Why fantasy writers should read old books

[MasterofRevels]

Why fantasy writers should read old books

A case for primary sources

open.substack.com

The more you familiarize yourself with the language and literature of the culture you are using as inspiration, the better you’ll be able to imbue everything from your characterization to your dialogue to your prose with historically informed believability.

 

[pmmg]

I try....but there is only so much I can do at once.

 

[Karlin]

Why fantasy writers should read old books

A case for primary sources

open.substack.com

The more you familiarize yourself with the language and literature of the culture you are using as inspiration, the better you’ll be able to imbue everything from your characterization to your dialogue to your prose with historically informed believability.

I'm not sure what to make of that rather verbose and fancy quote, but this all seems like a no-brainer to me.
I've got a fantasy in mind centered around Michelangelo and time travel. I've written it as a short story, but I know that I need to read a solid history of the Italian Renaissance and a biography of Michelangelo before attempting a full fledged novel.

 

[MasterofRevels]

I try....but there is only so much I can do at once.

For sure. And this was not meant as a "do better" kind of post. Moreso an encouragement of how you can benefit from reading old books, which just so happens to be something I really enjoy doing.

I'm not sure what to make of that rather verbose and fancy quote, but this all seems like a no-brainer to me.
I've got a fantasy in mind centered around Michelangelo and time travel. I've written it as a short story, but I know that I need to read a solid history of the Italian Renaissance and a biography of Michelangelo before attempting a full fledged novel.

That sounds like a cool idea. In keeping with the spirit of my substack article, you could check out Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists. It's from the Renaissance era and offers a contemporary perspective on the great Italian artists of that period. There's a biography of Michelangelo in one of the volumes.

 

[Letterdust]

I see your point, but unless you're going to invest the time into learning ancient Chinese, old English or ancient Greek, going back to the source material will be a fruitless endeavour. And if you're reading it in English, it's someone else's translation, with their own interpretation of history, philosophy and hegemonic thinking woven into the text from whichever era and location they were writing it from. We can't take our own heads off when we translate, so culture and social mores inevitably seep in.

Even reading something like the Canterbury Tales (which is pretty readable in its original as its quite close to modern English) still presents challenges of interpretation with some words and phrases that don't directly carry over. So again, unless you're going to become a philologist of middle English, maybe it isn't that helpful to go back to the original source. Even with something a couple of hundred years later, like the Diary of Samuel Pepys, can throw up odd things (what, for example, does "...meeting with Mr Henson, who formally had the brave clock that went with bullets." actually mean?!).

I do totally agree with your general point around reading widely to inform your work. I guess I'm lazy, and I'd rather find some really good historians (Mary Beard, David Starkey, David Olusoga) to do the hard work for me!

All that said, one of the reasons why the stories and archetypes in Lord of the Rings feels so familiar and resonant to some of us, is because Tolkien was a philologist of ancient English and could feed all of that knowledge about our ancient history and mythology into his story-telling. So if you do have a planet-sized brain like him, and you are able to read the originals - more power to you, and I'm sure you will be a more convincing story-teller for it.

I guess I'm agreeing disagreeably!

 

[Karlin]

I see your point, but unless you're going to invest the time into learning ancient Chinese, old English or ancient Greek, going back to the source material will be a fruitless endeavour. And if you're reading it in English, it's someone else's translation, with their own interpretation of history, philosophy and hegemonic thinking woven into the text from whichever era and location they were writing it from. We can't take our own heads off when we translate, so culture and social mores inevitably seep in.

Even reading something like the Canterbury Tales (which is pretty readable in its original as its quite close to modern English) still presents challenges of interpretation with some words and phrases that don't directly carry over. So again, unless you're going to become a philologist of middle English, maybe it isn't that helpful to go back to the original source. Even with something a couple of hundred years later, like the Diary of Samuel Pepys, can throw up odd things (what, for example, does "...meeting with Mr Henson, who formally had the brave clock that went with bullets." actually mean?!).

I do totally agree with your general point around reading widely to inform your work. I guess I'm lazy, and I'd rather find some really good historians (Mary Beard, David Starkey, David Olusoga) to do the hard work for me!

All that said, one of the reasons why the stories and archetypes in Lord of the Rings feels so familiar and resonant to some of us, is because Tolkien was a philologist of ancient English and could feed all of that knowledge about our ancient history and mythology into his story-telling. So if you do have a planet-sized brain like him, and you are able to read the originals - more power to you, and I'm sure you will be a more convincing story-teller for it.

I guess I'm agreeing disagreeably!

well, having read thousands of pages of the Chinese Classics in translation, I don't quite agree. I do make a point of reading the best available translations, preferably those with detailed footnotes.

I've done some translation myself, so I am aware of the difficulties involved.

By the way, how many people do you know who have read the Bible (no matter how you define it) in the original?

 

[Letterdust]

"I've done some translation myself, so I am aware of the difficulties involved."

I think you've just agreed with my point

 

[Finchbearer]

For me, I’m no linguist, so I have no idea if something is a ‘good’ translation or not, but reading something ancient, even through a modern English translation feels like a tantalising peek into the distant past.

 

[Karlin]

I've probably mentioned this before, but I read part of the Gilgamesh Epic in translation into Biblical Hebrew. The idea was that Biblical Hebrew is close linguistically to ancient Akkadian, so you'd get a better sense of the rhythm and flow of the original text than if it were translated into, say English. I think there's something to this, but, my cuneiform reading skills being somewhat rusty, I have no solid way of judging.

