Speak, Memory

[jbor]

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>From: Heikki Raudaskoski <hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi>
>

> I'd say that SL himself is not "preserving the memory", but rather the
> opposite. I also repeat that the switch from one of the daughters to the
> mother is not justified. Let it be added that while both he and the Coen
> brothers, to whom I referred in the following message, might be said to
> have an straightening-up-the-curves attitude, the latter (or the
> anti-straightener Joyce, for that matter) are by no means doing any
> violence to the original text, and this is JUST what Lombardo does IMHO.
snip

Agreed on all counts (tho' haven't seen the new Coen bros film yet so didn't
catch the synergy there, but, as they've hardly put a foot wrong as far as
their back catalogue goes -- that short story collection put out by the one
or the other perhaps being the exception there -- I'm willing to go with it
sight unseen.) Why, I'd even venture that it's a crime of the same order and
magnitude as, say, "translating" (in terms vouchsafed by Derrida -- M.
L'oeuf-tête himself -- anyway) Benny Profane's entrance in _V._ as a
reincarnation of Baudelaire's poet-outcast from _Les Fleurs du Mal_, or the
rocket scream which comes across the sky to open _GR_ as that of a Holocaust
victim or group thereof. It does do "violence" to the original text, and
flies in the face of that recapitulation of the invocation (to the "daughter
of Zeus", at lines 11-12), just as those attempted "translations" of Pynchon
fly in the face of the immediate textual recapitulation and elaboration (let
alone whole text readings!) of the character or incident. What's more, such
"translations" -- interpretations, really -- which attempt to construct an
idiosyncratic meaning *in opposition to* the textual data do violence to the
*spirit* of the text; I'm reminded of the way the Nazi intelligentsia
similarly "translated" and then enlisted selected excerpts from Nietzsche's
works to justify their conceptions of Aryan supremacy in the 20s and 30s,
and the subsequent campaign of ethnic cleansing they put into practice.

best