I found some great sentences in Beckett's "Molloy": "Je dors peu et le peu que je dors je le dors le jour." 14 monosyllables, nine of them with the same vowel sound! "Le Supplément Littéraire du Times était excellent à cet effet, d'une solidité et non-porosité à toute épreuve." (Molloy, sleeping outside, uses newpaper to put under his blanket to keep warm and dry at night.) "La vision béatifique ne serait-elle pas une source d'ennui, à la longue?" Beckett is not necessarily better in French--I find Moran's disgust of the body and contempt for his offsprping more harrowing in English--but I find it "easier" to read because the foreignness of the text slows me down. I can still appreciate its Frenchness as a quality. The more one knows a language the less one sees it as having a distinctive quality in and of itself.

I discovered yesterday that I can read Occitan at a basic level, since it is so close to Catalan. In fact, barely distinguishable in many instances. That means I probably know Gascon as well. I must improve my Italian reading skills. Is Montale a sort of "generic" modernist poet, or is there something in his poetry that one cannot find anywhere else?