How am I supposed to get good at writing in my native language if I don’t enjoy anything that has been produced in it?
>>25310163I speak Portuguese and I hate Camões. What's your instance, OP?
>>25310166Don’t you guys have an extremely extensive translation industry? Even if you don’t like the authors of your country, you certainly are not starved for good reading in your language.And as for Camões, I haven’t read the Lusiads yet, and even if I did, it would be in English.
I get that (Basque)
>>25310163> be me> Italian> want to write cool novel> 99% of the literary tradition from 12th to 20th century is made of poetry> 99% of contemporary fiction is gay and cringe> mfw
>>25310199*made of poetry written in a language that hardly rasembles current italian
>>25310199>99% of contemporary fiction is gay and cringeI can attest to that. I read one of your celebrated writers, that Calvino. What a waste.But hey, you have wonderful poetry. That is still something. That still means you can hone your skill in your language.
>>25310196Sorry to hear that man. Do they only publish those ‘society bad, human sad’ novels that all the non-anglo countries seem to do?
>>25310206They also writing that ‘society bad, humans sad’ with some extra degeneracy?
>>25310210Rly hope this shi bait because spanish literature is fkn goatedThe themes are not the issue, the thing is that its preaty easy to publish in this lenguaje because no one wants to, so terrible books get created.People say Atxaga is great, bsAresti and Lizardi are nice tho
>>25310199>99% of contemporary fiction is gay and cringe>>25310207>CalvinoMaybe you guys need to stop reading the terroni and start with some white author.
>>25310199>>25310221>Inb4 Manzoni is not contemporaryHere is someone contemporary.
>>25310228Looks pretentious
>>25310221>terroniCalvino was born in Cuba from a northern italian father, then when he went back he lived in Northern italy. Retard
>>25310228Mildly attractive Houellebecq lookin ass
For me, it's not that I don't enjoy anything written in my language, but rather that the "newest" author from that group was born an entire century before our present. Commies and libs killed literature.
>>25310493Check where his mom is from.
>>25310215Any b recommendations for a Spanish native speaker but nearly illiterate? I tried to read don Quixote but it was too difficult. Something with more modern simpler Spanish that's actually good would be nice but it's hard to pick the wheat from chaff for reasons like you said
>>25310166I actually think both Camões and Pessoa are the finest Portuguese wordsmiths, but yeah apart from them it's basically a literary desert (the one I really despise is Saramago)
>>25311051IDK about modern but The Trickster of Seville is a decent play
>>25310163I’m somehow better at reading English poetry than reading persian poetry, my native language.
>>25310163>How am I supposed to get good at writing in my native language if I don’t enjoy anything that has been produced in it?If anything this seems like it should make it easier for you to break out.Take ideas from a few works in other languages that you do enjoy and then put your own twist on them in your native language and viola, you've carved out a niche for yourself.
>>25310199You don't know shit about literature in your own country, partly because the canon has been fucked up by the lack of good literary criticism since forever, partly because you don't put in the effort - so let me help you and this other idiot over here >>25310207.Here's some absolutely valid list of canonical author from the last generation that doesn't include Eco and Calvino.>Anna Maria OrteseRead Corpo Celeste as a premise to this whole list. The first two texts contain everything you need to process the rest and should be canonical texts in high school. Then read the Iguana, and then off to whatever you want.>Goliarda SapienzaRead Lettera Aperta, and if you want the other autobiographical writings. Read L'arte della gioia.>Antonio MorescoRead Clandestinità or La Lucina or Lo sbrego for a start, then all the rest.>Aldo BusiRead Seminario sulla gioventù (Seminar on Youth), possibly one of the best Italian novels of the last century. All his novels are good and his travel books even better. This guy is likely the greatest mind we had in Italy since Leopardi. Yes, the homosexual who was on TV.>Walter SitiRead Scuola di nudo. Read Troppi paradisi. I hate this guy like you wouldn't believe, and I hate that he's the only "academically acknowledged" Italian author in Italy (because he writes sitting on bibliographies every Italian literature student knows: Pasolini, Frankfurt school, Max&Freud, etc.). But despite the stale concepts, the writing is high level. Definitely a canonical author of the present. >Daniele del Giudice.Read Atlante Occidentale. Read Staccando l'ombra da terra. Read the short stories. You want minimalism done well? You want Calvino's "simplicity" for smart people and with no surreal bullshit? You want prose precision that aproximates Flaubert's? Read this guy.