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Thread: Flowery language

  1. #31
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    Try Walter Pater and John Ruskin. Both were revered in their day and, interestingly, both were professors at Oxford when Oscar Wilde was a student there. Wilde used to go on long walks with Ruskin and claimed that Pater even made a homosexual advance on him. Personally I find that kind of writing just too much effort to read.

  2. #32
    Purple prose? LOL! I happen to LOVE purple prose! Many of my friends think my love of L.M. Montgomery is ridiculous because of her flowery language. I also love Elizabeth Goudge. Thomas Hardy also might fall into this?

  3. #33
    Registered User EmptySeraph's Avatar
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    Walter Pater,
    John Ruskin,
    Robert Burton,
    Thomas Browne,
    James Boswell,
    Thomas Macaulay,
    Matthew Arnold,
    Max Beerbohm,
    Nathaniel Hawthorne,
    Herman Melville,
    Ralph Waldo Emerson,
    Henry David Thoreau,
    Samuel Johnson,
    William James,
    Henry James,
    Virginia Woolf,
    Oscar Wilde,
    James Joyce,
    Joseph Conrad,
    Evelyn Waugh,
    Thomas De Quincey,
    Thomas Hardy,
    Francis Bacon,
    William Faulkner,
    D. H. Lawrence,
    Samuel Beckett,
    John Lyly,
    Izaak Walton,
    Jonathan Swift,
    Richard Steele,
    Joseph Addison,
    Ambrose Bierce,
    H.L. Mencken,
    John Banville,
    E. B. White,
    T.S. Eliot,
    George Orwell,
    Charles Dickens
    Vladimir Nabokov
    Truman Capote.

    So far, I've managed to amass this list of writers that, in some way or the other, showed signs of a certain propensity for an unmistakably baroque manner of writing, of a poignant rococo scent in their style, or that, simply, proved to be very deft when using the English idiom, having a lot of elegance in their written language. Some works of some of these writers are indeed plain as for the style, for example, Swift's satires, but they are nonetheless imbued with a very refined, groomed style that employs many a distinguished word. Any suggestion? I'm looking for writers that wrote in English and that gave themselves up to the aesthetic quality of the style.
    Last edited by EmptySeraph; 04-27-2017 at 06:08 PM.
    Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes.

  4. #34
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    From my country I would count Raduan Nassar and Guimarães Rosa. The first was not translated yet, afaik, and will probably not be for a long time. Look for "Lavoura Arcaica" (Archaic Farm, literally). He has three works, but is kind of an author "of one only book". Nassar doesn't innovate with language but use a metaphorical, very lyrical, style, which could be described as "poetry in prose". I like him. The second has translated his "The Devil to Pay in the Backlands", his magna opus. I don't know if the translation keeps both the poetic tone and the dialect layer, however. He was a passionate polygloth and his work is full of grammatical and lexical plays with a very heavy regional language which is difficult even for us, so part of it may be lost iT.
    ED.4: The translation I found, from 1963, is this one: http :// documents.tips/documents/the-devil-to-pay-in-the-backlands-joao-guimaraes-rosapdf.html
    Compare the second paragraph fom page 17 with this one: https :// thedeviltopayinthebacklands.wordpress.com/2010/06/01/stylistic-rendering/
    The second version is much closer to the original than the avaiable translation.
    Last edited by Shifter; 05-05-2017 at 10:38 PM.

  5. #35
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    Lolita has quite a lovely, lilting vocabulary featured in it. Would you rather give that a try? Many of Nabokov's works are really well written, and most certainly feature an interesting range of lexical choices. Hope you enjoy exploring it :')

  6. #36
    Bibliophile JBI's Avatar
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    Virgil and Tennyson come to mind for flowery language most above all.

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