>you will never read gargantua and pantegruel in its original

>>8608796
Hey, I was just about to start reading this, cause I vaguely remember someone on here saying it would help me understand some references in Tristram Shandy. Am I just going to get more confused reading Gargantua and Pentagruel?

>>8608796
I can't give any clarification regarding Tristram Shandy or its understanding, but reading Rabelais has its own rewards. Mainly dicking, drinking, and shit-eating but also veering into the pleasures of reading long legal citations.

>>8608796
Weeeeell, by reading Erasmus, Plato, Agrippa, some Petronius and Boccacio, Folengo, old french farces, Villon, the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, Lucian and the True History, and knowing some Latin and Greek, you can get close enough.

I read the chapters on Rabelais' youth in his biography. It was amazing to see how educated he was, though an education from back then was flawed in so many ways. Anyway, OP's right that he's definitely one of those writers one would have to spend a lifetime with to understand.

>>8608993
You would need to know this and so much more. It's amazing what a difference there is between him and someone like Shakespeare in terms of education. Maybe part of the reason why Shakespeare is so popular today is because he wasn't indoctrinated into the academic culture of his day the way Rabelais was.

>>8609149
I wouldn't say that academic culture is what most defines him though, he has much more to do with folk culture, all those words drawn from local dialects, and his manipulation of language might have been savant but that made it no more remote from Rabelais' contemporaries than Shakespeare's weirdspeak from his