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nerdkitten's review
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Blood, Death, Grief, Medical content, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Terminal illness, and Slavery
Moderate: Sexual content, Fatphobia, Toxic friendship, and Violence
Minor: Death of parent, Sexism, Murder, Adult/minor relationship, Classism, Alcohol, Cursing, Excrement, Biphobia, Panic attacks/disorders, and War
eliathereader's review against another edition
2.0
Ölmek istiyorsan eğer, bu sana ait bir mesele, seni önleyecek değiliz fakat Aeneis çoktandır artık yalnızca senin meselen değil; o halde bunu atmalısın kafandan…
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Yazılmasının sekiz yıl, çevrilmesinin kırk yıl sürdüğü, Vergilius’un son on sekiz saatini anlatan meşhur roman Vergilius’un Ölümü, Aralık ayı kitap kulübü okumasıydı. Aeneis uzun süredir okuma listemde olunca onunla paralel şekilde okuyup ilerlemek istedim ve haliyle iki ağır kitap beni çarptı. Kitap dört bölümden oluşuyor sırasıyla Su-varış, Ateş-çöküş, Toprak-bekleyiş ve Hava-eve dönüş. En güzel bölümleri bence 1. ve 3. bölümüydü çünkü diğer iki bölüme kıyasla okuması bir nebze rahattı. Ama açıkça söylemek gerekirse dehşet yorucu bir kitap özellikle yoğun bir döneminize okumak boşa olur. Vergilius’un geride bıraktığı en önemli eseri Roma’nın efsanevi kurucusu Aeneis’in destanını anlattığı kitabı. Broch cidden büyük emek harcamış, yazılması imkansız zorluktaki eserlerden. Atılan her adımda 20 sayfa betimlemenin, duygusal çatışmaların, hayat-ölüm düşüncelerinin olması beni bir yerden sonra cidden bezdirdi. Özellikle dikkat dağınıklığıma hiç iyi gelmedi ki uzun bir zaman diliminde okuyabildim. Bence çevirmeni de bezdirmiş ki çevrilmesi 40 sene sürmüş. Eğer Vergilius kitabın sonunda hayatına devam etse paramı geri isteyecektim. Şaka bir yana kaliteli bir eser ama okurken sanat sanat için mi olmalıdır sorgusunu çok yaptırıyor. Broch’un en yakın arkadaşları Musil, Rilke ve Canetti gibi isimler. Sırf bundan sizi nasıl bir kitabın beklediğini anlayabilirsiniz.
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Yazılmasının sekiz yıl, çevrilmesinin kırk yıl sürdüğü, Vergilius’un son on sekiz saatini anlatan meşhur roman Vergilius’un Ölümü, Aralık ayı kitap kulübü okumasıydı. Aeneis uzun süredir okuma listemde olunca onunla paralel şekilde okuyup ilerlemek istedim ve haliyle iki ağır kitap beni çarptı. Kitap dört bölümden oluşuyor sırasıyla Su-varış, Ateş-çöküş, Toprak-bekleyiş ve Hava-eve dönüş. En güzel bölümleri bence 1. ve 3. bölümüydü çünkü diğer iki bölüme kıyasla okuması bir nebze rahattı. Ama açıkça söylemek gerekirse dehşet yorucu bir kitap özellikle yoğun bir döneminize okumak boşa olur. Vergilius’un geride bıraktığı en önemli eseri Roma’nın efsanevi kurucusu Aeneis’in destanını anlattığı kitabı. Broch cidden büyük emek harcamış, yazılması imkansız zorluktaki eserlerden. Atılan her adımda 20 sayfa betimlemenin, duygusal çatışmaların, hayat-ölüm düşüncelerinin olması beni bir yerden sonra cidden bezdirdi. Özellikle dikkat dağınıklığıma hiç iyi gelmedi ki uzun bir zaman diliminde okuyabildim. Bence çevirmeni de bezdirmiş ki çevrilmesi 40 sene sürmüş. Eğer Vergilius kitabın sonunda hayatına devam etse paramı geri isteyecektim. Şaka bir yana kaliteli bir eser ama okurken sanat sanat için mi olmalıdır sorgusunu çok yaptırıyor. Broch’un en yakın arkadaşları Musil, Rilke ve Canetti gibi isimler. Sırf bundan sizi nasıl bir kitabın beklediğini anlayabilirsiniz.