>Fleur JaeggyRead Proleterka, read I beati anni del castigo and so on. Again, proper prose precision. Like a early 1900s lady writing in the 1980s. >Roberto CalassoAre you a fascist? You like esoteric stuff and myth? Read this guy. He copies his wife's (Jaeggy) stye (badly), but despite being poorly written, the books represent a specific kind of italian "renaissance" intellectualism that died with him. A more honest and interesting version of what Umberto Eco tried to do.>Are you autistic and you like weird prose?Gadda, Landolfi, D'Arrigo, Meneghello, La Capria. >More recent?Read Aldo Nove, Giorgio Vasta, Claudia Durastanti, Tiziano Scarpa, Francesco Pecoraro and so on.>literally whoExactly. Who are these guys? You don't know because Italian academics and literary critics are gatekeeping this stuff from you in order to fight ideological fights over bullshit and promote the latest Einaudi or Mondadori or Feltrinelli nepobaby so that she can win the Strega and sell a few more thousand copies and be forgotten the year after.Pic related is the first page of Seminar on Youth by Busi, which you should get today.Read more.
>>25310163>How am I supposed to get goodYou get better at writing by writing. There is no other way. You don't get better at writing by finding good writing and emulating it. You get better at writing by reading a lot, acquiring your own taste, then writing as well as you can. There is as much to learn from shitty writing as it is from genius writing. When you read a great novel, you identify all the things you thought the writer did right, and when you read a shitty novel, you identify everything the writer did wrong. You enjoying it is an irrelevant variable. You either read to learn, or for entertainment.
>>25311501I forgot, among others: >Vitaliano TrevisanRead Un mondo meraviglioso. Read Works. One of the few authors who actually talks about how it feels trying to get jobs in this shithole of a country.For the rest, Italy has a good literature, nothing short than another good contemporary literature in other countries. The general feeling that there's nothing good going on, or that contemporary athors are all shit is based on the surface-impression of what gets publicized and what gets translated, but there is a completely parallel canon for people in the know that needs to get out there - if it wasn't for the fact that we completely lack proper literary mediators. The apparent proviciality of Italian cultural discourse is entirely dependent on how weak, ideologically-minded, uncultered and deprived of taste or critics are. Italy is a "traditional" country and the traditions being brought on are two: catholic/fascism (more or less covert) of authors with "spiritual" and "fantastic" themes, and a hollowed version of communism and social critique. This is of course too much of a generalization, but the point is: if a writer's work doesn't fit into a recognizable category, i.e. into one of these two clans and their numerous subclans, most critics have now way of categorizing or recognizing the aesthetic merit of a book. One reads literary criticism on newspapers in Italy and it never engages with anything beyond general themes that are ideologically recognizable. Most people in power in the cultural world (intellectual non-entities like Chiara Valerio) are in power because they networked within known categories and wrote stuff is readable within those categories and upsets no one, and/or are nepobabies. There is currently a lot of debate around cultural work being unpaid, and most cultural workers (editors, writers, translators) belonging to a single social class. The redundacy of themes, glossy journalistic style, "americanized" aesthetics, dubbed dialogues and so on all comes from the fact that most of the literature in the spotlight emerges from a very tiny echo chamber of people.But literature (lucky for all of us) still has the lowest baseline possible for participation, i.e. pen and paper and a public library to get some reading done. So people from other backgrounds are still churning out good books despite the horrible conditions.Again the first two essays of Corpo celeste by Anna Maria ortese can give you a feeling of what the fuck happened to this country culturally after WW2, and what it meant to be an "unaffiliated" writer and a writer from a poor background. She's extremely cultured, a philosopher in direct continuity with Leopardi, and writes in wonderful prose. Another essential book to map the geography of the country culturally speaking, is Lettere a nessuno by Moresco, a series of unsent letters to people in the Italian cultural world.
>>25311501>>25311516Thank you so much for the list!
>>25311501Why did Calasso fail to gain traction among normies and midwits, unlike Eco? I could order almost the entire oeuvre of Eco in translation if I wanted, but I think the single thing that my dinky Central European country ever got from Calasso was a version of Cadmus and Harmony that has been out of print for a decade and half.
