cahn | 18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 35

In the previous post Charles II found AITA:

Look, I, m, believe in live and let live. (And in not going on my travels again. Had enough of that to last a life time.) Why can't everyone else around me be more chill? Instead, my wife refuses to employ my girlfriend, my girlfriend won't budge and accept another office, my brother is set on a course to piss off everyone (he WILL go on his travels again), and my oldest kid shows signs of wanting my job which is just not on, sorry to say. And don't get me started about Mom (thank God she's living abroad). What am I doing wrong? AITA?

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From:

mildred_of_midgard

So I need to hold off on the 18th century for a while, since as you can see, Pompadour predictably made me both google things like "How are these Châtelets related?" and also find a lot I wanted to share, neither of which is improving my German reading speed. :P

So,

selenak, are you able to rec or anti-rec Sabine Appel as an author? She's got a bio of Catherine de Medici that I'm eyeing, to go with my Schultz bio of Henri IV. If you can't say either way, I'll give her a try and report back. If she's to be avoided, then not to worry, I have plenty of other reading material!

From:

selenak

Sabine Appel: sorry, no, I haven't read anything of hers yet.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Update: 300 pages in, I can report that Appel is a definite step up in difficulty from Schultz. She likes long sentences, long paragraphs, academic analyses, and digressions.

For example, this sentence covers multiple distinct political developments and could really have been multiple distinct sentences:

Dass sie dies aber nur tat, um sich Spielräume zu verschaffen, während sie ihre diversen anderen Karten ausspielte und schaute, wie weit sie am Ende kam an ihren unterschiedlichen Fronten, lässt sich zum Beispiel schon daran erkennen, dass sie Philipp ein französisch-englisches Bündnis in Aussicht stellte, das ihm Kopfzerbrechen bereiten konnte, indem sie der Königin von England ihren fünfzehnjährigen Sohn Henri zum Gatten anbot, sollte sich Philipp nicht zu den von ihr intendierten Eheschließungen mit seinem Hause durchringen können, etwa der Heirat Henris mit Johanna von Portugal oder der ihrer Tochter Margot mit dem Infanten Don Carlos, oder indem sie sich noch während der Konferenz von Bayonne mit den Abgesandten des Sultans Suleiman traf.

And this sentence is so abstract that even though it's comparatively short, it involved a certain amount of work to sort out.

Die Geschichtsschreibung einschlägiger Provenienz verband aber mit dem Protestantismus – und diesen verkörperte Coligny – durch seine puritanischen Züge eine grundsätzlich höhere Moralität mit dem Anspruch lebenswirklicher Realisierung, die dann bei ihren Vertretern entsprechend betont wurde, als pars pro toto und gleichsam zur Kennzeichnung einer Gesellschaftsbewegung.

Appel's also into loving descriptions of whatever's caught her interest. Like 10 pages of literary criticism on Marguerite of Navarre's Heptameron, during which we don't hear a peep about Catherine de Medici. I admit, I skipped the last 3 of those pages!

But between Google's help and my policy of "If I understand what the sentence says, I don't need to puzzle out every word and clause," I am making good headway and learning a lot. But it was definitely the right move to read 6 Schultz books for practice first. Only 250 pages to go, and then on to Matilda of Tuscany!

From:

felis

Hilfe. That certainly involved work to sort out even for me. Kudos to you for sticking with it!?

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Ha, thanks for the validation. Gotta learn academic German sometime!

Cahn, if you want an example, to help you get a sense of what we're talking about, without making you Google translate the original sentence, of the sort of thing she does, it's basically stringing together clauses and interjections, so that you have to, if you want to figure out what subject goes with what verb, link all the pieces together yourself, which is a stylistic issue I can be guilty of myself when writing in English, I know, but I also freely admit I'm not the clearest author ever either, unless I'm doing technical writing, which has different conventions, such as bullet pointed lists, that make it easier to naturally break your message down into smaller chunks for your reader. <-- That.

German has more tolerance for this kind of thing than English, so it's maybe not quite as bad in the original as it comes across in my example there, but she definitely does it more than any of the authors I've been reading in the last 4 months. I've developed an MO: notice when she's changed the subject in the middle of a complete thought, scan ahead to pick up that thought and complete it, and then go back to the part in the middle that's a separate thought and then read that. I'm getting the hang of it, except when I'm faced with a lot of new abstraction vocab on top of the convoluted syntax, and then it's off to Google Translate to ask for help.

Whew!

From:

cahn

Eeeeeek! I can follow it in English, because that's how I write naturally, but following that kind of thing in a foreign language is Right Out.

