The OF Blog: Inherited Bookshelf and Portuguese, Italian, and German books

Sunday, December 04, 2011

Inherited Bookshelf and Portuguese, Italian, and German books


Yesterday, I received the bookcase that I inherited from my maternal grandmother (my grandfather built the case) and I moved my Library of America editions (46 so far) there, along with my old and newer Mark Twain editions and the Thomas Ligotti books I've managed to collect.  The other books are placeholders until I decide if I want them to remain there or return to the few stacks I still have.


To fill the void on another bookshelf left by removing the above-mentioned books, I moved several of my foreign language editions over to the vacated bookshelf.  Here is a picture of most of the 26 Portuguese-language books that I currently own, including three excellent books by David Soares that I wish were available in English translation so I could urge others to read them.


I have just over as many Italian language books (29).  Featured in this picture are the six Umberto Eco novels that I have in Italian editions (all of his novels).  Hope to write more reviews of his earlier books to go with the ones I've already written for The Prague Cemetery (the only one of his books I don't yet own in English translation) and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.  Slowly reading Foucault's Pendulum around other works.


Here, among other authors, are my Italian editions of Italo Calvino and Dino Buzzati's works. Plan on reviewing some of these in 2012, either here or elsewhere.


Although my German is too rusty after 15 years of neglect, I've collected 54 German language books, making it the third-most foreign language books I have after Spanish (over 400) and French (around 120).  Here are some of the Goethe and Heine books I have, as well as a three-volume anthology.


Schiller and Kafka, two of my favorite playwrights/writers in any language.  I might devote part of 2012 to relearning German enough to read them without much need of a translation or dictionary.


A smorgasbord (almost the only Swedish I know) of other German writers.  I even have the German edition of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' The Communist Manifesto in there.  The Herman Hesse and Michael Ende books just missed the picture cut, alas.


Here's the German translation of Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, some Hegel and Thomas Mann, a Romanian book, and Romanian, Greek, and Polish translations of some of Jeff VanderMeer's work.  No, I'm not fluent enough to try to read the latter three without assistance, although the Romanian I can puzzle out through knowing the cognates in other Romance languages.

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