GR translation: White Visitation

[alice wellintown]

Yes, I like this suggestion best. In fact, I would apply this
suggestion to the Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese?)  translation project.
Something Monroe sent over this wire yesterday about archaic English
words that might make a comeback links to a list of the easiest and
toughest languages to learn if your first language is English. Arabic
and Chinese languages, Korean, Basque, are on the tough list. If this
is true, translation from English to Chinese or Korean or Arabic is
much tougher than translation from English to German or English to
Spanish. I think this is true. So, trying to work woth the lexicon and
the syntax is probably not the best method. A more creative and poetic
translation may be best. Finding the best fit, as Paul suggests, will
not be easy. There will be times when the idiomatic and poetic
ambiguities are lost in translation, but something exciting and
beautiful, with new poetic and ambiguous multiplicities will emerge.
This also, as David Morris suggests, forces the reader to do some
work. I'd be interested in reading what is made of these passages in
Pynchon, not so much to see how the poet-translator missed the mark,
as how the poet-translator used the Chinese language and culture, for
example, a comical phrase, to evoke a particular and related response
from Chinese reader.

On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 7:11 AM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net> wrote:
> Mike
>
> I had a thought during the night.
>
> Is there a comical phrase in Chinese that means roughly what we mean in the
> U.S. (and maybe Britain too) when we say "the men in the white coats are
> coming to get you."  It means you're alarmingly psychotic and have to be
> institutionalized.  That's the image I think I receive when I hear "The
> White Visitation" in the context of what's going on in GR.  The place
> formerly, in now sadly gone peacetime,  housed mental patients.  Now it
> houses another groups of nuts who are trying every possible scheme they can
> think of to help win the war. Could you think up a place name that would be
> suggestive of that?
>
> I do also hear the religious, devotional overtones of a care-giving facility
> (like St. Verionica's) so if that could be worked in, all the better.
>
> P
>
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