Tangentially related, I will say that after I dropped the ball in a major way in January and February, I've actually been pretty good since then at reading a page or two every day of French, and even though it's not even close to your study rate, heh, I can feel it getting easier to read with daily practice. The Bible is great because not only do I know the subject matter and often text in English reasonably well, it is quite repetitive so I get practice with any vocab I just learned. ...I guess the downside is that all the vocab I'm learning is stuff like "sin" and "altar" and "burnt offering," which is maybe not so useful for salon :D

From:

luzula

Hee. I took French in school, but most of what I actually used it for after that was reading math articles when I did my Ph D. "Soit X un espace topologique..." does not give great vocabulary for other things.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Hee. My German vocab is fine as long as it's all about einmarschieren (invading/marching in) and Belagerung (a siege) and Aderlass (bloodletting), but it's going to be hilarious next time I'm confronted with a menu or public transportation in Germany. "Can somebody just attack someone or put some leeches on them or marry them off to someone twice their age, so I know what's going on?" :'D

From:

luzula

You can even probably puzzle out some very specific Swedish words now! : )

belägring = siege
åderlåtning = bloodletting

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Awesome! Even better, if I can't puzzle them out, I can remember them once I learn them! (What I've found while studying German is that my Germanic historical linguistics background doesn't always allow me to puzzle out words, but once I look up their meaning, I can remember a word much better if I recognize it as related to something I learned back in my dead-Germanic-language-studying days.)

ETA: In conclusion, as I meant to say, I can see that I'll soon be able to talk to the ghost of Charles XII. ;)

Edited Date: 2022-04-28 09:36 pm (UTC)

From:

luzula

Oh, what dead Germanic language did you study?

When I read that Linneaus book, it was interesting to compare 18th century Swedish with 18th century English. There were some cool similarities! For example, the Swedish word which is currently spelled "bra" was spelled "brav" back then, showing it's relation with English/Scottish "brave/braw". and I found a word "fäj" which I didn't find even in the most comprehensive Swedish dictionary, but which the notes explained meant "fated to die". That is, it's the same word as English/Scottish "fey"!

ETA: What would you ask his ghost, if you could?

Edited Date: 2022-04-30 02:11 pm (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Oh, what dead Germanic language did you study?

All of them. Old English, Middle English, Gothic, Old Norse/Icelandic, Old High German, Middle High German--okay, not a lot of Old Saxon, but I did look at the Heliand once, just for completist purposes, when I realized I was missing Old Saxon. :P

showing it's relation with English/Scottish "brave/braw". and I found a word "fäj" which I didn't find even in the most comprehensive Swedish dictionary, but which the notes explained meant "fated to die". That is, it's the same word as English/Scottish "fey"!

Yay! I can also tell you that having a smattering of Scots* is tremendously helpful in my German studies, for exactly this reason! Just like you, I wouldn't have recognized "fäj", but once the notes told me the answer, knowing "fey" would have helped me remember it forever!

* Well, and Tolkien. Tolkien helps. :D (The man actually *knew* all the dead Germanic languages, and didn't just study them without actually learning them.)

Edited Date: 2022-04-30 02:17 pm (UTC)

Re: Reading rec question

From:

luzula - Date: 2022-05-23 11:00 am (UTC) - Expand

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Ghost: Eh, nothing comes to mind. I was just making a joke that my Swedish vocab is well on its way to being as useless for modern practical purposes as my German vocab. ;)

ETA: According to my word-counting tool, salon just crossed the 3-million word mark today, meaning we're averaging a little over a million words a year. :DDD

User	Words	Comments
selenak	1,301,850	3,192
mildred	1,236,616	4,821
cahn	303,052	2,729
felis	99,625	415
luzula	23,715	144
prinzsorgenfrei	15,344	78
gambitten	13,116	36
Everyone else	7,931	67
Total	3,001,249	11,338

Whenever I see this, I think, "Gambitten, come back!" :(

Edited Date: 2022-04-30 05:55 pm (UTC)

Re: Reading rec question

From:

cahn - Date: 2022-05-05 04:48 am (UTC) - Expand

Re: Reading rec question

From:

selenak - Date: 2022-05-05 08:12 am (UTC) - Expand

Re: Reading rec question

From:

mildred_of_midgard - Date: 2022-05-05 05:53 pm (UTC) - Expand

From:

mildred_of_midgard

eeeeek! I can follow it in English, because that's how I write naturally, but following that kind of thing in a foreign language is Right Out.

