Quote:
Originally Posted by rkomar
When I read slowly, it's more that I take more numerous and longer breaks rather than actually taking in the words more slowly. I will also re-read phrases and sentences more often.
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Do you find that the breaks help you to absorb what you're reading?
Often, when I'm editing, reading or helping to translate a difficult passage (or one with profound implications on multiple levels), I have to take a break to allow the tree of meaning, metaphor, sound and rhythm to take shape.
I used to feel this was a feature of my stupidity or laziness until I read about one of Proust's translators doing the same thing. The poet Robert Lowell also mentioned doing this when writing his
Imitations, which are partly original and partly translations of other poets.
And then I think of the science fiction writer, Samuel Delany, who told me that, because he was dyslexic, he had to disassemble the language of books completely in order to read them. When he was studying the modernists, he did something I hadn't heard of before: He actually wrote stories using the techniques of Joyce and Pound to assess how difficult and/or meaningful the exercise really was. You get the feeling that reading is a very active experience for him -- almost as active as writing, which is why he's a such good critic in addition to being a celebrated novelist.