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riotsquirrrl's review
2.0
Uuuuuuuugh. I finally finished this book. After lugging it around since 2002 and taking a full month to get through 300 pages, it can be gotten rid of. I think the only good it had was as a book by my bedside, it made me sleepy after only reading a few pages.
I always feel like I should like collections of short stories more than I actually do. I seem to forget, over and over again, that I struggle with getting interested in the next story after having finished the last. This collection certainly didn't help with that problem. While Bishop did many of the translations, he did not do all of them. Many of the translations came from 19th century sources, for reasons of copyright I presume. The only thing worse than trying to poke through Renaissance English is to poke through Victorian translations of works into pseudo-Renaissance English. This gets borne out by the last two stories which are from England which are far easier to read than the proceeding stories in translation. Of course the modernization of spelling and punctuation helps a great deal, but voices of the English writers were much more clear than the voices from the tales from Spain, France, Germany, and Italy.
Add to that the sheer number of tales filled with casual sexism towards women and I really did not enjoy much of this at all.
Good riddance.
I always feel like I should like collections of short stories more than I actually do. I seem to forget, over and over again, that I struggle with getting interested in the next story after having finished the last. This collection certainly didn't help with that problem. While Bishop did many of the translations, he did not do all of them. Many of the translations came from 19th century sources, for reasons of copyright I presume. The only thing worse than trying to poke through Renaissance English is to poke through Victorian translations of works into pseudo-Renaissance English. This gets borne out by the last two stories which are from England which are far easier to read than the proceeding stories in translation. Of course the modernization of spelling and punctuation helps a great deal, but voices of the English writers were much more clear than the voices from the tales from Spain, France, Germany, and Italy.
Add to that the sheer number of tales filled with casual sexism towards women and I really did not enjoy much of this at all.
Good riddance.
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