I'm actually reading a German novel. It was written by Hermann Hesse, the title: Narziss and Goldmund.
At first I thought it was some kind of story of two gay boys in the Middle Ages, but the book eventually surprised me. I haven't finished it yet, but I can't wait reading it on and on. I'm quite sad, actually, that I'll finish this book in the near future. When I start reading a novel, I absorb in it in a very short time, and then I become the inhabitant of the novelist's world. It is always a sad awakening, when I finish a book.
So, Narziss and Goldmund are close friends, they met in their childhood as students of an abbey school. They found themselves attracted to each other which at first seems to be almost love - not a brotherly one. Narziss helps Goldmund to discover his real self, and as a result G. leaves the abbey and begins his journey to acquire a lot of experiences. During his adventures he finds out that he has artistic qualities and he imagines his final masterpiece moulded from his mother - who left him - and from the Virgin Mary, and which will be named after the first woman, Eve.
During his journey G. is attracted to several women, and he experiences many kinds of love. Once it almost caused his death, because he made love to a baron's mistress, and they caught him, and wanted to hang him. As a miracle, his old friend, Narziss was staying in the same castle, and after recognising G. he made the baron release him. Now I'm with this episode, as they are riding their horses home, back to the abbey. They have started to inquire about the last ten years while they didn't see each other.
I'm really interested in the continuation of the story. I'd like to find out how the two guys' lives are connected, and how will their friendship end.
I think, this novel is similar to other "development novels" like that of Goethe. Goldmund is going deeper and deeper in the human soul, his journey has two directions, one geographically, the other mentally. I like reading about his discoveries which amaze me, and makes me realize how little I know about myself.

I have finished Tartt's novel. I have read it at least five times, and I find it really fascinating each time. Perhaps it's because the book has a certain gloomy atmosphere, or because I like its interpretation of friendship, or simply because Tartt has a very good sense for the psychological side of the act of murder. I enjoy her digging deep into the human mind as I loved Dostoyevskiy's Crime and Punishment. Papen is in a way a Raskolnikov - as once Tartt herself refers to the famous sentence, when Raskolnikov confesses his murder.
"It was I killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them."
And I think the reader is finally left on their own to decide what a murder is. Why does a group of well-educated young people want to commit this deadly sin? It's irreversible, and it is going to hang over their heads forever. The murder of a friend - this is the act which carries on what Raskolnikov began. Papen and his friends - despite their obvious love to each other - push a friend into a ravine. This act stays with them forever, and prevents the protagonist from leading a happy life.
I always feel an attraction towards these kinds of novels which deal with the dark side of the human soul. I love the unsolvable misteries that arise from the unknown depth of the mind. I still wonder about these secrets. It's really a Secret History.

I frequently find it difficult to switch between the languages. I have the same feeling as Richard Papen in The Secret History, when he is wondering about ancient Greek and modern English, and the difference between the thought patterns.
The other day, for example, I recalled one of my dreams, and I wanted to say that pictures from it still haunted me. I was talking in Hungarian, and for an inexplicable reason I couldn't find the proper word for "haunt". I simply felt that there's no notion capable of conveying the same meaning as this word. After a while, with the help of my friends, I found a proper translation, but still I think, having read all those novels, stories in English that are full of ghosts, nightmares, superstitions, "haunt" has a slightly different meaning than "kísért" for me.
Am I niminy-piminy? :)
(A new expression I learnt today.)

- the meaning: (adj): affectedly dainty or refined

What does Donna Tartt say about language?

"The assignment was a two-page essay, in Greek, on any epigram of Callimachus that we chose. I'd done only a page and I started to hurry through the rest in impatient and slightly dishonest fashion, writing out the English and translating word by word. It was something Julian asked us not to do. The value of Greek prose composition, he said was not that it gave one any particular facility in the language that could not be gained as easily by other methods but that if done properly, off the top of one's head, it taught one to think in Greek. One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation. By necessity, I suppose, it is diffult for me to explain in English exactly what I mean. I can only say that an incendium is in its nature entirely different from the feu with which a Frenchman lights his cigarette, and both are very different from the stark, inhuman pur that the Greeks knew, the pur that roared from the towers of Ilion or leapt and screamed on that desolate, windy beach, from the funeral pyre of Patroklos.
Pur: that one word contains for me the secret, the bright, terrible clarity of ancient Greek. How can I make you see it, this strange harsh light which pervades Homer's landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato, an alien light, inarticulable in our common tongue? Our shared language is a language of the intricate, the peculiar, the home of pumpkins and ragamuffins and bodkins and beer, the tongue of Ahab and Falstaff and Mrs. Gamp; and while I find it entirely suitable for reflections such as these, it fails me utterly when I attempt to describe in it what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action multiply from actin, action marching relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from either side to fall into neat step at the rear, in a long straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be inevitable, the only possible end."

"Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God. Language is the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning light as you pluck from a old bookshelf a half-forgotten book of erotic memoirs. Language is the creak on a stair, it's a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, it's the warm, wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl. It's cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot."
Fry: The Subject of Language

What's up in the world of English? What words and phrases can we use to make our language knowledge up-to-date?
What are the translation difficulties or challanges that I like to wonder about?

I've created this blog to share my thoughts on some peculiarities of the English language.
Here is what Fry and Laurie think about LANGUAGE :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHQ2756cyD8