On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 4:01 PM, Greg Newby <gbnewby@pglaf.org> wrote:
I added our Confucius #3330, though the HTML is not that good. It's readable, though, and our Korans are not.
Do you think I should add our Kalevala, and perhaps trade out an American poet?
Kalevala is still Western, and you don't want the list to have too much in the way of hard-to-read old epics. How about #42290, an Arthur Waley translation of 170 Chinese poems? They are short and fairly accessible. Alas, what I think would be the barest introduction to world literature would be a thousand books or more, and too many of them would be in copyright or untranslated. Still, there should be an attempt to put some balance in the list, so that it's not just Survey of English Literature. Perhaps the list should be introduced with a caveat, saying that more works from non-Western languages and cultures are being added to the collection, which at this point has a strong bias towards works originally written in English. -- Karen Lofstrom