Word: mountainous
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...April 25 the Green Mountain State's legislators passed a bill allowing same-sex couples to enter into "civil unions." Everyone involved knew there was a fire storm of protest coming; even some supporters of the bill took pains to insist that the state had not become the first in the land to license gay marriage. But it sure looked that way as civil-union partners were guaranteed a laundry list of rights--in areas of child custody, family leave, inheritance, insurance--traditionally reserved for the traditionally wed. "This is really very emotional," said gay-rights advocate Paula Ettelbrick after...
Reading Soul Mountain in this version is a frustrating experience, chiefly because of the sense that there must be more to it than this. Surely the Nobel Prize cannot have been decided principally on the basis of what appears here. Gao, 60, a playwright as well as a novelist, is regarded as a master of the Chinese language. Perhaps that skill cannot be completely conveyed in a translation, but a better use of English might have helped...
...course cultural chauvinism, Chinese literature remains a terra incognita to most Western readers. Those who would translate Chinese works into English face some heavy burdens. Unfortunately, while Mabel Lee, an honorary associate professor in Chinese studies at the University of Sydney, may have captured the literal essence of Soul Mountain in the original, she presents it in a strange and often irksome form of English. Run-on sentences sprawl: "I hadn't originally intended to do any reading, what if I did read one book more or one book less, whether I read or not wouldn't make a difference...
Another character, called "you," is on a quest to reach Lingshan, "ling meaning spirit or soul, and shan meaning mountain." He, "you" is told, will find this place at "the source of the You River." Along the way, he meets a woman, called "she," who morphs throughout the book into many different women, sometimes married, sometimes not, who have in common a pronounced tendency to whine: "She says she never wants to grow up and yet she also wants to grow up. She wants to be loved, wants everyone to look at her, but she's afraid...
Peter, rather sensibly, quits climbing and takes up nature photography. Annie, however, joins forces with an egomaniacal mogul (Bill Paxton) for an assault on K2, said to be the world's toughest mountain to master. His inner skankiness comes out when they fall into a snow cave and have to be rescued before succumbing to altitude sickness...