Jonathan Swift
Had Swift known GR he would probably have included “reviewers” in the above sentence, This thought warns me against continuing any further with my review,
But the Travels ofGullible Gulliverhave made me laugh like no other book for a long time.
And I want to share this,
The introduction in my edition by Michael Foot was almost as funny, For Foot surveys the history of the reaction to Swifts book, from its immediate huge success and popularity during the Enlightenment to the deprecating opinion shared by many, but not all John Keats was one of the exceptions, in puritanical Victorian times.
They were affronted by the shameful indecency their own minds projected onto Swifts lines,
Some of the quotes from Victorian responses made me laugh as heartily as Swifts words,
His rehabilitation started during WW, beginning with a lecture in Cambridge in, Gullivers attacks on war and the idiocies of nationalism would have met welcoming ears in that university hall.
Some rejection still lingered for a while and surprisingly both George Orwell and Aldous Huxley were highly critical of Swift.
Nowadays, many aspects of this book appeal strongly to our more cynical and detached age, What we have now is filtered by the Disney Cartoons and The Economist has chosen Gulliver as the title to its Travel Section.
And of course, the company Yahoo also got its name from the most detestable of Swifts characters.
As everyone knows this is a book about travelling, The popularity of two of its four parts and their easy refashioning into tales for children disguise the fact that the book was written as a parody of the then prevailing travel writing.
If for us Travel now means consumption, then it still meant discovery, But in all discoveries there is some degree of presumptuousness, And this is what bothered Swift,
But this book is a journey in itself: Travel into Acerbity, Each part becomes more acidic and sour than the previous one, And if the Victorians found it indecent we have to admit that there is a fair amount of stripping in this book, but not of clothes.
Swift is stripping human nature, For apart from the hilarious and highly creative stories, the sum of reflections on the relativity of some of our beliefs, which we hold as absolute, constitutes a fully developed treatise on us.
The Fantastic and Utopian character is disguised by Swift's framing with exact dates each of the four trips.
Gulliver sets off on theth of Mayand returns from his final trip on theth of December.
May be it was this kind of specificity that made one of Swifts contemporaries go and have a look at his Atlas to check where Lilliput was.
And another adamantly denied that the whole thing could be true!!
Apart from children, some mathematicians have also been delighted by Gullivers adventures sitelinkdemonstrable proof.
The third trip, to the Land of Laputa some knowledge of Spanish helps in understanding this title is an amusing diatribe against mathematicians and academics.
A good reader of Swift must be willing to embrace selfparody,
The fourth and final trip is the most controversial one, since it is a direct blow at the arrogance of human nature.
And yet, this part is an excellent exposition of Swifts thinking and his deep aversion of brutality and despotism.
Apart from Swifts exuberant imagination, I have greatly enjoyed his language, In spite of the irony and satire, his writing reads as coming directly from the pen of Mister Common Sense.
Swift wrote in a limpid form, keeping a perfect pace that accompanied an impeccable stream of clear thinking.
Swift was known for his conviction on the appropriate use of language:
And to make sure of this, he would read aloud to his servants to confirm that his text would be understood.
He kept his humour until the end, and this is what he wrote for his own epitaph.
I close this book feeling a great respect for the smart, polite Houyhnhnms who enjoy a level of wisdom and common sense that should be the envy of all of us.
"This is a giant rip off of Honey I Shrunk the Kids and Honey I Blew up the Kid.
" This is a line from Paul Bryant's review,which made me smile,
Gulliver's Travels works equally well as a biting satire on the human condition,as a children's story,a morality play,and for that matter as the source for some fun movie adaptations.
First read in my childhood as an Urdu translation,later as a textbook and finally went through the whole thing by choice.
The first two voyages to Liliput and Brobdingnag are a lot of fun, After that,the two remaining voyages to Laputa and the land of the yahoos,though laced with deep meaning are not as memorable.
