Newsgroup: it.cultura.linguistica.inglese
Titolo: presight

"Havermeyer had grown very proficient at shooting field mice at night 
[...]. His bait was a bar of candy and he would presight in the darkness 
as he sat waiting for the nibble [...]"
 
What does "would presight" stand for?
 
Excerpt from "Catch-22" by J. Heller (a bit disappointing so far), page 44.


The device used to aim a gun is called the "sights" In simple versions 
it is two-forked upright metal pins placed on top of the barrel near the 
shooter's eye and a single upright metal pin near the end of the barrel. 
The shooter visually lines up the one pin between the two pins while 
aiming and this helps keep the barrel level and straight.
 
I don't recall ever encountering the word "presight" but I must have 
because I read Catch-22 long ago and even read it a second time, but 
still long ago. I would suppose that it means he aimed the gun at the 
candy bar as he waited for a mouse to appear.
 
Spero che ti piacia il romanzo. Secondo me ï¿œ un capolavoro.
 

 
without a doubt. Yossarian Rules!
 
My copy is falling apart from the many times I have read it, but it's been a
while... I'll have to read it again soon.
 
G

 Spero che ti piacia il romanzo. Secondo me ï¿œ un capolavoro.
 
Lo porterï¿œ a termine, lentamente, ma lo farï¿œ. Anche io mi auguro che mi 
piaccia,
finora ho letto 50 pagine e il romanzo ancora non mi ha conquistato, ma 
spero di
cambiare idea presto...
 

 cambiare idea presto...
 
You are a patient man!
I am a very impatient man! :)
I would hardly go on reading a book that doesn't hook me in after 50 
lines, not pages! :D
 


When I read "War and Peace", the first pages are punctuated by long 
passages in French (with no footnotes or endnotes in my edition) and the 
only time I studied French was almost 20 years ago. Still, I managed to 
finish the book, but that was because I was 100% sure it was a masterpiece.

 passages in French (with no footnotes or endnotes in my edition) [cut]
 
Nice anacoluthon, lol. I meant "I noticed that the first pages were 
punctuated".
 


Alla buona derrata, pensaci su. When I read Crime and Punishment, in 
English translation, I found it so compelling that I did not put the 
book down until I'd finished it. Ten years later, I read it again, and I 
had to discipline myself to read it to the end because I found it so 
boring. To this day I don't know if the problem was that the version I 
picked up the second time was a bad translation, or if Dostoyevsky's 
writing ability had diminished in comparison to my standards in the 
intervening years.
 
 
 

 intervening years.
 
The *first* date is the most memorable! ;)

 because I was 100% sure it was a masterpiece.
 
 
I haven't read it and I will never do.
 
Seems that there are a lot of useless parts that one can skip.
 
Anyway, I don't care whether a novel is considered a masterpiece
by scholars and critics, I go with my own tastes.
 
"Catch 22", read in Italian, I liked it, and then I learnt that
it is one of the most important novels of the post war XX
century. There are many more I haven't read and I will never
read.
 
 
"I took a speed reading course and read 'War and Peace' in
twenty minutes. It involves Russia."
__ Woody Allen
 
 
-- 
"To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant
struggle."
                -- George Orwell
 


 
That's a famous and well-known joke. I always wondered if the reader can 
keep focused (and for how long) over a speed reading session.
 

 Alla buona derrata, pensaci su. 
 
"Alla buona derrata"?
 
I am not sure such an expression exists in Italian.
You can say "alla buon'ora", to mean "About time!" as in "it's about 
time you answered to my last post, you lazy Italian!" [*]. But I does 
not seem to apply here.
 
Moreover: 'derrata'... I can not remember I have ever heard the term 
without an "alimentare" nearby. Not exactly a colloquial term.
But, since you are discussing literary masterworks, it is I who may be 
at fault here.
 
(I've always wanted to write "It is I who...")
 
War and Peace. It's about Russia, right? :-)
 
cheers,
Peltio
and a Merry Christmas to you, my friend.
 
 
[*] Did I tell you that I have this tendency to disappear for long 
periods of time?
 
 

 at fault here.
 
It's interesting that you use the term "masterworks" instead of 
"masterpiece." I was just thinking about this word choice before I 
browsed this newsgroup today. I wrote that Catch 22 was a capolavoro, 
but I don't think that I'd write that it was a masterpiece. Masterpiece 
in English seems to me a higher standard than capolavoro in Italian. 
That, of course, may be entirely due to the fact that a 6 year old 
Italian has a better understanding than I do of the connotations of most 
Italian words.
 
For me, a masterpiece would be the frescoes of the life of Christ 
painted on the walls of the Scrovegni chapel in Padova by the genius 
Giotto. I don't know if the high bar I set for the word masterpiece is 
shared by the majority of native English speakers. It may not be, given 
that I've often heard the word genius applied to people who I would, at 
most, consider competent and artful Rock musicians. Just to give you an 
idea of how low the bar is set for genius in the US, I've been called a 
genius at times by people who could have adequately complimented me by 
saying, "hey, that's a good idea."
 
Joseph Heller is not a genius. I would, however, call his work Catch 22 
a masterwork.