 

[Finchbearer]

I've probably mentioned this before, but I read part of the Gilgamesh Epic in translation into Biblical Hebrew. The idea was that Biblical Hebrew is close linguistically to ancient Akkadian, so you'd get a better sense of the rhythm and flow of the original text than if it were translated into, say English. I think there's something to this, but, my cuneiform reading skills being somewhat rusty, I have no solid way of judging.

Beowulf is written in a dialect of old English, but translation into modern English is apparently still tricky. To be able to understand the actual language would probably be best, but as I said above, I’m just glad I can read them at all.

 

[Jackarandajam]

And if you're reading it in English, it's someone else's translation, with their own interpretation of history, philosophy and hegemonic thinking woven into the text from whichever era and location they were writing it from.

This bugs the crap out of me, less with ancient stuff and more with 19-20th century classics. The thought niggles at me while I'm reading Dostoesvsky, "yeah, but I wonder how beautiful this is in russian..."
America's satisfaction with raising generations of monoglots is a bummer, but I'm doing what I can to catch up to most of the rest of the world. I'm at the age now when learning a new language is an uphill battle, but you know. YOLO.

 

[Ban]

This bugs the crap out of me, less with ancient stuff and more with 19-20th century classics. The thought niggles at me while I'm reading Dostoesvsky, "yeah, but I wonder how beautiful this is in russian..."
America's satisfaction with raising generations of monoglots is a bummer, but I'm doing what I can to catch up to most of the rest of the world. I'm at the age now when learning a new language is an uphill battle, but you know. YOLO.

Most of us in the non-Anglophone world become bilingual or multilingual simply due to exposure, not educational policy. If Western TV shows, movies and videogames weren't predominantly made in the Anglophone world, we wouldn't be speaking the same language. That's the same way the previous generation in my province learned German. Humans are willing to learn a language if the screens flash in a fun enough manner.

Note Belgium and Canada, which are nominally bilingual (plus some more) and work hard on fostering bilingualism. The people are still not assured to speak both, with many in Belgium opting for English as a second language instead.

 

[Letterdust]

An interesting diversion into the merits of learning a foreign language, but for clarity, I guess what I was saying is that most of us aren't bilingual in ancient languages, which means we are dependent on the translations of others. Given that comes with all the usual caveats of time, distance, culture, gender, philosophy and culture, I am more inclined to rely on an expert with years of training in using historical resources to interpret all of that stuff for me. Any good history book will draw on the original sources, and often provide translations as part of the text. BUT the key thing you get with a history book, that you don't with translated texts, is lots of context and explanation to make it easier for the lay person to understand.

I work full time, I have a 5 year old and a husband, and two elderly parents. I'm all for research, but my time is short, and I'd rather spend it writing. If I can draw on the amazing resource of someone who has spent years at university studying the subject matter, and also the years after figuring out how to interpret it in the best way, that's what I'm going to do. I'm not going to sweat about the original sources. I'm a fantasy fiction writer, not a Roman Historian.

HOWEVER, if I had time, space (i.e. not a 5 yr old jumping over me as I write) and the intellect, I would plunge myself into different languages and histories, because they are basically the original stories of humanity, and that's what we're all interested in

 

[pmmg]

Learning a new language is on my list, but its somewhere below a lot of other things. I think maybe in another lifetime

Till then...I'll make the best of.

 

[Ban]

When I read "old" I don't necessarily think of "ancient." There are quite a few old stories I could read without needing to study a new language (some words and spellings here and there). Plenty of generations-old Dutch and English tales that are still readable to someone with a bit of linguistic context. As for the truly ancient, I dropped Latin and Greek back in high school out of teenage sloth. Ah well, perhaps I'll pick it back up one day.

 

[Mad Swede]

Writing this as someone who is fluent in several languages, despite my dyslexia. People talk about translations, but the best translations are much more than that, they are interpretations. I've been closely involved in the ongoing translation of my books from Swedish to English, and I can say that it is only when you do this that you begin to understand how closely related culture and language are. There's no way of conveying the nuances of a story without doing a proper interpretation which takes into account both the language, the story itself (including any underlying messages and themes) and the culture of the country for which you are translating the story. Google Translate just doesn't cut it, and even professional tools like Babylon can't do it all. The more I've been involved the more I have appreciated the great skill involved in such interpretations. Wonderful popular examples of this are in the various translations of the Asterix albums, as a comparison between the French and English versions shows quite clearly.

 

[Queshire]

Man, I read (or rather, listened to) the Starship Troopers novel awhile ago. It was interesting to see just how different something from even 60 years ago is from modern day stuff and to see what people back then thought the space future would be like.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I once considered learning Italian to read Dante in the original Italian, had a good laugh at myself, and read a translation. Honestly, if I was going to put in that much work into language these days, it'd be to build and flesh out a conlang for my world.

The usefulness of ancient/classic lit to world-building would be on a case-by-case basis.

 

[Ban]

I once considered learning Italian to read Dante in the original Italian, had a good laugh at myself, and read a translation. Honestly, if I was going to put in that much work into language these days, it'd be to build and flesh out a conlang for my world.

The usefulness of ancient/classic lit to world-building would be on a case-by-case basis.

I reckon you would have had to learn Tuscan, as Dante lived well before a unified Italian language emerged. I find the idea of you learning Italian only to discover the original texts still were a pain to read rather amusing. Though I might be off myself. Modern Italian might be sufficient for reading Dante, as the latter informed the former... Less funny.

 

[Letterdust]

I'm mildly disappointed that no-one has explained to me what a brave clock with bullets is. Heheh.