How do I get into this? I have to look up plant names, 19th century fields/landscape...

i had to download a dictionary app on my phone to get through it, and i feel better off for it. trying to learn spanish now too

You dont need to know the referent of every fucking plant name jesus christ. That will completely kill the beauty and vocal music of reading this book

close

leftists, everyone.

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I think he is the good guy, though. Fuck meat bags

the spanish bits are forced and suck, though.
t. mexican
there's a pdf online where you can see the translations of each spanish line. you don't have to learn a language for it lol

>being this much of a pleb
Not understanding the language is part of the alienness of the setting, and you can figure out the more important parts by logic.

Ah, blood meridian, monsieur? that novel is the sark and chaparral of literature, the filament whereon rode the remuda of highbrow, corraled out of some destitute hacienda upon the arroya, quirting and splurting with main and with pyrolatrous coagulate of lobated grandiloquence. our eyes rode over the pages, monsieur, of that slatribed azotea like argonauts of suttee, juzgados of swole, bights and systoles of walleyed and tyrolean and carbolic and tectite and scurvid and querent and creosote and scapular malpais and shellalagh. we scalped, monsieur, the gantlet of its esker and led our naked bodies into the rebozos of its mennonite and siliceous fauna, wallowing in the jasper and the carnelian like archimandrites, teamsters, combers of cassinette scoria, centroids of holothurian chancre, with pizzles of enfiladed indigo panic grass in the saltbush of our vigas, true commodores of the written page, rebuses, monsieur, we were the mygale spiders too and the devonian and debouched pulque that settled on the frizzen studebakers, listening the wolves howling in the desert while we saw the judge rise out of a thicket of corbelled arches, whinstone, cairn, cholla, lemurs, femurs, leantos, moonblanched nacre, uncottered fistulas of groaning osnaburg and kelp, isomers of fluepipe and halms awap of griddle, guisado, pelancillo.

It's not that alien to me, though. I live in Mexico and I'm sort of bilingual. Still, there are many mistakes in the Spanish bits or things that feel awkward.

Look, Timmy, it's a brainlet!

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Are they justified mistakes (a gringo speaking it) or did McCarthy himself fuck it up?

We don't have Mexican food in my country and for a long time I thought a taco was a kind of cutlery

1/2
About the Spanish parts and the English parts: It’s comical how abyssmally different they are from one another. It’s almost like they’re from different authors. Yes, he may throw in the occasional hacienda or arroyo or the dozens of plazas and presidios or whatever it is they were dealing with at the moment to provide some local flavor to the reader but his actual Spanish dialogue is cartoonish at best. Cardboard-like. It barely gets the job done. Being a Mexican reader, his attempt for exotic enchantment doesn’t work on me. It’s not that the dialogue itself is incorrect, it’s technically correct, but it feels awkward and clunky and it’s delivered with such awkwardness and clunkiness. An American reader, of course, will just take it for granted or for mumbo jumbo and move on.
And then in the part where the juggler is telling them their fortune by the campfire one of the cards that appears is The Fool, which McCarthy makes his Mexican juggler say it was “El Tonto”. But “El Tonto” is Spanish for “the idiot”, “the dumb one”, or even “the silly one”. The correct name for that tarot card is “El Loco” (“the madman”), this is how it’s known. And since tarot cards in Spanish take their names directly from the French deck, there’s no way one would translate Le Mat (also known as Le Fou) as “El Tonto” other than mistranslating from the English “The Fool”, also meaning “dumb”, which is exactly what McCarthy did. You may say “Well, maybe the showmen family found an English tarot deck and did the translation themselves!”, but besides being improbable, that’d be quite a cheap and easy answer, wouldn’t it? I mean, they’re supposedly professionals at what they do (at lest they give me that vibe). Now, Albert Erskine, the man who was McCarthy’s editor at that point, clearly was sleeping in his laurels. It may just be the errors in my edition (Vintage International) but it seems like everytime he saw a Spanish word containing the letter N he had the impulsiveness to turn it into an Ñ for whatever reason, as if that’d make things more correct or more Mexican, so instead of getting “pinole” or “sereno” (pinole being the traditional sweet powder eaten by the Tarahumara, and sereno meaning serene or quiet), we got aberrations like “piñole” or “sereño”, words that don’t even exist in Spanish. And it’s not me being critical, those words are pronounced differently, it’s not only a matter of spelling, as many of you may know.