>>25311501>Aldo Busi>Left-wing, feminist and political militant for homosexual rights, fervently anticlerical in his life and in his art, he published a series of five «end-of-millennium» essays and six manuals «for a perfect humanity» that analyse contemporary socio-political issues and propose some guidelines to handle them in daily life. Because of his open stances and his straightforward language and depictions, he finds himself to be often in the middle of given and received lawsuits.This guy sounds very unique. Post-WW2 literature in the west definitely isn't cluttered to fuck with whole fucking platoons of guys like this in every single country's scene.
>>25312233He didn't write anything that could be turned into a movie, like Eco did, and did not care about contemporary political problems around truth, who has power in the knowledge world and so forth. Eco wrote extremely cultured and well written mystery novels, or fun historical fiction of the highest degree. But it's cultured fun. Calasso deals with esoteric stuff and a very personal brand of perennialism that has two main problems:1. it's not "international" and it channels an old fashioned idea about how to be a European intellectual (and idea that somehow now, with internet syncretism and stuff like this).2. His brand of perennialism channels people like Guenon and is tangential to figures like Evola - though he never was a typically "rightwing" author of the cringe kind, and is universes above people like Evola, if only for the fact that he actually read original texts of the traditions he's referring to.In terms of foreign perception there's also something extremely suspicious in the head of a major publishing house basically self-publishing his multi volume work... The Calasso books likely wouldn't have any traction, had they been published or reviewed by peers (again, despite his culture, the writing is rather poor). He was able to appear as someone with vision because he had the opportunity to self-publish himself for years with no contradictory and say whatever he wanted.He's still a major figure in our culture though, and what he did with Adelphi defined the taste of italian readers for at least two generations, maybe three. If you're curious about him, I also recommend getting informed about Roberto Bazlen, an absolutely central figure in Italian culture and one of the founders of Adelphi - in his notes what you see is like the "ideal publisher mindset", focused on a specific taste and sensibility for authenticity... A great character Calasso (but not only him) is very much indebted to. He was also one of those polyglots who allowed for culture to seep from one country to another... we don't have these kind of guys in publishing anymore.
>>25312250He has been an absolute powerhouse of a human being. Do not imagine the sterotypical politically correct TV homosexual author of today - people like Busi fought for their life in order to have the freedom to fuck who they wanted to fuck.His feminism and his anticlericalism have depth, and he's basically the only post-war Italian author who talked about class issues without euphemisms and with an actual working class background - all this while writing in the most beautiful, colorful, sometimes baroque and sometimes vulgar prose you can find in the Italian language. His linguistic creativity is almost unmatched, he writes beautifully deep character and can move you to tears, while at the same time waxing philosophical about life, love, work, etc. He has a truly plastic intellect and even stuff like the manuals (his minor things, almost written for fun) are absolutely incredible.Sodomies in Elevenpoint is a genius book about sexual encounters in the middle east and norther Europe, with a central part which contains one of the best "manual" sections for young writers I have ever read.
>>25311501>gay and cringe
>>25310221>white author>that is one guy>hey what is your literary tradition?>it's this one guyAnyways Manzoni explains pretty well why Italy got stuck in the Renaissance
>>25310166Can I recommend you O Alegre Canto da Perdiz? It was the most beautiful prose I've ever read in Portuguese, while staying simple and not wordy in the manner of, say, Machado de Assis.
>>25312537Fighting for the freedom to be a faggot is ultimately still about fighting for the freedom of faggotry. No goal has ever been made innately nobler just because it has been the target of much striving...and a faggot's anticlericalism will never have any real depth beyond "I hate the church because they told us that men putting it in each other's assholes is abhorrent". It's like jews and right-wing politics. Do you genuinely think a jew will ever be able to hate right-wing politics for any reason other than the fundamental clash of their interests? Talking without euphemisms, one would think, would have to include recognizing the fact that what people think about the world and others is fundamentally pre-rational, either because they are existential matters and therefore not up for debate, or innate preferences and dislikes rationalized after the fact.
>>25312537Bump
>>25312537>his best work is an autobiographyma basta, go fuck yourself retard
>>25311051Fray Perico y su borrico.
