people, but when shit hits the fan, its all about toughness and classical masculinity. Just some fun detail that makes the story more interesting, I think.
>>24720527In that era, basically the same as Amish
>>24720320I didn't think Moby Dick was particularly difficult. It does have some archaic language so it was easier to read it on my Kindle where I could just press on a word and immediately get its definition than it would have been to read it on paper. The book I had the most difficulty reading was probably Faulkner's The Sound and The Fury (it's a fantastic book and well worth the challenge). >>24720363I was able to read Tom Sawyer at age 10 with no problem. I do not think I would have been able to read Moby Dick.
>>24720425Not really. There is a subtleness to both, but both of those refer to outgroups today and yesterday.Similarly its not a hacks work, meaning their action is presented, which sells the idea.
>>24720584I agree that the book is written in a way that makes its points clear just by depiction the action, but I think you're missing out on a lot of Ahab's bullshit if you don't know what Puritans are, and how they differ from other denominations that are present in the story. The idea of predestination, the obsession with good vs evil, and his ironic, possibly blasphemous decision to become a direct agent of god
>>24720283You can read it twice. An abridged version in your own language and then the original version, Then you are familiar with the plot and can enjoy the original prose even more>>24720375Dick is hard usually
>>24720283Gave it to my gf and she ended up reading the chinese version after a couple chapters because she said it was too tedious, and she basically grew up reading English literature since being a kid.
>>24720574What makes The Sound and the Fury so hard?
>>24720283Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than equally, thought Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and posterity of Joy. For, not to hint of this: that it is an inference from certain canonic teachings, that while some natural enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for the other world, but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the joy-childlessness of all hell’s despair; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still fertilely beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and soft cymballing, round harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.
>>24720737NTA but the main difficulty with The Sound and the Fury comes from the first and second chapter. The first is from the perspective of a mentally disabled character who has a completely nonlinear perception of time. Past present and future blend together for him. For instance, in the beginning of the book he hears a golfer say the word “Caddy”,which is also his sister’s nickname. This immediately makes him feel like he is experiencing events that happened with his sister years before. This hopping around the timeline is reflected in the prose. Paragraph to paragraph, line to line. The second chapter is classic modernist stream of consciousness style from a character who is going to commit suicide so it’s quite sporadic as well. The other 2 chapters are much more straightforward.
>>24720737Im not the guy you're responding to but, a quarter of the novel is written as the inner thoughts and experiences of a severely mentally disabled man. Not just his perspective, but literally a direct "stream of consciousness". With zero explanation or narration. Just raw data. He'll say something like "the roses were smoke now" and we're supposed to infer that the sun is setting from that. Lots of sensory information. The rest of the novel isn't that hard but that one chapter will filter a lot of people.
>>24720297It's definitely more difficult than your average realist novel, but not as difficult as the modernists or Melville's later output.
>>24720297>>24720764It’d harder than average but I’d say not even close to the difficulty of reading 17th century prose like Sir Thomas Browne or Robert Burton.
>>24720750Nope, even back then, it wasn’t like Ahab’s super-crazy brain didn’t get the idea that all the ouchies he was feeling now came straight from some other big ouchie before.And he was pretty sure about it, too — like, just how super mean swamp snakes make more super mean swamp snakes, just like nice chirpy birdies make more chirpy birdies,Well, same goes for feelings: happy stuff makes more happy stuff, and sad stuff makes more sad stuff.Actually, Ahab thought, sad stuff might be better at making more sad stuff than happy stuff is at making more happy stuff.Like, if you think about who the sad stuff’s mommy and daddy are, and who its babies are, it's a big family, way bigger than the happy family.And not even talking about the church-y stuff that says some fun things we do here don’t get to have any happy babies in heaven,But instead, they get super sad forever with zero joy-babies and a big sad-face in scary hell,But the really sad, guilty feelings we get? Oh, those guys keep making more and more super sad babies forever — even after we’re dead!Not even talking about that, it’s still kinda obvious that sadness is winning.Ahab thought: “Even the biggest happy moments always feel a little bit... whatever, like, ‘meh,’ when you look at them real close.”But the big sad stuff? That’s got spooky meaning in it.Sometimes it even feels kind of shiny and magical, like something an angel with a sword would be into.And if you follow those super serious sad feelings all the way back in time, like digging into their family tree,You end up with, like, ancient super-sad god-grandparents who don’t even have a start point. Just forever sadness gods.So even when the sun is out and everybody’s doing happy hay dances,And the moon is being all round and musical and going “clang clang” like a big sky tambourine,You still gotta admit:Even the gods get bummed out sometimes.And that permanent sad wrinkle on people’s faces?That’s just the sadness stamp from the gods who made us. Boom. Sad forever.
>>24720764Is Middlemarch considered hard?
>>24720754>>24720755I'm the guy who made the original post. These two generally summed up why I found it challenging. There are also two characters named Quentin (one mostly called Miss Quentin) and one character's name was changed when he was a kid.
Moby Dick is difficult for most native speakers too. Just get an annotated version if possible and give it a go.
>>24720287>You won't get all the nuances in English anywayYou think native speakers get all the nuances?
>>24721055My native language is 19th century New Englander.
ESL here. Wasn't difficult at all for me; that being said, I've read my handful of Shakespeare, Pope, Dryden, etc. It really doesn't matter at all if you're ESL, a native would have the same difficulty as you, the prose is alien to them. Also pay no mind to these philistines claiming that you're at an inherent disadvantage for being ESL: Nabokov, the best stylist of the 20th century, was ESL. And most natives can't even read Shakespeare, so are they really better than you?
>>24720824nta but middlemarch isn't that hard, just super victorian. the prose can be dense but if you can read Moby-Dick you can read Middlemarch. do so if you haven't, it's the only english-language novel that can go toe to toe with Tolstoy
>>24721788Thats what I'm sayin, with moby dick the biggest thing is the cultural context. Knowing about the religious groups and the culture of new england and such. Knowing about how morally pure and psychologically deranged Puritans can be. Knowing about how people in NYC at that time had access to world-class theater and arts but also had to step over piss and pigshit on their way to work. Knowing how a Puritan from Nantucket would react to one of these New Yorkers bragging about his time on a merchant vessel. The history of Long Island. Its not indespendable knowledge, because Melville explains most of this in vitro, but it makes the characters and narration feel a lot more vivid.
Everyone saying it's not hard is lying. I feel the better I get at reading, the harder it becomes. Every line runs on for miles, so chock full of symbolism, thick-laid irony, references and double meanings, I can only get through one chapter at a time before my head starts to hurt.
>>24720725>giving a woman moby dickyou are autistic