karp76's review against another edition
3.0
"The world is full of deeds yet empty of perception." This is a work of conflicts. Conflicts within (narratively and inherent) and conflicts with of (the readers). The dying poet Virgil and his great work, the Aeneid (locked in its chest) are taken by the Emperor to the port of Brundisium. Virgil wants to burn it, destory it but is convinced otherwise. He lays in bed and his reflections pour out of him: a series of dreams and visions that are beautiful and illogical and abstract and rambling and fancible. They do not cease. They pour out of the dying poet's breath. Words upon words pour and pour, such beautiful words and phrases in sentences that stretch unbroken across hundreds of pages, never ceasing, never a pause, more and more, pouring, pouring and conjuring and debating and reflecting submerging us until we cannot breathe, until our eyes blinking wonder what has been said, what has been thought? Was it a dream or a mess? A style too bold, too much? Words upon words pouring out, even into the waters of the afterlife, pouring pouring and we wonder: is this abstraction unreadable or too divine or simply neither?
bookscatsandjazz's review against another edition
challenging
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
4.0
herpesma's review against another edition
2.0
A truly and deeply frustrating book, one of glimpses of rare beauty amidst a sea of onanistic modernist flourish which serves less to impart a sense of a mystic unveiling reality and more an acidhead describing how a person and a rock are the same. Broch is, at times, a highly insightful writer, capable not only of a turn of phrase which rings loud and true but of prolonged sections of staggeringly insightful dialogic narration which makes the large swathes of the book which fail all the more painful. Although ostensibly couched in the reality of a Roman Virgil, the man represented here is much indebted to Dante's depiction of him, nearly as much as Broch's style is indebted to Joyce. What comes about is an attempt at an author's stream of consciousness, and more than that a journey mirroring that of The Divine Comedy as he embarks upon his own death. It's a monumental task, perhaps even a self-defeating one for an author to take up, an impossibility which Broch at first acknowledges and then makes into dreadful fetish, like a schoolyard pariah making play with yesterday's torn-off scabs; piercing beneath the surface but seemingly for the sake only of the praise. Although thus making a near perfect mirror for the Virgil drawn in its pages, the fundamental problem becomes one of sustained tone: what is at first confessional and self-lacerative quickly becomes annoying and parodic as a Monty Python Christianity, all the more upsetting in its play self-awareness lacking any willingness to bend towards a less self-involved perspective. This limitation is perhaps the fault of the modernist movement, which, although interesting to couple with the grand and often universalizing tones of epic and canto, ends up coming across less as a portrait of a confused fever at the end of a man's life and more as Broch's self-soothing debasement and re-attachment to literature. Perhaps he should have listened closer to his own themes of death preceding rebirth, because if ever a book was in need of extensive rewriting, especially because there is an Acropolis buried beneath the many layered grains of omnipresent self-doubt, Broch's occasionally brilliant, always impressive, and utterly intolerable final book is the one. Props to the third chapter and a touching depiction of friendship, especially a fascinatingly pliable Augustus Caesar, drop for the endless repetitions of "denude" in pages-long abstracted paragraphs with nary an airy nook to rest its self-supposed laurels upon
spacestationtrustfund's review against another edition
3.0
In reading this novel in English I was faced with an unexpected translation conundrum. The ingredients: the word "Himmelsverborgenheiten," clearly invented by Hermann Broch specifically for the occasion of Vergil's looking at the night sky. The translator's recipe: just do whatever. The context:
Out of curiosity I went to check how the French translation by Albert Kohn had fared. Same recipe; slightly different outcome:
Oh, Nähe des Urbildes, Nähe der Ur-Wirklichkeit, in deren Vorhof er stand —, wird die kristallene Decke der Himmelsverborgenheiten nun zerreißen? wird die Nacht ihm nun ihr letztes Sinnbild enthüllen, ihm, dessen Auge zum Brechen bestimmt ist, wenn sie das ihre aufschlägt?Jean Starr Untermeyer, who translated Der Tod des Vergil in 1945, removed from the oven this product:
Oh, nearness of the arch-image, nearness of the arch-reality in the fore-court of which he was standing—, was the crystal cover of the heaven-secret about to be rent? was the night about to unveil its final symbol to him whose eye must falter when the night’s eye opens?"Himmelsverborgenheiten," which more literally could be translated as heaven's (Himmels-) hidden (verborgen) -ness (-heiten), becomes "the heaven-secret." The original word is plural (the singular would be "Himmelsverborgenheit," meaning "heaven's concealment," i.e., "Himmels Verborgenheit").
