Which books did Father Christmas give you?

[kev67]

I got Bleak House and A Tale of Two Cities, both Penguin clothbounds, from my mother. It was supposed to be an either-or present. I also received Lionel Asbo by Martin Amis, and A Man of Parts by David Lodge from my brother. That was supposed to be one-or-the-other too.

[Delta40]

I got a bedside lamp to assist my reading...

[Vota]

3 volume Library of America Philip K. Dick sci-fi collection in slipcase
The Rediscovery of Man by Cordwainer Smith-Hardcover

I wasn't expecting to get both and was happily surprised.

[Lykren]

A Life in Small Things, a biography of Jane Austen, is the only book I have received for Christmas.

[Pierre Menard]

I pretty much only asked for books:

Collected Poems of James Merrill
Madame Bovary (Penguin deluxe edition/Davis translations) by Flaubert
The Essential Writings of Jonathon Swift (Norton)
Pere Goriot by Balzac (Norton)
Poems of Osip Mandelstam (Merwin/Brown translations)
The Five Books of Moses (Robert Alter trans.)]
Omensetter's Luck by William H. Gass
Nikolai Gogol's collected Tales
Selected Poetry of John Donne (Norton)
Selected poems of Robert Graves

Pretty darn happy!

[qimissung]

Everybody got good stuff, it looks like! I got "The Dark is Rising" series from a friend and "The Orphan Master's Son" from my son.

[Poetaster]

Beowulf: a glossed text
Aeschylus's The Oresteia translated by Robert Fagles
The Complete poems of Catullus

[Paulclem]

I got:

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke
Lost in Shangri- La by Mitchell Zuckoff
Pagan Lord by Bernard Cornwell
Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov - which is a good, low key thriller set in the Ukraine.

I also got myself:
The Brothers Karamazov
The Aeneid by Virgil

because I can't resist books.

[Poetaster]

The Aeneid by Virgil

The Aeneid of my favorite books, I really hope you enjoy it.

[ChicagoReader]

First year in awhile I didn't get a bunch of books but I did get the New Oxford American Dictionary which I'm extremely happy with.

[tonywalt]

1Q84 by Murakami (already have it, but two is good)

[Calidore]

Just went post-Christmas shopping at Half-Price Books (20% off everything through Monday) and found a very nice Dover oversize edition of Poe's The Raven with full-page illustrations by Gustav Dore. That's about it for literature, though. I also picked up a couple of Mutts strip collections (actually, I would consider Mutts comic-strip literature); the last book of C.S. Friedman's Magister fantasy trilogy; and a couple of F. Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack novels, which series I've heard lots of good things about but haven't read any of yet.

[Paulclem]

The Aeneid of my favorite books, I really hope you enjoy it.

Thanks. I do too. I haven't decided when I'll be reading them all yet. I've got some to finish first.

[Pierre Menard]

The Complete poems of Catullus


Out of curiosity, what translation did you get?

[TheFifthElement]

I was very lucky this year. I received a collection of Seamus Heaney's poetry, a book about the history of tea, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt and The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton which are two of the best books I've borrowed from the library this year. And this morning my first subscription from And Other Stories arrived, A Map of Tulsa, which I am very much looking forward to reading. Happy days.

[Lokasenna]

I only got one present (which is good - I detest being given gifts), and it was a book: Knit Your Own Zombie.

I normally hate being given things, but this was awesome. I am, however, now going to have to learn to knit just so I can manufacture zombies...

[Poetaster]

Out of curiosity, what translation did you get?

It's the Guy Lee translation, in the Oxford World Classics. To be honest, I asked for this edition specifically because it's a bilingual edition, with the Latin text printed along side the English translation. I can read Latin, I've been teaching myself it for some time now, but I'm still not fluent so I need the translations to help me out.

[Frostball]

I haven't gotten any books yet, but I will be going down with my girlfriend to visit my family about twenty days from now to do a very very late christmas celebration with them. My family is rather straightforward about asking what we all want and getting each other exactly that for christmas, so I can expect to get War and Peace (P&V translation) and the Annotated Ulysses.

[ennison]

One of the worst books I've ever read called The Countries We didn't ever invade ( I really hope that is the wrong title as I do not want to give the prat any advertising at all) by some semi-literate whose favourite phrase is "sort of" and who likes the word "Brits" and "we" believing perhaps that an ineffectual TV humour spices history for the Englishman-in-the-street. One for the charity shop.