An interesting series of adventures,or rather misadventures, It entertains as well as vexes the reader, Gulliver's travels draw upon at least five traditions of world literature, some of them active from classical times to the present: the literal travel account, realistic fiction, utopian fiction, symbolism, and the fantastic voyage.
Interestingly, the use of fantasy for a serious statement, virtually eliminated by two centuries fo emphasis on realism, is reappearing in our own day.
However, it has taken a wrong turn now, Instead of making a statement in a positive way most of the authors are doing it in a negative way.
There are many here among us
Who think that life is but a joke,
Bob Dylan
When Gulliver first came to the light of day in the climate of a more genteel, and historically Georgian reader than those who read Pilgrim's Progress in the previous century, echoes of its hero, Christian, must have resounded through his or her mind!
This fantasy has haunted my steps and dogged my days all my life.
It represents a Pilgrim's Progress for me, too as well as for Dean Swift, being an Anglican priest through the insalubriously and most lugubriously harrowing paysage moralisé that was my, and Swift's life.
But placed in historical context its a harangue against religious narrowmindedness, liberalism, and intellectual freedom, A mixed kettle of fish!
Nevertheless, the politely Houyhnimic, and thus archly knowing PilosopherKings of Georgian Britain judged Swift to be rather odd, as their modern counterparts, too, judged me.
For we were both bipolar,
Just outta bounds, Beyond simple decency. A Stranger to intellectual progress, Why
You see, when a kid first wakes up and chooses ethical behaviour, he often sees himself as catapulted into a Land of Liliputians.
If he rebels, he is blacklisted by their establishment, tied to the ground with tiny inextricably knotted threads while he sleeps, and roundly excoriated by their tiny, tinnily middleclass voices.
In short, he is just too proud by a very unhealthy margin, In my case, to make matters worse, I just chuckled at them, Hence my bipolarity. I needed an outlet!
If he still is not heeled, he will then be courted and thus grossed out by the humunguously odorific Brobdingnagians.
Thats his second temptation, and it is seldom met with diffidence, Gulliver, though, reacts with panic, As did I.
If still unrepentant and selfwilled, his next stop will be Laputia and its
surrounding archipilago of islands.
For he must at least learn humility,
There he will be pegged as a danger both to himself and polite society, when he continues to value himself over others.
Refusing to recant, his final stop is the Isle of enervately intellectual Houyhmnms, Who disdain him. And rightly so, for they dwarf him in their paradoxical intelligence,
He will be be from thenceforth exiled into ignominy up crap creek without a paddle: he is condemned to SWIM back to Ireland.
Thank heaven, then, for the small mercy a canoe he is then afforded!
And like Gulliver, crushed, I was finally humble.
Oh, and it's not a fantasy,
Its the enforced progress of a halfbaked pilgrim, who STILL only Regresses until he learned, That was me.
John Bunyan woulda just sighed and said thats LIFE for us Christians, as we grow in faith, pride intact at first.
If we want to be saved, we must swallow that pride, Holus bolus.
We must not live a life that is a Slaughterhouse Five
For you MAY be saved and maybe not, if you haven't survived the trial.
For just like Billy Pilgrim, we still have a chronically Enlarged Ego that has simply gotta go:
By letting the Lord “trample out His wine press where His Grapes of Wrath are stored.
” And believe me, we all deserve it, But how.
And so we reach Heaven,
The end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive at the place we started
And know the place for the first time.
bibliotecaafectivă
Cine mai citește astăzi cartea lui Jonathan Swift Cine știe că yahoo.
mail pe carel folosim toți trimite chiar la acest minunat roman Voi comenta doar un episod foarte amuzant.
În Călătoriile lui Gulliver III:, naratorul vizitează marea academie din Lagado, vede la lucru, întro aulă, maşinăria lui Raymundus Lullus.
Dar marea academie are o secţiune de savanţi filologi, care se dedică edificării unui limbaj universal, accesibil oricărei ființe din univers.
