Originally Posted by
Verdaguer
I find those canons great, even when I always criticize them all. The first thing I always do, though, is looking at the source. If it's made by an English reader, I know that there are going to be more English-language authors than there should be, but it is still interesting to see those writers he has considered better and what authors he's included from other cultures. Same thing when the source is not English. In the end, it is better to know what authors each culture considers canonical and then judge by oneself if they're worth figuring in an 'international list'.
Translations and publicity play a big role in the decisions. The latter being also a political tool. For instance, my vibrant Catalan literature is ignored by most good readers usually because of simple ignorance of its existence given the lack of political statehood. To a point that masterpieces like Tirant lo Blanch, regarded by those who read it and studied it as the best fifteenth-century novel, and which should figure in most canons of the big European novels, is usually ignored or forgotten, left out even by Bloom. The same could likely be said about a few masterpieces from some other middle-sized languages/literatures.
In honour to Bloom's canon, though, I congratulate him for having included six modern Catalan authors, even if four of them were poets. But I can't help resting surprised by the total absence of Catalan or Occitan authors for the Middle Ages.