Right? I'm pretty sure I couldn't have handled it right up until this month, but my German's been improving in leaps and bounds since January. So last week I was a bit like, "Hold my beer while I read these 20-line convoluted sentences." :P

(And then had insomnia strike HARD this week, so despite the sentences about Matilda of Tuscany being so much easier that it almost feels like cheating, I've read hardly anything. Sigh.)

I've actually been pretty good since then at reading a page or two every day of French

Ah, good! I was wondering how that was going. I'm glad to hear it's going well! I was hoping to be ready for French by now, but...I persevere with German. I'm now hoping to be ready by the end of 2022!

From:

selenak

I'm with Felis - these sentences are awful to read if you're German, too.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Another "Do you know this author?" question for our Germans: Volker Reinhardt. Mostly a Renaissance scholar, but he just published a bio of our Voltaire in January.

From:

selenak

Heard the name, have not yet any of his books, due to a silly personal pet peeve: his book about Alexander VI. aka Rodrigo Borgia is titled "The Creepy Pope" (Der unheimliche Papst), and his book about the Borgias "Die unheimliche Familie" - the creepy family. Now you can say a great many things about the Borgias in general and Rodrigo in particular, always with the caveat of "neither better or worse than other Renaissance families, got the bad press due to being outsiders from Spain having a go at the pie that was supposed to be Italian-served only". "Corrupt Pope", "Renaissance Pope", "Simonist Pope", "Nepotism Champ", fine. But unheimlich, he was not. So I was put off his oeuvre so far and haven#t read it yet.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I saw that! And I thought, "Selena's not going to like that." *g*

Well, I'll give him a try. I care more about readability at this point than about saying correct things. I just don't want Stollberg-Rilinger, or, as I discovered last night, Bernd Schneidmüller. Either of whom I could handle in English, but not yet German.

Hopefully he at least knows how Lucrezia's husbands died...

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Mind you, I'm now having a laugh thinking of the Addams family, and how the song lyrics could be turned into a Borgia family song... :D

From:

selenak

That was done years ago!

https://youtu.be/s1ADwv2A1wg

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Lol!

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Also, if we're talking aggravating titles, I have one for you: "Anna Maria Francesca: una principessa boema...una fiorentina mancata" (Anna Maria Francesca: a Bohemian princess...a failed Florentine).

Now, I really wanted to give the author the benefit of the doubt and hope that in Italian "mancata" can mean something more neutral, like, "Almost became a Florentine but not quite," without all the value judgment, and that this was just a marketing gimmick akin to appending "The Enduring Legacy of Mary, Queen of Scots" to your title to convince English-speaking readers to buy your book about this Winter Queen they've never heard of.

But then I read some of Bruschi's books (I have yet to read the AMF one, because I got a bit fed up with him), and he's the Florentine (!) who thinks it's well known that Italians are the best-looking people in the world, and within Italy, the Tuscans are especially good-looking, and within Tuscany, the Florentines are the pinnacle of human beauty. All this to support an argument that good-looking men in Florence must have been a dime a dozen, so if all his contemporaries felt called upon to praise Giuliano Dami's beauty, we know he must have been smoking hot stuff.

(I was going to review Bruschi's books for you guys, but you know...it just would have been firstly a rant about his terrible opinions, and secondly a rant about how he seems to be confusing the genres of history and historical fiction, so, consider it said.)

Anyway! My view of Anna Maria Francesca is that she was a SUCCESS at avoiding having to live in Florence with Gian Gastone! You try marrying him, Alberto Bruschi. :P

ETA: Only you wouldn't, because you're a freaking homophobe. *grumbles*

Edited Date: 2022-04-24 04:06 pm (UTC)

From:

selenak

Count me as cheering Anna Maria Francesca for staying the hell away from Florence and a situation like her mother-in-law's where she'd have been in the social power of her husband, too.

From:

cahn

good-looking men in Florence must have been a dime a dozen, so if all his contemporaries felt called upon to praise Giuliano Dami's beauty, we know he must have been smoking hot stuff.

...wow. Thanks for reading it and reporting back? Because this is hilarious to me, but I imagine it was rather less hilarious to actually read.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Oh, it was hilarious! I kept wanting to liveblog it at you guys! This and the 18th century tabloid, complete with Harold Acton/Norman Douglas intros.

But after I finished reading, I realized that it would just be a rant about how this is all terrible history and the amount I actually learned was minimal (though we did get documentary counterevidence to GG as pedophile!), so I would be better off actually trying to learn stuff.

That said, if I go back to these books when I have more time, you may hear from me on the subject of "These people should have stuck to historical fiction."