Cum arată noul limbaj Iată un prim proiect, Cuvintele polisilabice sînt reduse la unităţi lexicale, formate dintro singură silabă, Sînt eliminate verbele, adjectivele, participiile, Rămîn doar substantivele, numele monosilabice, Oamenii vor discuta între ei doar prin silabe: pa, vu, ga, di, ke, zo, Din fericire, savanții lui Swift nu se mulțumesc doar cu atît, Limba perfectă se va dispensa și de silabe, Au sesizat un proiect nou,
Acum, cuvintele sunt desfiinţate complet, Dacă substantivele desemnează întotdeauna lucruri şi numai lucruri, e mai potrivit să aduci lucrurile însele, cînd vrei să exprimi ceva.
Limba este cu adevărat universală, poate fi pricepută de oricine, discutăm arătînd lucruri și numai lucruri.
Omul nu mai scoate sunete, nuși mișcă buzele, arată cu degetul, Avantajul acestui limbaj este, în opinia academicienilor lui Jonathan Swift, protejarea gîtlejului şi plămînilor, Rostirea înverșunată de propoziții duce la coroziunea gîtlejului și la micşorarea volumul plămînilor.
E mai bine să ţii gura închisă: te ferești în acest chip și de viruși, rămîi perfect sănătos pînă la moarte.
Dar e cu putință oare să cuvîntăm cu lucruri şi numai cu lucruri Nam mai rosti propoziţia Mărul e roşu”.
Am prezenta pur şi simplu un măr roşu, Dacă am avea nevoie de lumină, am arăta iasca, amnarul, lampa cu fitil muiat în petrol, Dacă am dori să elogiem dulcele, am oferi celuilalt o stafidă, o fărîmă de zahăr candel brun, un sărut.
Nimic mai simplu, nu.
Swiftwrites towards the end of his book:
, . . an author perfectly blameless, against whom the tribe of answerers, considerers, observers, reflecters, detecters, remarkers, will never be able to find matter for exercising their talents.
Had Swift known GR he would probably have included “reviewers” in the above sentence, This thought warns me against continuing any further with my review,
But the Travels of
And I want to share this,
The introduction in my edition by Michael Foot was almost as funny, For Foot surveys the history of the reaction to Swifts book, from its immediate huge success and popularity during the Enlightenment to the deprecating opinion shared by many, but not all John Keats was one of the exceptions, in puritanical Victorian times.
They were affronted by the shameful indecency their own minds projected onto Swifts lines,
Some of the quotes from Victorian responses made me laugh as heartily as Swifts words,
. . a monster, gibbering shrieks and gnashing imprecations against mankind tearing down all shreds of modesty, past all sense of manliness and shame filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene.
His rehabilitation started during WW, beginning with a lecture in Cambridge in, Gullivers attacks on war and the idiocies of nationalism would have met welcoming ears in that university hall.
Some rejection still lingered for a while and surprisingly both George Orwell and Aldous Huxley were highly critical of Swift.
Nowadays, many aspects of this book appeal strongly to our more cynical and detached age, What we have now is filtered by the Disney Cartoons and The Economist has chosen Gulliver as the title to its Travel Section.
And of course, the company Yahoo also got its name from the most detestable of Swifts characters.
As everyone knows this is a book about travelling, The popularity of two of its four parts and their easy refashioning into tales for children disguise the fact that the book was written as a parody of the then prevailing travel writing.
If for us Travel now means consumption, then it still meant discovery, But in all discoveries there is some degree of presumptuousness, And this is what bothered Swift,
But this book is a journey in itself: Travel into Acerbity, Each part becomes more acidic and sour than the previous one, And if the Victorians found it indecent we have to admit that there is a fair amount of stripping in this book, but not of clothes.
Swift is stripping human nature, For apart from the hilarious and highly creative stories, the sum of reflections on the relativity of some of our beliefs, which we hold as absolute, constitutes a fully developed treatise on us.
The Fantastic and Utopian character is disguised by Swift's framing with exact dates each of the four trips.
