I want to study literature. I’m not an English Literature major or anything related, but I feel a pull to it. I wouldn’t mind dissecting and analyzing a text. So I figured I’d give it a try on my own.

I read about 80% of Paradise Lost and could follow along easily. On a surface level I understood the story. But then I watched a series of lectures from a Yale professor where he deep dives into the nuances of every line and what they meant to Milton on a personal level, along with hidden possible meanings and metaphors. I was left both amazed and feeling like I’m too dumb for this.

So I tried again.

I read the prologue of Beowulf… and there’s a lot I don’t understand. Just in the first few lines, whats a “foundling”? What’s a “whale-road”? I know I can watch videos of people explaining it, but that seems like having the answers just handed to me.

I want to have the skills to read a text and proficiently find an essays worth of insight within it. Maybe I’m just underestimating myself, but I feel like the world has so many highly intelligent, quick-minded people, and I’m sadly and frustratingly not one of them.

  • Elder_Keithulhu@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    There is an old haiku by Basho that is considered a great work:

    Furu ike ya

    kawazu tobikomu

    mizu no oto

    Those three lines have been translated dozens of ways but, even if you read every translation, you would not understand what made it famous. I was introduced to it in elementary school and I was near the end of my time in college when I finally learned enough about the form, the language, and the culture around the haiku to feel like I properly appreciated it.

    My favorite translation is by Alan Watts:

    The old pond,

    A frog jumps in:

    Plop!

    No level of genius or meditation will help you understand this poem. Only context will and that requires outside help. That help may be having it explained to you or learning the surrounding information until you can put the pieces together yourself. A lot of literature is allusion to other literature, history, the pop culture of the time and place of the work. People dedicate their lives digging up these details and still disagree with other people who have done the same.

    Read. Read a variety of things from a variety of sources. If you want to challenge yourself with classics, get annotated copies and read the foot notes. You would probably have no trouble spotting a parody of Donald Trump in a modern book or TV show because you have lived the context but you probably wouldn’t spot a parody of a 15th century french noble in a book. If a story referenced covid, you would be pulling from a lot of familiar context and little would need to be explained. You could be forgiven if passing references to yellow fever in an account of the Haitian Revolution went over your head.

    So, the frog. So many translations use water-sound, splash, or the sound of water. Why do I prefer plop? Based on what I understand about the context, plop drives the point home. The haiku is not great because frogs are cool. An old frog in a pond plopping into the water probably doesn’t seem odd to a modern reader at all but it was a careful subversion at the time.

    When it was written, Japan had centuries of poetic symbolism that was largely codified. What made Basho great was that he was a master of the existing poetic ideas and went out of his way to turn them on their heads. A contemporary Japanese audience would have expected a frog gracefully swimming in a swift-moving river or stream as a symbol of spring. Instead, it is an old pond. It is still. The frog does not splash into the water with a graceful dive; it plops.

    It is like the old joke, “Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.” It is easy, in a modern world where everyone hears a hundred variations on the joke in grade school to not understand why it is not only a classic but was truly funny at one point. In its proper context, it would not be a children’s joke. It would be told to adults who were accustomed to carefully crafted word play and subversions of expectations.

    So, the joke managed to subvert expectations by giving a simple answer when the audience could be expected to stretch their minds trying to anticipate a clever twist. It brought them down a peg and made them feel a bit silly for overthinking it and missing the obvious. If you only know the joke from having a thousand 5 year olds shout it at you followed by a lifetime of older folks trying to subvert the simple punchline, you miss the point of a friendly jab at a stuffy society. If you assume the frog is saying something profound about the world by plopping into the water, every attempted analysis will miss the fun.