Under the rose

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

Warning Lit Crit stuff 



Translation is a problem and the question of what
translations Pynchon used is another. In the current GRGR
chapters we have several good of examples of some of the
other problems one confronts when trying to figure how Rilke
figures in Pynchon's work and in GR. Rilke's evolves as a
"Poet" and his own ideas and how they are illustrated in the
three principle Rilke texts that seem to have most
influenced Pynchon--The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,
The Sonnets to Orpheus and The Elegies---are not fixed for
our convenience and Pynchon evolves too. Furthermore, as Kai
has demonstrated, Pynchon's command of German is suspect,
although I think it is difficult, though not impossible to
evaluate, since Pynchon presents languages/cultures in
contact and he demonstrates his enhanced sensitivity and
knowledge of language and languages/cultures in contact (he
criticizes his earlier failings in SL Intro) and exhibits a
refined subtlety for all aspects of language and
languages/cultures in contact in GR. Furthermore, we need to
account for how and why Pynchon makes use of Rilke. The why,
while complex and controversial, is much easier to get a
handle on than the how. The how is as complex, if not more
complex than Pynchon's use of any other text. We have to
contend with allusions--Rilke's and than Pynchon's on
Rilke's, Irony, again sometimes a double Irony, Imagery,
Pynchon's parodic use of Rilke's themes of love and death,
and so on. From Weisenburger's Companion: V.383.20-22 "Here
is a curious puzzle. The quotation does not appear in the
Obras Poeticas of Jorge Luis Borges...Pynchon has worked up
a decent imitation--a neat trick, given the way Borge's
fictions reinvent literary history." Pynchon does this sort
of thing with Rilke and with others, T.S. Eliot, for
example, through out GR. Other neat trick are compounded by
Pynchon's other neat tricks, like names--Enzian (an
important, both an Ironic allusion to Rilke) or V.41315-16
"once only once..." 

Complicating all of this is Weissmann and his
reading/misreading of
Rilke. In the current GRGR chapters we get more on the
influence of certain texts and Nazism,  Hesse, for example,
but Hesse doesn't figure large in GR and neither do any of
his books. One could write a "Mitchell PrettyPlace
18-volumes study" (GR.275)on this subject I'm sure. 

Doug Millison wrote:
> 
> "The myth concerning the onset of his illness was, even among his myths,
> the most remarkable. To honor a visitor, the Egyptian beauty Nimet Eloui,
> Rilke gathered some roses from his garden. While doing so, he pricked his
> hand on a thorn. This small wound failed to heal, grew rapidly worse, soon
> his entire arm was swollen, and his other arm became affected as well.
> According to the preferred story, this was the way Rilke's disease
> announced itself, although Ralph Freedman, his judicious and most recent
> biographer, puts that melancholy event more than a year earlier. Roses
> climb his life as if he were their trellis."
> 
> from the first chapter of _Reading Rilke Reflections on the Problems of
> Translation_ by William Gass, also reviewed in the new issue of New York
> Times Book Review, on the Web at
> http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/g/gass-rilke.html
> 
> d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n
> http://www.millison.com
> http://www.online-journalist.com