Gulliver sets off on theth of Mayand returns from his final trip on theth of December.
May be it was this kind of specificity that made one of Swifts contemporaries go and have a look at his Atlas to check where Lilliput was.
And another adamantly denied that the whole thing could be true!!
Apart from children, some mathematicians have also been delighted by Gullivers adventures sitelinkdemonstrable proof.
The third trip, to the Land of Laputa some knowledge of Spanish helps in understanding this title is an amusing diatribe against mathematicians and academics.
A good reader of Swift must be willing to embrace selfparody,
The fourth and final trip is the most controversial one, since it is a direct blow at the arrogance of human nature.
And yet, this part is an excellent exposition of Swifts thinking and his deep aversion of brutality and despotism.
Apart from Swifts exuberant imagination, I have greatly enjoyed his language, In spite of the irony and satire, his writing reads as coming directly from the pen of Mister Common Sense.
Swift wrote in a limpid form, keeping a perfect pace that accompanied an impeccable stream of clear thinking.
Swift was known for his conviction on the appropriate use of language:
That the use of speech was to make us understand one another, and to receive information of facts now if any one said the thing which was not, these ends were defeated.
And to make sure of this, he would read aloud to his servants to confirm that his text would be understood.
He kept his humour until the end, and this is what he wrote for his own epitaph.
He gave the little wealth he had,
To build a House for Fools and Mad.
And shewd by one Satyric Touch,
No Nation needed it so much,
I close this book feeling a great respect for the smart, polite Houyhnhnms who enjoy a level of wisdom and common sense that should be the envy of all of us.
"This is a giant rip off of Honey I Shrunk the Kids and Honey I Blew up the Kid.
" This is a line from Paul Bryant's review,which made me smile,
Gulliver's Travels works equally well as a biting satire on the human condition,as a children's story,a morality play,and for that matter as the source for some fun movie adaptations.
First read in my childhood as an Urdu translation,later as a textbook and finally went through the whole thing by choice.
The first two voyages to Liliput and Brobdingnag are a lot of fun, After that,the two remaining voyages to Laputa and the land of the yahoos,though laced with deep meaning are not as memorable.
An interesting series of adventures,or rather misadventures, It entertains as well as vexes the reader, Gulliver's travels draw upon at least five traditions of world literature, some of them active from classical times to the present: the literal travel account, realistic fiction, utopian fiction, symbolism, and the fantastic voyage.
Interestingly, the use of fantasy for a serious statement, virtually eliminated by two centuries fo emphasis on realism, is reappearing in our own day.
However, it has taken a wrong turn now, Instead of making a statement in a positive way most of the authors are doing it in a negative way.
There are many here among us
Who think that life is but a joke,
Bob Dylan
When Gulliver first came to the light of day in the climate of a more genteel, and historically Georgian reader than those who read Pilgrim's Progress in the previous century, echoes of its hero, Christian, must have resounded through his or her mind!
This fantasy has haunted my steps and dogged my days all my life.
It represents a Pilgrim's Progress for me, too as well as for Dean Swift, being an Anglican priest through the insalubriously and most lugubriously harrowing paysage moralisé that was my, and Swift's life.
But placed in historical context its a harangue against religious narrowmindedness, liberalism, and intellectual freedom, A mixed kettle of fish!
Nevertheless, the politely Houyhnimic, and thus archly knowing PilosopherKings of Georgian Britain judged Swift to be rather odd, as their modern counterparts, too, judged me.
For we were both bipolar,
Just outta bounds, Beyond simple decency. A Stranger to intellectual progress, Why
You see, when a kid first wakes up and chooses ethical behaviour, he often sees himself as catapulted into a Land of Liliputians.
If he rebels, he is blacklisted by their establishment, tied to the ground with tiny inextricably knotted threads while he sleeps, and roundly excoriated by their tiny, tinnily middleclass voices.
In short, he is just too proud by a very unhealthy margin, In my case, to make matters worse, I just chuckled at them, Hence my bipolarity. I needed an outlet!
