First Encounter....

bishun · Post by **bishun** » Tue Sep 07, 2004 4:09 pm

Do you remember the first time you read Lovecraft, or heard about him?

I don't [not specifically at least], and it bothers me; I do know however that the first of his works that i read was "The Call of Cthulhu" online, but i dont remember why i was drawn to read it, i knew nothing of the author. Thats all it took, even at age 14 (or so) and not understanding some of Lovecraft's strange adjectives, i loved it.

I proceeded to read anything written by him. It's really a shame that he died so young, knowing that his stories (in my opinion) only seemed to get better and better as he aged.

p.s. youll have to excuse me if this topic has already been touched upon.

Lagwolf · Post by **Lagwolf** » Tue Sep 07, 2004 5:33 pm

I wanted to read Lovecraft for many years and was unable to find the books...from my early-teens. Then I found em' in a Maine bookstore and bought the entire series. Then I went through as many of the Chaosium series as I could...I think I have almost every one published, maybe missing a few new ones.

nortonew · Post by **nortonew** » Tue Sep 07, 2004 5:59 pm

I first read Lovecraft way back in grade school, sometime like the late 70's I think. Of course, I didn't fully appreciate it when I was that young.

I've read most of his stories several times since then. However, it wasn't until I started looking up Lovecraft stuff on the internet that I realized that there were many other authors who also wrote mythos tales.

Post by **Aleister** » Tue Sep 07, 2004 6:48 pm

I first learned of Lovecraft when I played CthulhuMud many years ago. I did not know who Lovecraft was, but I came to love his inventions through that game.

It is an online text-based game, which is disliked by many these days (it is actually struggling to keep even the smallest number of people on it these days

), but it really got the imatination going. I had the greatest mental images from the people, places, and things of the game and I came to love the Cthulhu Mythos before ever really reading any of it

Then of course I got some books!

decadence · Post by **decadence** » Tue Sep 07, 2004 9:34 pm

I found a clay statue and a painting of that tentacled evilness on your wall al..that was my first exposure

E.A. Lovecraft · Post by **E.A. Lovecraft** » Wed Sep 08, 2004 12:05 am

I had a reading teacher suggest "The Dunwich Horror" to me in junior high. Read it, thought it was cool, never bothered to check out who wrote it.

Several years later, Michael Whelan's cover art for "At the Mountains of Madness" caught my attention. I figured any book with a picture that cool had to be good, and it was. I definitely took note of the author the second time around.

Adrian · Post by **Adrian** » Sat Sep 11, 2004 5:37 am

Got an estonian translation of his stories randomly from a library. His style was different and deeper from everything I had read before so from that point I looked up everything on him I could get my hands on.

Post by **Aleister** » Sat Sep 11, 2004 3:08 pm

One thing I have wondered is if the style of an author is drastically changed by language differences. Since translation is not always absolute (meaning there is not always a single word or phrase which perfectly translates into the same meaning in another language).

Since you have read both Estonian and English versions of some of the stories, would you say they are comparable? Or is the feel of it quite a bit different?

Of course I also know that the answer to this varies with different languages as well

Adrian · Post by **Adrian** » Sat Sep 11, 2004 3:41 pm

There recently appeared a translation of "The Case Of Charles D. W." over here and the translation was horrible. It showed how some random translator can treat HPL as an ordinary writer. The style and originality of words had wholly been disassembled. Then again there are great and masterful translations. It does of course depend of the language but even more so of the translater. A talented man can invent or replace words in the original language.