What country has the best literature?

So it's fucking shit?

>Virgil
Not Italian.
>Machado
Machado de Assis? Not Spanish.

Look, Spanish is my mother tongue, I love Spanish, but I have to say it. Garcia Márquez is not an Spanish author.

>Mein Kampf
Hitler was autrichian
I would like to say Musil, but he was autrichian too. So Mann maybe

So is it worth it learning German in order to read Goethe and Mann?

Germany with XX century prosaists

Attached: pobrane (1).jpg (199x253, 7K)

Antonio Machado
I consider every hispanic author as a Spanish author. The independence of South America should never have happened.

No, Machado, the Spanish poet

Russia
How is this even a question

So I can go to Spain and call myself Spanish (I'm Chilean). Cool.

Not you, only Chileans of value.

Yeah, I'm from Argentina and I call myself Spanish

Unironically the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

I'm interested, give me examples please

France > Great Britain > USA
And you can safely ignore the rest.

Quo Vadis, Jan Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Sargossa, With Fire and Sword, the works of Stanislaw Lem, Ferdydurke, Metai/The Seasons

Russia>England>Germany

Russia has not produced a single notable novel in the last 70 years.

Same happens with everyone

Buen hombre, hace bien saber que no onions el único hispano con consciencia en este planeta. Una Hispanidad unida, con identidad y orgullo de su pasado glorioso, conviene a nuestro sino triste estado de vaivén.
La lengua castellana debe retomar su trono como la lengua franca y, sino eso, tan si quiera debe alcanzar los laureles que antes tenia: y eso solo lo haremos juntos. Plus Ultra, hermano

>Russia has not produced a single notable novel in the last 70 years
Solzhenitsyn
Nonsense, plenty of “notable” novels since 1949.

Nunca fue lengua franca. De qué mierdas hablas.

>Solzhenitsyn
His prose is laughably bad.

Ay Dios mío, nunca alguien en Yea Forums me había transmitido tanta esperanza. Mil gracias hermano, Plus Ultra.
Y que Dios te bendiga.

The man won the Nobel Prize for Literature, user. I realize that this is more often highly politicized than not these days, but in any case it’s never gone to someone “laughably bad.” You’re pissing into the wind.

>it’s never gone to someone “laughably bad.”
How can you tell? I can call his prose is bad because I've read One Day and Cancer Ward in my native Russian, and it's a boring gray clunky mess. And these two are his best works, a huge chunk of his texts is borderline unredable.

Putting aside Shakespeare, it's notable that Bloom's Western canon contains more English entries than any other country

My top five would be: Russia, Japan, Hungary, Czech Republic, and France.

By the logic of this thread, all American literature can be classified as English

If you don’t read contemporary Russian literature it doesn’t mean it has no worthwhile books. Let’s go further and apply your logic to other countries. What are some notable novels from the last 70 years? Protip you can’t include Harry Potter and shit like that

If you don’t read contemporary Russian literature it doesn’t mean it has no worthwhile books. Let’s go further and apply your logic to other countries.

>Garcia Marquez
>Spanish
LMAO

I've read about 25 modern (2000-2018) Russian novels, all shit. There is Mikhail Shishkin, but he's just a second-rate Nabokov.
>Let’s go further and apply your logic to other countries. What are some notable novels from the last 70 years?
Are you kidding?

For me hispanic and spanish are the same. As it should be.

In your opinion, user. Just because you think (subjectively) Solzhenitsyn is bad doesn’t make him objectively so. For example, I don’t like Citizen Kane (which many consider the finest movie ever made). I can call it crap until I’m blue in the face but that won’t change a thing.

Hungary and the Czech Republic have a greater body of literature than England and the US? This must be the best-kept secret in the world.

Colonialist scumbag.

Erofeev, Mamleev, Limonov, Pelevin, Aitmatov, Dovlatov. They are all notable enough despite your opinion about them.

As a Brazilian, I guess I can say I’m somewhat neutral. We have great books in our canon, but we are certainly not even near the top places in literary history.

If I had to choose an specific country to name as the one with the greatest literary corpus it would have to be England. The reason is that England excels in mostly all genres and has produced a great quantity of notable poets. There’s also the colossal figure of Shakespeare, a figure that would outbalance any measurement.