2/2
Then, in things where he’s supposed to actually intervene, Erskine does nothing, so instead of getting “cigarrillo” and “La vi sin ruedas sobre un río obscuro”, we got “cigarillo” and “La ví sin ruedas sobre un rio obscuro.” Why does he put an accent on “vi” but leaves “río” without its proper accent? Your guess is as good as mine. It’s just all over the place. We have Erskine arbitrarily choosing whatever spelling he wants for reasons yet to be known to mankind.

Some of McCarthy’s Mexicans resemble the gypsies who arrived in the fictional town of Macondo (set in Colombia) from Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realist extravaganza One Hundred Years of Solitude more than they resemble actual Mexicans from the mid 1800s. It’s a bit obvious where he’s getting his references from. Although I’ve read somewhere that McCarthy read lots of books in Spanish from that era as research for his book, it just doesn’t seem plausible to me the fact that you could find such whimsical folks in the arid deserts of northern Mexico in the mid 1800s. But to each their own. This one is absolutely on me.

Thanks for the analysis.
I think you're right about him fucking up the tarot reading, and if I recall the cards themselves were in Spanish too (or at least nameless), so there isn't a credible explanation for that fuck up.
>it just doesn’t seem plausible to me the fact that you could find such whimsical folks in the arid deserts of northern Mexico in the mid 1800s
As much as one could find a figure like the Judge, and his initial encounter with the scalp hunters - it adds to the mystical and exotic feeling of the book IMO

struggle through, then re-read it in 5 years and realize you like it now

The Crossing is even tougher, there are whole multi page scenes of spanish dialog with thematic importance

Lmao, I thought the taco was universal, like pizza

Is this common play on McCarthy's verbose? I just got through Judge Holden's lecture on the black Jackson.

Unfortunately no. Maybe I exaggerated the constant looking of plants lol.

I don'tlike abondoning books either. I'm starting to think I got meme'd again

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>his actual Spanish dialogue is cartoonish at best. Cardboard-like. It barely gets the job done.
his english dialog is not exactly naturalistic either. the guy goes for a mood.

I now have a vision of Mccarthy trying to chat up Mexican chicks with cod Spanish like pic related

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Nice trips, user said and spat and wiped his chin as the dead baby lay speared by the hyacinths on that dusty arroyo.

it's a copypasta poking some lighthearted fun at his 1860s geography almanac style of description

this

i didn’t feel that it was wordy for the sake of wordiness. it’s prose styling was very intentional and (imo) monumentally successful.

bait

You didn’t get meme’d. Although it isn’t for everyone, it is one the greatest American novels of the 20th century.

"wordy for the sake of wordiness" is Not Even a criticism. this is a word based medium. verbosity can serve to artistic ends just as minimalism and terseness. get elevated plebes. if you think BM is a slog then you should definitely be reading it because it's probably improving your taste

Something being wordy just for the sake of it is a legitimate criticism, just not applicable to BM because it does serve a purpose.

it's almost never a legitimate criticism, just a wail of frustration
nobody outside of shitpost authors is doing anything for the sake of being wordy
theres always a goal the complainer is missing

adding: it's the same spirit of pseudocriticism that calls a work "pretentious"

I read that it wasn't initially liked by some when it first came out, but it eventually got the praise it deserved. I'm assuming his prose and probably the gratuitous violence was the problem for critics.

This seems to be the thing people keep telling me to do, but it doesn't feel right. I think its because I keep treating it like a film, it certainly seems that way since NCFOM and The Road were turned to adaptations where the scripts are almost 1 to 1.

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Your not supposed to understand the Spanish cause the kid doesn't understand it, however it's written in a very basic way so that with just a little bit of knowledge you'll understand some of the words and figure out the rest through context clues

So what's the significance of Ye Rapiste Judge being a good dancer?

>pretentious
is a legitimate criticism but gets thrown around by idiots who think anything they cant immediately grasp is feigning intelligence or cultural sofistication

It demonstrates his physical prowess and his cultured intellect simultaneously.

No, it's gotta be more than that, seeing as how many times the fact is trotted out, and the ending

Man, you guys need to get over this hobgoblin of perfect comprehension. You will never understand a book perfectly, there are always going to be words (in English or Spanish or whatever) you dont know.

Let it go, pausing to look up words is a horrible distraction. You're honestly diminishing your comprehension by interrupting the text constantly.

