The 305 Greatest Books - #184: The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler

The next up on my reading of the 305 greatest books is The Decline of the West by Oscar Spengler. The book can be found on the Sybervision Book List.

Spoiler warning: I hated everything about this book. Reading this book has been several years in the waiting. It is one of the last two books I had on the original 100 Greatest Books list I started, the Sybervision Book List (a list from a now defunct company). The book was an attempt at cataloguing the progression of history up to the 1920's when the book was written from a rather Euro-centric point of view, specifically a German point of view. However my problems with this book are almost immediate. I don't know if it was the particular translation, which also was atrocious, or the original text, however I feel it was a mixture of both. This translation, which seems to be the one most commonly around, was by Charles Francis Atkinson also from the 1920's. The text is almost incomprehensible at times. The ideas the author was trying to get across got lost more often than they were found and frequently the author (I assume it was the author) would leave words in their original Greek or other language, of which the reader couldn't even begin to decipher. My favorite parts though (sarcasm) were when the translator felt the need to constantly add his two cents in to the text. Like, shut up, this isn't your book. The topics are also widely all over the place. He jumps around the timeline across centuries within sentences of each other and fails to use the "BC" or "AD" identifier on times more often than not. And a lot of his concepts are downright just wrong. He has an entire chapter about how Darwin was just wrong and although he doesn't mention his alternative, it seems he is in favor of Lamarck but his reasoning is inconsistent. The book reads much like this was a literary essay or textbook where the author was just given access to a series of Encyclopedias, to the point that on nearly every page the translator cites an encyclopedia entry. It's dull, difficult to follow, and at many times it is just inaccurate. However, there were some light points. I did find some of his information intriguing, when I could decipher the text. I appreciated the agnostic approach to religion within the text. And he appeared to have some insight into the evolution of Germany at the time, which he was opposed to. His overall point was the Europe at this time was the pinnacle of society, however it had become stagnated since the Middle Ages in many cases and was slowly going to be overun by Asian society and ideals. So overall, it was terrible. I honestly don't understand how anyone could praise this work, although an abridged version might be much easier to follow and if one only sticks to Volume 1. Then maybe?

The 305 Greatest Books - #183: The Gypsy Ballads by Federico García Lorca

The next up on my reading of the 305 greatest books is The Gypsy Ballads by Federico Garcia Lorca. The book can be found on the Norwegian Book List. 

Comprising 18 poems, each about 2 pages in length, The Gypsy Ballads, is by far one of the shortest works on this list. And since it is so short it is hard for me to properly do it justice. That, and I am no expert in poetry. Also, while I feel the translator did his utmost best to translate these poems into English to put across the same feeling as they did in their original Spanish, there is something inherently lost when you move from one language to another in any form of literature, most of all poetry, which relies not only on the words choices of the authors but also the cadence of the lines, and even how the words look on the page. All that being said I rather enjoyed this short work. Since it was so short I wanted to take my time and absorb each of the works in their own right and slowly analyze of the metaphors that were being used. While a poetry expert would be able to extract far more than I ever could, I did enjoy the poems as they were presented to me. The introduction in my edition helped me to get into the mindset required to understand most of the work and even rather gather information about a lot of the metaphors presented. While some of the poems were rather gruesome, especially towards the end, they were written in order to shock the reader purposefully to the atrocities being committed against the gypsy people. Other of the poems were sweet and soothing to read. His poetry formats also bounced around with some being more free verse while other rhyming. Overall, even though it was short, I also rather enjoyed it.