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Here's the latest installment in the regular best-of-quarter collections, the purpose of which is to gather some particularly good Literature Q&A in order to get some easily available links to showcase our site.

One use for this post could be to gather links for promotion on Literature's community-run Twitter X account. But it's also useful for any kind of site promotion: if we want to show off the site to literary friends, it'll be much easier if we have a list of particularly great posts to point to.

Please nominate some exemplary questions and/or answers from the fourth quarter (Oct/Nov/Dec) of 2024.

  • When choosing nominations, please remember the primary purpose: to showcase our site to people elsewhere in the hope of maybe tempting them to come here. Let's try to focus mainly on great questions with great answers, and perhaps also great unanswered questions (which we can advertise as "hey, why not come and answer this") — not anything with subpar answers, which will tend to give a bad impression and defeat the purpose.
  • Remember that votes don't necessarily reflect quality, and the purpose of this is to promote quality over score. Highly-voted posts are easy to find, underappreciated gems less so.
  • Getting a wide range of different stories represented in our list here would also be nice, but not strictly necessary. Feel free to nominate a bunch of Q&A about the same book, if you think they're all outstanding. But don't nominate questions just because they're about your favorite book.
  • Multiple nominated posts per answer here is fine.
  • Feel free to nominate either some of your own posts which you're particularly proud of, or posts from other people which really impressed you.
  • Ideally, some explanation of why the nominated questions and answers are so good would be useful — constructive feedback might give people ideas about what to aim for in the future.

Also, if you find a great post from some previous month, feel free to go and post answers on any of the older posts linked in the opening sentence. The date of the meta answer doesn't matter — late entries are still more than welcome! — only the date of the post on the main site that's being nominated.

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I'd like to nominate Clara Diaz Sanchez's interesting and very thorough answer to Charo's question: What's the symbolism of the Cid's beard? I never would have guessed that El Cid's beard could have so much symbolism attached to it.

I'd also like to nominate Gareth's answer to jackhoward's question: Does anybody know good English translations of Goethe's poems from German? Gareth takes a short poem by Goethe, analyzes five different English translations and shows that which is “better” depends on what criteria you are using for “better”. These different translations preserve different features of the original, and depending on which criteria for “better” you use, any of them is arguably “better”. So while not actually answering the original question, this answer makes a convincing argument that the question is unanswerable.

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Over this past quarter I have greatly enjoyed the Gabriela Mistral Reading Challenge, both as questioner and answerer. Tsundoku in particular asked a large number of interesting questions, and one that I particularly enjoyed answering was "What sort of love and epiphany are meant in Mistral's Dos ángeles?" which involved analysing a very beautiful, though rather obscure, metaphor in Mistral's poetry.

As a non-native speaker, I always find it interesting when dialectal forms of English are discussed and explained. I find Burns' poems to be very difficult to follow, so I greatly appreciated Gareth Rees' clear explanation of "How does the first stanza of Robert Burns's "For a' that and a' that" translate into modern English?"

There was a highly impressive story-id from Ayshe, responding to "A short story about a car breaking down in the desert". The answer, And The Rock Cried Out by Ray Bradbury is certainly not obscure - indeed, I've read it myself, but somehow the summary given in the question didn't spark my memory.

Finally I'd like to give a shout-out to Verbose, for their efforts to promote the James Baldwin challenge, and preventing it from flopping.

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