Spanish literature could only be a contender if Latin America were to be counted as a single country. To be frank, Latin America has produced far better writers than Spain in all of its history (and I’m even counting Dom Quixote - I share Nabokov’s opinion on that work; it’s more a powerful symbol and cultural icon than a perpetually great work of art).

But seriously, who are we to judge the best country? How many of us have knowledge of all the Chinese corpus? The Dream of the Red Chamber is supposed to be one of the wonders of the world, yet none of us have ever read it.

One thing I deem important is cultural commerce. If a country remains culturally isolated many new founding and innovations will not reach its artists. Maybe that’s one of the great advantages that Europe had during the last 3 centuries. Places like China and Japan were too closed and, although they never stop changing styles, they never had the same sparks of new vitality that Europe was experiencing. Think on Russia, for example. If they didn’t had the influence of the French and British novelists Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Chekhov would not be possible, and to my mind Tolstoy and Chekhov are among the top 10 best writers of all time.

We also must never forget that popular languages and powerful countries will give the illusion of possessing greater talent, when in many times this is not the case. One example: Bob Dylan won the Nobel for his lyric writing, but in Brazil we have a poet and songwriter named Chico Buarque whose lyrics are far more complex, humane, empathetic and varied than those of Dylan. And I’m not saying it out of patriotism. Emily Dickinson, for example, is so great a poet that I don’t see any equal in our country.

Anyway, this measuring thing is quite useless. Don’t know why I wrote so long a post about it.

Hungary definitely has a good body of literature. I've thoroughly enjoyed everything I've read from them and the Czech's contributed a lot like Kafka and the word "robot".

Hello fellow user from Brazil, I'm Brazilian too and I noticed that you have a good English, do you read books in English? I've read like 12-16 books in English and sometimes I feel like my English is not improving

Hello user. Actually my English is quite bad, especially when it comes down to spelling and to verb tenses. I do read a lot in English, but mostly out of necessity: many books I use for research - or simply books of literature that I want to read but cannot find in Portuguese - are only available in English. However, when I can find good translations I prefer to read in Portuguese: I have more ideas and make more neural connections when reading in my native language.

I forced myself to read a lot of Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson in English, because I love their poetic language (the greatest in the world, in my opinion), and can’t find any translations that do them justice. To be frank, I take the best translations Incan find and read them with the original text at my side.

But my English is not good. The autocorrecting device of my phone helps me a lot. And then there’s the fact that I’m already 32 years old, so I have been reading English for quite some time now (I remember the ecstasy of discovering Wikipedia on its early days: that was the first time I really started to read English almost daily: I improved a lot thanks to it).

I love our language. For me it’s much more sonorous than English. But English poetry has an advantage in the fact that they have a lot of monosyllables and can fill the metric with far more meaning than we can. There’s also the great plasticity of English (although I have read that German and Greek are even more malleable and prone to invention).

Yes I agree with you, Portuguese indeed is a beautiful language, but I've chosen to read books in English because I can find them for a very low price in relation to the Portuguese prints, for example 1984 I'd pay 45 r$ in a Portuguese copy and I just bought one copy in English for 15r$, so that's the main reason I've opted to read in English, and also because some books doesn't have any translations or just because they are better to read in English, well I'm 19 years old and I have a lot to improve and I find myself kinda optimistic in relation to English sometimes, I'm good at speaking it and sometimes it's nice, and damn I really want to read Shakespeare, but now that u said that I'll try to find it in English (estante virtual is a good place for you to find books in English if you're interested, also in Portuguese too, they have a very low price because the majority of it is 2nd hand books!)

Wolfram von Eschenbach, Gottfried von Strassburg, Grimmelshausen, Opitz, Gryphius, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Kleist, Storm, Stifter, Fontane, Rilke, George, Hofmansstal, Musil, Robert Wlaser, Max Frisch, Thomas, Heinrich, Klaus Mann, Kafka, Grass

>And these two are his best works
>not 200 years together

Faust by Goethe is as important as Don quijote

None of them have any international interest or recognition, maybe besides Germany.

Thank you for an interesting and well thought-out post, Brazil user.
I completely agree; both Czech and Hungary have contributed a lot. But to call their literary contributions superior to those of both England and the US (as the other user did) is farcical.

Basado y rojopildorado.
Cela is great, La familia de Pascual Duarte is brutal.

rojoempastillado*
Así lo reconoce la RAE
Saludos