Reading war and Peace is a metaphor in English for both something that takes ages and for marking you out as a literature fan.
I was reading a book in Irish today and it translated “you never read war and Peace” into “you never read the graveyard clay”.
This is a famously difficult Irish language book https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cr%C3%A9_na_Cille
So do other languages have their War and Peace metaphor. As in do the French use Proust, the Spanish Don Quixote etc?
by cavedave
4 Comments
I can’t answer your question, but:
>”you never read war and Peace” into “you never read the graveyard clay”
Kind of surprised it didn’t reference Finnegan’s Wake. Is that not as “big” a book in Ireland as it is in America?
no – the book is LITERALLY about War (time) and Peace (time) – not a metaphor
Considering it’s a Russian novel, perhaps the same metaphor applies in other countries and languages?
Is Don Quixote really used that way?
The prose is so simple and the story formatting is serialized. I’d put it at about the same level as comic books for ease of comprehension.