German translators of AtD

[Mark Kohut]

"Anymore, it's always a day of judgement"....


----- Original Message ----
From: Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net>
To: Michael J. Hußmann <michael at michael-hussmann.de>; pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Thursday, November 29, 2007 3:42:41 PM
Subject: RE: German translators of AtD

Michael J. Hußmann sez:

> What would 
> correspond to a day of judgement in AtD? The killing of 
> Scarsdale Vibe? WW I? 

Proximately, World War I -- as a judgment on Vibean sin writ large, and on
many who either believed amid mindless pleasures that no such apocalypse
would come, or pledged to stand against it and then took up the flag in
1914.

Beyond that... Well, one of my teachers was Bob (repeat Robert) Hollander, a
great Dantist who completed his English translation of the Commedia this
year. That led me to a summer session in Florence, then to teaching there
the year before GR came out. So I was primed to see Pynchon's uses of
history in a Dantean light even before Charles Hollander taught us all to do
so.

Pynchon can't believe in *one* day of judgment to come, in time and ending
time, as Dante did (nor in atonement and redemption in the same way a
colonial New England Pynchon could). But in AtD as in the other books he
takes us through a variety of hells and purgatories, often hard to
distinguish from Earth, and even offers occasional glimpses of what paradise
might be like if we weren't so damned... what we are.

I'm not arguing a one-to-one correspondence to a medieval Christian
timeline, nor am I wrangling over a point of translation you're certainly
better equippd than I to judge. I'm simply saying that to my ear, the
Biblical echo in the English title is very deliberate, and I'm sorry there
wasn't a way to keep it in the German along with all the other connotations.


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