A Little Latin, Less Greek

[Reiner Haehnle]

Hi,

Andrew Walser asked:
: 	A question about polyglottality --	
: 	Which languages does Pynchon know, and how well does he know them? 
: Perhaps Andrew Dinn, with his impressive Wagnerian signature, could
: comment on the German in GRAVITY'S RAINBOW ...

well, I guess this is my chance for active participation in this list
after having lurked for quite some time in the background (full of awe
for the usually very informed and useful articles posted here).

Some time ago I started my third reading of GR (the first time I read
the German translation, from then on the original). After a while when
the plot started to involve German characters I noted occasional
errors in style and grammar of the German text fragments. Judging from
those, I'd say that at the time when Pynchon wrote GR he can't have
known a lot about German grammar. The remark cited by Bob Orlwosky:

 Regarding Pynchon's knowledge of German, he admits in his 1969 letter about
 the Herero to Thomas Hirsch that his German was "virtually nonexistent."

is probably a slight exaggeration on the side of Pynchon, but his
German certainly wasn't great.

BTW, if anybody is interested, I'll continue to collect German-related
errors in GR while reading on and I'll make them e-accessible after
finishing my current reading (which may take a while as I have a
tendency for highly parallel reading of several works). On the other
hand, if such a list exists already somewhere, I'd be grateful to know
so I can spare myself the trouble.

Regards,
		Reiner

-- 
( Reiner H"ahnle                    Phone/Fax:   +49-721-608-4329 )
) Institute for Logic, Complexity      e-mail: haehnle at ira.uka.de (
( and Deduction Systems             `Nichts,                      )
) Department of Computer Science            Niemand,              (
( University of Karlsruhe                           Nirgends,     )
) 76128 Karlsruhe, Germany                                   Nie' (
( http://i12www.ira.uka.de/~reiner/               -- Arno Schmidt )