Essays

Using a special in-house tool we have analysed the vocabulary of 50 of the world’s most famous Russian, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish novels – in their original language – to determine which of these works have: the greatest number of different words and the highest “vocabulary-richness ratio”, the ratio of the number of different words to the overall word-count of the work in question.
For the purpose of this analysis all punctuation marks (other than apostrophes and (…)

Étienne de la Boétie (1530-1563) was a shooting star in the firmament of 16th-century France, a poet, jurist, essayist and philologist who graduated from the University of Orleans at the age of 22, was appointed court magistrate also at the age of 22 and became a member of Parliament the following year, two years before the legal minimum age, for which he was granted special dispensation by the King of France, Henry II.
He was appointed by the French crown as a member of the special (…)

We have compared the word-counts of the 505 translations from other languages into English on our site with the following results:
ALL OF THE TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH OF RUSSIAN AND GERMAN TEXTS HAVE WITHOUT EXCEPTION SIGNIFICANTLY MORE WORDS THAN THE ORIGINAL
The detailed lists of the texts involved in this study can be seen below.
There is a real possibility that the very act of translating high-quality literary texts such as those involved here necessarily entails a certain (…)

Born and bred in Chicago, a life-long fan of baseball in general and of his home team, the Chicago White Sox in particular, Nelson Algren (1909-1981), one of the finest American authors of his time, was particularly qualified to analyse the inner workings of the most sensational scandal in the history of professional sports, the corruption of of the most important event in the American sporting calendar, the World Series of baseball, in 1919.
To quote from his vivid account:
"There was (…)

In this brilliant historical essay Stefan Zweig recounted in his clear, penetrating style the drama and the intensity of one of the most significant events in world history, the campaign of the young twenty-one-year-old Turkish Emperor, the Sultan Mahomet, to overcome the determined resistance of the thousand-year-old Byzantine Empire, then centred in the historic centre of the Eastern Orthodox faith, the ancient city of Constantinople with its magnificent cathedral and its impregnable (…)

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A reasonably comprehensive, albeit necessarily incomplete, overview of the outstanding German-language short stories, novelettes, novellas, novels and plays that have been written by German, Austrian and Swiss authors over the past several hundred years.
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There are no doubt some novels missing from this compendium, but there can be no doubt that these 100 masterpieces by 74 authors from 22 countries have all scaled the very highest heights of literary achievement in the novel form. TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. LIST BY DATE OF PUBLICATION
2. LIST BY AUTHOR
3. OVERVIEWS AND COMMENTS
4. ANALYSIS BY AUTHOR
5. ANALYSIS BY COUNTRY
6. ANALYSIS BY LANGUAGE
see also=>More of the World’s Greatest Novels
1. LIST BY DATE OF PUBLICATION YEAR____ (…)

None of these 100 novels by 73 authors from 24 countries were included in Our Selection of the World’s Greatest Novels, although they are all worthy candidates for the distinction of appearing there in the august company of Don Quixote, Les Misérables, War and Peace, The Magic Mountain and In Search of Lost Time. TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. LIST BY DATE OF PUBLICATION
2. LIST BY AUTHOR
3. OVERVIEWS AND COMMENTS
4. ANALYSIS BY AUTHOR
5. ANALYSIS BY COUNTRY
6. ANALYSIS BY LANGUAGE
7. (…)

One is first and foremost captivated by the sheer lyrical beauty of the poem, from the first of the seventy-five quatrains (or rubaiyats):
- 1 - Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight: And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.
and the stirring early cry:
- 7 - Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring The Winter Garment of Repentance fling: The Bird of Time has but a little way To fly - (…)