#vagueness

[dougielombax]

Y’all fuckers really ought to read another book.

I mean come on!

If y’all can move on as quickly as you rightfully did from that fucking piece of shit slag and actual rapist Neil Gaiman, then what’s your excuse?

Damn your nostalgia.

[tonreihe]

“It is easy to argue that Japanese is a hopelessly vague language from which it is impossible to translate, but the argument usually comes down to an unreal notion of what even the best translator can accomplish. No two languages make quite the same distinctions, and every translation is a makeshift insofar as this is true.

“It is undeniable, however, that the refusal of the Japanese language to make distinctions often seems scandalous, and the problems one faces in trying to make Japanese literature understandable in translation grows accordingly. Tanizaki takes the position, in an illuminating study of literary style called A Composition Reader, that it is the duty of the Japanese writer to know the genius of his language and to accommodate himself to it: if Japanese is vague, its vagueness must be made a virtue of.

“Tanizaki puts himself in a line of stylists stemming from The Tale of Genji, stylists who aim at a dreamy, floating prose. They are suspicious of too vivid a choice of words, too clear a view, too conspicuous a transition from one figure or idea to another. They prefer their prose to be misty, to suggest more than it says. They are, Tanizaki says, pure Japanese stylists, in opposition to Chinese-influenced writers who aim at conciseness and precision. One is left to conclude that the latter, who rather dominate the field today, are trying to do something that can only result in violence to the basic nature of the Japanese language.”

—Edward G. Seidensticker, in the introduction to his translation of Junichiro Tanizaki’s Some Prefer Nettles

[thirdity]

What is frequently appreciated in many so-called symbols is exactly their vagueness, their openness, their fruitful ineffectiveness to express a “final” meaning, so that with symbols and by symbols one indicates what is always beyond one's reach.

Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

[starryvomit]

the vague posting is prolly never abt u but hey, if the shoe fits 🪞

[philosophybits]

Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.

Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia

[soulmaking]

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff)

[crustaceansingles]

Awfully nebulous.