VV(12): Her Left Eye

[Dave Monroe]

Picked up the most recent trans. of this, largely as
the Zone Books ed. (bundled with Gilles Deleuze's
"Coldness and Cruelty") fell behind a bookshelf I'll
never be able to move, and I suspect the Sylvere
Lotringere trans. went with it, so ...

"And now her eyes struck me like bolts of green
lighting.  Yes, they were green, those eyes, with
their indescribable gentle power; green, but green
like precious stones, like deep, unfathomable mountain
lakes."

>From Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, trans.
Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Penguin, 2000), p. 17. 
By the way, the always appreciated Penguin
"Explanatory Notes" (so when's their Gravity's rainbow
being annotated?), mention, among other things,
Tannhauser, Hegel, Manon Lescaut, Astarte and Peter
Schlemihl ...

--- Dave Monroe <davidmmonroe@[omitted]> wrote:

> "As the distance between them gradually diminished
> Mondaugen saw that her left eye was artificial: she,

> noticing his curiosity, obligingly removed the eye
> and held it out to him in the hollow of her hand.  A
> bubble blown translucent, its 'white' would show up 
> when in the socket as a half-lit sea green.  A fine 
> network of nearly microscopic fractures covered its 
 
> surface.  Inside were the delicately-wrought wheels,
> springs, ratchets of a watch, wound by a gold key 
> which Fraulein Meroving wore on a slender chain
round 
> her neck.  Darker green and flecks of gold had been
> fused into twelve vaguely zodiacal shapes, placed 
> annular on the surface of the bubble to represent
> the iris and also the face of the watch." 
> (V., Ch. 9, Sec. ii, p. 237)

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