If he still is not heeled, he will then be courted and thus grossed out by the humunguously odorific Brobdingnagians.
Thats his second temptation, and it is seldom met with diffidence, Gulliver, though, reacts with panic, As did I.
If still unrepentant and selfwilled, his next stop will be Laputia and its
surrounding archipilago of islands.
For he must at least learn humility,
There he will be pegged as a danger both to himself and polite society, when he continues to value himself over others.
Refusing to recant, his final stop is the Isle of enervately intellectual Houyhmnms, Who disdain him. And rightly so, for they dwarf him in their paradoxical intelligence,
He will be be from thenceforth exiled into ignominy up crap creek without a paddle: he is condemned to SWIM back to Ireland.
Thank heaven, then, for the small mercy a canoe he is then afforded!
And like Gulliver, crushed, I was finally humble.
Oh, and it's not a fantasy,
Its the enforced progress of a halfbaked pilgrim, who STILL only Regresses until he learned, That was me.
John Bunyan woulda just sighed and said thats LIFE for us Christians, as we grow in faith, pride intact at first.
If we want to be saved, we must swallow that pride, Holus bolus.
We must not live a life that is a Slaughterhouse Five
For you MAY be saved and maybe not, if you haven't survived the trial.
For just like Billy Pilgrim, we still have a chronically Enlarged Ego that has simply gotta go:
By letting the Lord “trample out His wine press where His Grapes of Wrath are stored.
” And believe me, we all deserve it, But how.
And so we reach Heaven,
The end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive at the place we started
And know the place for the first time.
bibliotecaafectivă
Cine mai citește astăzi cartea lui Jonathan Swift Cine știe că yahoo.
mail pe carel folosim toți trimite chiar la acest minunat roman Voi comenta doar un episod foarte amuzant.
În Călătoriile lui Gulliver III:, naratorul vizitează marea academie din Lagado, vede la lucru, întro aulă, maşinăria lui Raymundus Lullus.
Dar marea academie are o secţiune de savanţi filologi, care se dedică edificării unui limbaj universal, accesibil oricărei ființe din univers.
Cum arată noul limbaj Iată un prim proiect, Cuvintele polisilabice sînt reduse la unităţi lexicale, formate dintro singură silabă, Sînt eliminate verbele, adjectivele, participiile, Rămîn doar substantivele, numele monosilabice, Oamenii vor discuta între ei doar prin silabe: pa, vu, ga, di, ke, zo, Din fericire, savanții lui Swift nu se mulțumesc doar cu atît, Limba perfectă se va dispensa și de silabe, Au sesizat un proiect nou,
Acum, cuvintele sunt desfiinţate complet, Dacă substantivele desemnează întotdeauna lucruri şi numai lucruri, e mai potrivit să aduci lucrurile însele, cînd vrei să exprimi ceva.
Limba este cu adevărat universală, poate fi pricepută de oricine, discutăm arătînd lucruri și numai lucruri.
Omul nu mai scoate sunete, nuși mișcă buzele, arată cu degetul, Avantajul acestui limbaj este, în opinia academicienilor lui Jonathan Swift, protejarea gîtlejului şi plămînilor, Rostirea înverșunată de propoziții duce la coroziunea gîtlejului și la micşorarea volumul plămînilor.
E mai bine să ţii gura închisă: te ferești în acest chip și de viruși, rămîi perfect sănătos pînă la moarte.
Dar e cu putință oare să cuvîntăm cu lucruri şi numai cu lucruri Nam mai rosti propoziţia Mărul e roşu”.
Am prezenta pur şi simplu un măr roşu, Dacă am avea nevoie de lumină, am arăta iasca, amnarul, lampa cu fitil muiat în petrol, Dacă am dori să elogiem dulcele, am oferi celuilalt o stafidă, o fărîmă de zahăr candel brun, un sărut.
Nimic mai simplu, nu.