>This seems to be the thing people keep telling me to do, but it doesn't feel right.
my first time reading it when i was like 18, i sort of lost interest, it felt like a slog, i didnt finish it. i came back early-20s and read it all the way through, it was still a struggle but less so, i had a much better idea what was happening and didnt have to look up so much. on my third re-read in late-20s i really loved it. by that point i knew the vocabulary and i had read other stuff like the bible and moby dick and philosophy so i got way more of the references and themes and it was just an absolute joy. its one of my favorite books now. so dont be discouraged user.

he is in tune with the rhythms and harmonies of things. as brutal and violent and warlike as he is, he is not in dissonance with nature at all.

>as brutal and violent and warlike as he is, he is not in dissonance with nature at all
Is he that brutal compared to the rest of the characters? Other than the implicit fate of the kid, he doesn't exactly outdistance the other scalp hunters or Indians.

Everybody in the gang is terrified of him, we see veteran scalphunters threaten to shoot him in the head for what he does to kids, the very first time we meet him he incites a violent mob apropos of nothing at all, just on a whim. He's more committed to violence than anybody else in the book. Even Glanton is merely his acolyte

I mean, they're terrified of him because he's a 7 foot tall pale demon who plays mind games with them.
While he does have a menacing undercurrent to him outwardly he isn't notably brutal, his horror is far subtler imo.

There's a scene where he takes a man's head in his hands and begins to crush it like a bug. I hate to be argumentative but I really think you're off base on this one. The Judge is a league of his own, he's like the ideal mixture of reflective intelligence and intuitive brutal violence. All the epigraphs relate to him, especially the Valery one.

No more horrific than the kid stabbing the bartender through the eye with a broken bottle or the Indian smashing out two infants' heads out.
He can be indeed incredibly violent but it's the same with the other members, but I agree the difference is that he seems to enjoy the violence itself more than anybody else.

i was already interested in learning the language, it isn't just for the sake of rereading BM

I do think it's more horrific for how personal and direct it was but maybe that's a dead end point to debate. I think we do agree on the point that his enjoyment and justifications of violence are definitely on a different level from the rest of the gang. A lot of them just go with the flow, they get violent over little perceived insults and stuff, but the judge flat out celebrates violence and preaches its virtues to everyone. To tie it back to the dancing and the eipgraphs, I think he recognizes the eternal ebb and flow of violence in human life, and he goes joyously along with it instead of resisting it (as the kid does in a few very subtle moments) or doing it mindlessly like Glanton or Davey or the rest of the gang.

Do you agree that when he chides the kid about "showing clemency to the heathen", he's talking about Glanton and his gang?

I do agree with that yalie chick on that yeah. I think the judge equates heathenry to weakness and godliness to power. When the kid doesnt execute the wounded guy, or when he helps Davey with the arrow, I think the judge is seeing that as a weakening kind of pity.

Same, except I abandoned it with 50 pages to go because I literally didn’t give a single fuck about what happened in those last 50 pages.

So was the kid's innocence the reason he couldn't touch him back then, and had to wait until he became a "man" and therefore under his power/dominion?

Actually I think it may be the other way around, as a kid he had "a taste for mindless violence" and the judge saw him as game for his own values. As he grew into a man and the gang fell apart and he showed pity to various members and started hiking a bible around with him, I think those are actually the things that called Judgment down on him.
Also your mentioning this makes me think we've had interactions in previous blood meridian threads... it's a very interesting take

>McCarthy was born in Jerusalem, Israel, one of six children of Charles Joseph McCarthy and Gladys Christina (née McGrail) McCarthy.

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Ha, no, I only just recently finished it after having several false starts over the years, and just as well since it seems to be coming back in fashion on this board.
You might very well be right about that, but I still wonder about the Judge not touching him in the jail. Though you raise an interesting point, the kid as a potential acolyte and later an apostate from Holden's PoV.

Are you people seriously complaining because the book is 'hard?

Maybe you should fuck off back to John Green.

Ignore every other post in this thread. Just get the audiobook and you'll have a much easier time. No shame in it.

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Don't put it down OP. Blood Meridian is not an easy novel to finish but it has one of my favorite third acts in any book. Besides, the prose is just really fucking good all the way through

>That night Glanton stared long into the embers of the fire. All about him his men were sleeping but much was changed. So many gone, defected or dead. The Delawares all slain. He watched the fire and if he saw portents there it was much the same to him. He would live to look upon the western sea and he was equal to whatever might follow for he was complete at every hour. Whether his history should run concomitant with men and nations, whether it should cease. He’d long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men’s destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he’d drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he’d ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them.

as far as i'm concerned cormac is god

Fuck me, that beautiful prose made me wet

same. another one:

>A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

First book I ever read. Probably not wise.