[Pierre Menard]

It's the Guy Lee translation, in the Oxford World Classics. To be honest, I asked for this edition specifically because it's a bilingual edition, with the Latin text printed along side the English translation. I can read Latin, I've been teaching myself it for some time now, but I'm still not fluent so I need the translations to help me out.

Oh cool. I came very close to purchasing this exact edition not long ago. I'd be intrigued to hear if you recommend the translation down the line. On a slightly related note, as a speaker of Latin, are there any particular translators of Latin classics that you'd recommend?

[Poetaster]

Oh cool. I came very close to purchasing this exact edition not long ago. I'd be intrigued to hear if you recommend the translation down the line. On a slightly related note, as a speaker of Latin, are there any particular translators of Latin classics that you'd recommend?

I would be more helpful telling you which translations not to get. Latin is a hard language to translate into English verse well.

If you want a good translation of Ovid's Metamorphosis then get the A. D. Melville translation. It is amazing. For The Aeneid, Robert Fagle's translation is the one I use, as it's pretty good. I'm a fan of Fagle's work in general though, but some times he isn't as faithful to the original as I think he could be, it's not really been a problem for me, they read excellently anyway.

If you want to read Virgil's earlier work, though, it will be harder as I've not seen great translations of The Eclogues or The Georgics. Whatever you do, though, do not go with the C. Day Lewis translations of either. Especially with the Eclogues. Guy Lee has done translations of both in bilingual editions (much like his translation of Catullus) and while I don't think Guy Lee captures the eloquence of Virgil's original Latin, he is very accurate. He's a very academic translator, I've found, and I recommend getting them despite what I think are his flaws.

If you are a fan of Horace, there are very few translations of his work collected, and none I think are any good. Many poets use Horace as a way to set down someone else's ideas in their own style (I'm looking at you Alexander Pope and John Dryden) and the few blank verse translations I've found have not been very good for anything. If you want to read Horace then my best advice is to learn Latin. Horace's language is very stylized, and it doesn't really translate well into English. It would be very hard to get right anyway.

I translate Latin poems into English as a hobby too. I'm not a professional translator, but I like to think I'm done some good ones. As far as I know they are pretty close to the original anyway. I've completed the first Eclogue, and Horace 1.11 (the Carpe Diem one); and I'm working on Eclogue 4 now.

[Pierre Menard]

Thanks for the response Poetaster! I like Fagles as well, and I think Fitzgerald is good. I read David Raeburn's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and whilst I quite liked it, I'd really like to check out both Melville's and Rolfe Humphries.

Funnily enough, I was just looking at potential Horace translations on amazon. He's probably the hardest poet I've tried to decide on a translation for. James Michie sounds promising in a poetic sense, as does David Ferry, but I've heard they can be quite loose, whereas the so called more academic ones I found too dry in regards to the language. I'm leaning towards the anthology of Horace's work edited by J.D. McClatchy, that has translations from 20-30 modern poets. Not too sure if you're familiar with it.

But alas, maybe I will have to learn the distinguished language myself.

[Poetaster]

Thanks for the response Poetaster! I like Fagles as well, and I think Fitzgerald is good. I read David Raeburn's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and whilst I quite liked it, I'd really like to check out both Melville's and Rolfe Humphries.

Funnily enough, I was just looking at potential Horace translations on amazon. He's probably the hardest poet I've tried to decide on a translation for. James Michie sounds promising in a poetic sense, as does David Ferry, but I've heard they can be quite loose, whereas the so called more academic ones I found too dry in regards to the language. I'm leaning towards the anthology of Horace's work edited by J.D. McClatchy, that has translations from 20-30 modern poets. Not too sure if you're familiar with it.

But alas, maybe I will have to learn the distinguished language myself.

I have an ex girlfriend who had the David Raeburn translation of The Metamorphosis and she swore by it, but I can't. That is just personal taste though, I read it about a year before I started learning Latin so I can't comment in it's accuracy. I know it's a popular one.

I'm not familiar with the anthology edited by J.D. McClatchy but it has been recommended to me before. I'll have to check it out. Mostly I know Horace by the original texts, they can easily be found online. David Ferry, though, I forgot about him, thanks for reminding me. His translation of The Eclogues is fantastic - I can recommend that too. He is the closest I've seen to the original. So there is that too. If Ferry's Horace is as good as his Virgil then the world is suddenly a better place.