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Anonymous
Did you know Voltaire was sometimes a charlatan? I can prove it. 2017-02-01 01:55:11 Post No.
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Did you know Voltaire was sometimes a charlatan? I can prove it. 2017-02-01 01:55:11 Post No.
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Did you know Voltaire was sometimes a charlatan? I can prove it.
Anonymous
2017-02-01 01:55:11
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He pretended to read books he HAD NOT read.
On his 'Essay on Epic Poetry' he pretends to have read Camoes in the original, which had not happened. He even pretended to translated the first lines of the poems, failed, and then completely invented a load of idiocy for the third stanza!
Voltaire's ''translation'':
>« Je chante ces hommes au-dessus du vulgaire, qui des rives
occidentales de la Lusitanie, portés sur des mers qui n'avaient point encore vu de
vaisseaux, allèrent étonner la Taprobane de leur audace; eux dont le courage patient à
souffrir des travaux au delà des forces humaines établit un nouvel empire sous un ciel
inconnu et sous d'autres étoiles. Qu'on ne vante plus les voyages du fameux Troyen qui
porta ses dieux en Italie; ni ceux du sage Grec qui revit Ithaque après vingt ans
d'absence; ni ceux d'Alexandre, cet impétueux conquérant. Disparaissez, drapeaux que
Trajan déployait sur les frontières de l'Inde voici un homme à qui Neptune a abandonné
son trident; voici des travaux qui surpassent tous les vôtres.
>« Et vous, nymphes du Tage, si jamais vous m'avez inspiré des sons doux et touchants,
si j'ai chanté les rives de votre aimable fleuve, donnez-moi aujourd'hui des accents fiers
et hardis; qu'ils aient la force et la clarté de votre cours; qu'ils soient purs comme vos
ondes, et que désormais le dieu des vers préfère vos eaux à celles de la fontaine sacrée. »
This is very different than the original, which is obviously unnaceptable for a prose translation! Here's the fourth stanza in the original. All people who know Portuguese/Spanish/Italian will see the differece immediately!
>E vós, Tágides minhas, pois criado
>Tendes em mim um novo engenho ardente,
>Se sempre em verso humilde celebrado
>Foi de mim vosso rio alegremente,
>Dai-me agora um som alto e sublimado,
>Um estilo grandíloquo e corrente,
>Porque de vossas águas, Febo ordene
>Que não tenham inveja às de Hipocrene.
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>>9047366
What about it? Dante never read Homer, and didn't even know Beatrice personally. He was a pseud and a cuck, but it doesn't diminish his poem.
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The original /lit/izen
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The real trick of a patrician is to say you haven't read something then when they start explaining the thing you start to talk over them and yell "oh I remember yeah!" and go on a detailed 30 minute tangent on the thing they wanted to talk about revealing all sorts of esoteric knowledge.
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"The chapter on Camoens is a somewhat remarkable example of the writer s disregard for accuracy. It is evident that Voltaire was very ill-informed regarding Camoens and the Lusiads. Some years later he himself corrected, without remark or apology, some of the errors contained in the biographical account of the Portuguese poet. 1 In the sdmewhat fragmentary comments on the
poem, there is a certain amount of well-worded praise more than overbalanced by blame. " His Poem in my Opinion," we read at one point, " is full of numberless Faults and Beauties, thick sown
near one another ; and almost at every Page, there is what to laugh at and what to be delighted with."
https://archive.org/stream/voltairesessayon00voltuoft/voltairesessayon00voltuoft_djvu.txt
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>>9047691
In 1753 Baretti (Dissertation, p. 71) merely says that Voltaire has endeavored to impose on the reader by translating falsely some lines of Camoens to create a resemblance between them and a passage of Denham. Mickle points out (p. 610, note) that the idea similar to that of Denham was not contained in the original but was added by Fanshawe.
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>>9047366
Everyone does that, idiot. Do you think /lit/ has time to read as much as they do?
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>>9047785
I never did that, mate. Why would someone lie about what they read?
As someone said above, Dante didn't read Homer (don't know if that's true, since Homer appears in the Comedy, but I believe it probably is, since the Greeks were not much available at that time). Nor did he read Aristotle's Poetics (which was rediscovered centuries later) and so on.
It doesn't matter what you read, but how deeply you read it, and how much you are able to *gain* from it. Dante didn't read Homer, but he read Virgil, Horace and others. From those authors he read, he gathered so much knowledge and technique that he was able to create a great poem.
I myself am not ashamed of mentioning the books I haven't read. I have read only one or two French writers, for instance, because I want to learn their language in the future and spend money on the originals instead of spending it now with translations that will need to be replaced later on. I also don't know Shakespeare's History plays (except for King John a few years ago, and Branagh's movie about Henry V). And I have read no Faulkner or Celine novels, no novel by Thomas Mann and so on...
Why should I be ashamed? Homer probably didn't even know how to read!
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