Out of curiosity I went to check how the French translation by Albert Kohn had fared. Same recipe; slightly different outcome:
Ô proximité de l’archétype, proximité de la réalité première, dont il foulait le seuil, le revêtement de cristal des arcanes célestes va-t-il maintenant se fendre ? La nuit va-t-elle lui révéler son dernier symbole, à lui dont l’œil devra se voiler, lorsque la nuit ouvrira le sien ?This time it's "le revêtement de cristal des arcanes célestes." I'd be quite curious to see how different translations into different languages handle this word.
jensteerswell's review against another edition
1.0
I've got to stop reading modernism. Who wants to spend that much time in someone else's stream of consciousness?
ianfjanssen's review against another edition
2.0
These are my opinions on the work, not a comprehensive judgment on it. Just not my cup of tea, as is said. Even with all of Virgil's perambulating thoughts, I found I had no investment in what happened to him or how he perceived it. Broch set a high bar for himself with this, but I just found it a chore I did not care about sufficiently to persevere; maybe he succeeded, maybe he did not. Indeed, I found myself laughing at passages that probably were not intended as comic because of the seemingly absurd degree to which they were hyperanalyzed and masticated. I understand that this is the style of the work and I can appreciate it on some level for that, but as my grandmother used to say, "Sometimes too much is too much." I think that the prose probably flows much better in German, although that is no fault of the translator; you can see where the original compound nouns probably expressed thoughts and intentions better than the sometimes cumbersome English phrases into which they were translated. I neither recommend nor not seek to dissuade anyone from reading Broch's work, but I suspect you either will embrace it or drop out early, with not much in between. A truly heavy lift.
epictetsocrate's review against another edition
3.0
Albastre ca oţelul şi uşoare, mişcate de un vânt contrar domol, abia perceptibil, valurile Mării Adriatice unduiseră din faţă spre escadra imperială, atunci când aceasta se îndrepta spre portul Brundisium, având la stânga colinele teşite ale coastei calabreze ce se apropiau încet, iar acum, când singurătatea mării, însorită, totuşi atât de asemănătoare morţii, se preschimba în veselia plină de pace a activităţii omeneşti, când talazurile, străluminate blând de apropierea existenţei şi a căminelor omeneşti, se populau cu fel de fel de corăbii, unele care se îndreptau deasemenea spre port, altele care plecaseră din el, acum, când bărcile pescăreşti cu pânze cafenii părăseau aproape pretutindeni micile diguri de apărare ale numeroaselor sate şi aşezări presărate de-a lungul ţărmului scăldat de spumă albă, ca să iasă la pescuitul de seară, acum, apa devenise aproape netedă ca oglinda; deasupra, scoica cerului se deschisese sidefie, cădea amurgul, şi mirosea a foc de lemne aprins în vetre, ori de câte ori erau aduse încoace de adiere sunetele vieţii, o bătaie de ciocan sau o chemare.
Dintre cele şapte vase cu bordul înalt, care se succedau desfăşurate în linie, numai cea dintâi şi ultima, pentere zvelte, cu pinten, aparţineau flotei imperiale; celelalte cinci, mai greoaie şi mai impozante, cu zece, cu douăsprezece rânduri de vâsle, se remarcau prin construcţia fastuoasă specifică vieţii de la curtea lui August, iar cea de la mijloc, întrecându-le în splendoare pe toate, cu prora ferecată în bronz strălucitor ca aurul, cu capetele de leu, purtând în gură inele, de sub balustradă, strălucitoare ca aurul, cu şarturile pavoazate multicolor, purta sub pânze de purpură, sărbătoresc şi mare, cortul lui Cezar. Însă pe corabia imediat următoare se găsea poetul Eneidei, iar pe fruntea lui sta scris semnul morţii.
Dintre cele şapte vase cu bordul înalt, care se succedau desfăşurate în linie, numai cea dintâi şi ultima, pentere zvelte, cu pinten, aparţineau flotei imperiale; celelalte cinci, mai greoaie şi mai impozante, cu zece, cu douăsprezece rânduri de vâsle, se remarcau prin construcţia fastuoasă specifică vieţii de la curtea lui August, iar cea de la mijloc, întrecându-le în splendoare pe toate, cu prora ferecată în bronz strălucitor ca aurul, cu capetele de leu, purtând în gură inele, de sub balustradă, strălucitoare ca aurul, cu şarturile pavoazate multicolor, purta sub pânze de purpură, sărbătoresc şi mare, cortul lui Cezar. Însă pe corabia imediat următoare se găsea poetul Eneidei, iar pe fruntea lui sta scris semnul morţii.