with a roar of noise and a glory of daylight

[amphibimations]

I have been reading more arthurian stories but the thing i’m most obsessed with is Perceval by Chrétien de Troyes.

Perceval is like…. what if you had a medieval knight but he was a stupid teenager with ADHD who is also a mary sue that can kill everyone in a single hit and is the best at being a knight with zero training. He gets scared of the sounds of metal armor and thinks its demons coming after him. He doesn’t know his own name until like 3,000 lines into the poem and even then he’s just guessing what his name is and somehow gets it right. He seems to love his mom and always talks about her but he also saw her faint one time and was just like ‘oh well, that’s probably fine. I’m leaving.’ ..???????

Ive only seen like 5 posts on tumblr about perceval i need everyone to read perceval i am begging you please please please please please please please please please plea-

Online english translation (rhyming): https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/DeTroyesPercevalPartI.php

Online pdf of english translation (non-rhyming): https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/1073652/mod_resource/content/1/Chrétien%20de%20TROYES%2C%20Perceval%2C%20The%20story%20of%20the%20grail%3B%20Raffel.pdf

[reemillustrated]

snoopy reads the brothers karamazov!

[tossawary]

I'm not well-versed in modern retellings of "Pride and Prejudice" but now I'm curious if there's a single one of them that has made Darcy into a single father.

A shocking fraction of "P&P inspired" stories / character dynamics that I've seen seem to 1) make Darcy into an openly counter-cultural figure (a "bad boy"???) instead of a stiff dad friend type, as though basically all of Austen's male love interests aren't Mr. Responsible (she really said, "RAKES ARE ALL PREDATORY ASSHOLES!!!"), 2) leave out both the responsibilities to young Georgiana and Pemberly as crucial elements basically completely. Darcy is attractive to Elizabeth in part because he's a responsible family man who adores his younger sister, and who is capable of recognizing problems (including within himself and his relationships!) and repairing them with words and action. He makes her want to do the same!

The idea of removing family and professional responsibility from Darcy as a character boggles my mind. This man's world revolves around his commitments to family and friends. Any P&P "retelling" that completely removes the element of Georgiana (in a queerer adaption, Darcy could have a younger trans brother or something! You CAN be creative with Georgie here) is probably wildly missing the core themes of Austen's novel. He's a BIG BROTHER! He was made a FATHER FIGURE very young! It's thematically coherent to adapt this man into a GIRL DAD!!!

[hamletofficial]

Beloved Al-Rassan, the thought came to him in that moment, sharp and unexpected as a blade from beneath a friend's cloak, shall I live to shape your elegy as well?

— Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan.

[hamletofficial]

What ought a man honorably to do? To aspire towards? Was it the stillness of that pool—dreamed of, and written about—where only the one beast dared stalk from the dark trees to drink in the moonlight and under the stars? That stillness, that single image, was the touchstone of verse for him. A place out of the wind, for once, where the noise of the world and all the brilliant color—the noise and color he still loved!—might recede and a deceptively simple art be conjured forth.

— Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan.

[hamletofficial]

"What I think," said his chancellor, "if you will allow me to pursue a poet's conceit and imagine men as bodies in the heavens, is that we have the two most brilliant comets in the sky here in Ragosa this spring." Badir turned back to look at him. After a moment, he smiled. "And where would you put yourself, old friend, in such a glittering firmament?" And now the chancellor, too, smiled. "That is easy, in truth. I am a moon at your side, my good lord."

— Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan.

[hamletofficial]

Jehane was learning to accept that people besides her mother and father might love her, and do certain things because of that. Another hard lesson, oddly enough. She had not been beautiful or particularly endearing as a child; contrary and provocative were closer to truth. Such people didn't discover young how to deal with being loved, she thought. They didn't get enough practice.

— Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan.

[hamletofficial]

They'd summoned her to the barracks one night to attend to Ziri. He'd appeared deathly ill when she first saw him: white-faced, vomiting convulsively. It had only been wine, though. Rodrigo's men had taken him to a tavern for the first time. She'd chided them angrily for that, and they'd allowed her to do so, but in truth, Jehane knew they were initiating him into a life that offered so much more than the one he would have had in Orvilla. Would it be a better fate, a happier one? How could a mortal answer that? You touched people's lives, glancingly, and those lives changed forever. That was a hard thing to deal with sometimes.

— Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan.

[hamletofficial]

He had been born and raised on a farm in the far north. For him, a year before, Esteren in Valledo had been fearfully imposing. Esteren, he now understood, was a village. King Badir's Ragosa was one of the great cities of Al-Rassan. He had never been in a place where so many people lived and went about their business, and yet, amid the bustle and chaos, the swirling movements, the layers of sound, somehow still a sense of grace hovered—a stringed instrument heard in an archway, a splashing fountain half-glimpsed beyond the flowers of screening trees.

— Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan.

[hamletofficial]

Twice now, then. Twice in fifteen years he had murdered the most powerful monarch in the land. A khalif and a king. I am increasingly unlikely to be best remembered, ibn Khairan decided ruefully, entering his home, for my poetry.

— Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan.

[hamletofficial]

Behind her, to the west, Alvar saw the white moon low in the sky, as if resting above the long sweep of the plain. It was a strange moment for him; looking back, after, he would say that he grew older during the course of that long night by Fezana, that the doors and windows of an uncomplicated life were opened and the shadowed complexity of things was first made known to him. Not the answers, of course, just the difficulty of the questions.

— Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan.

[pityroad]

— Holes, Eileen Myles, from ‘I Must Be Living Twice, New & Selected Poems 1975-2014’

[hamletofficial]

"How do you know our language?" "Soldiers tend to learn bits of many languages." "Not that well, and not Kindath. How do you know it?" "I fell in love once, a long time ago. Best way to learn a language, actually."

— Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan.

[hamletofficial]

After somehow coping with the disastrous incident at the very beginning of their ride south, Alvar had been finding the journey the most exhilarating time of his life. This did not come as a surprise; he had nourished dreams of this for years, and reality doesn't invariably shatter a young man's dreams. Not immediately, at any rate.

— Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan.

[hamletofficial]

A different life, if she hadn't gone. Less wind, less rain. Perhaps none of the visions offered those who stand in the high, windy places of the world.

— Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan.

[softly-and-suddenly]

Half of the chapters in The Name of the Rose are like “In which Adso and William get up to Indiana Jones-style hijinks in the torture matrix library and someone gets murdered in an insane fashion” and the other half are “In which the monks debate whether Jesus ever shaved his legs for twenty pages straight”

[hamletofficial]

Thinking such thoughts, ibn Khairan walked noiselessly through the Garden of Oranges and, passing through the horseshoe arch, into the Almond Garden and then, beneath another arch, into the Cypress Garden with its one tall, perfect tree reflected in three pools. Each garden was smaller than the one before, each heartbreaking in its loveliness. The Al-Fontina, a poet once had said, had been built to break the heart.

— Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan.