GR translation: her glassy wastes

[alice wellintown]

> So perhaps "glassy" means not amounting to much, fragile, breakable--or,
> might it be a substitute for glossy, implying a cheap attractiveness?  In
> either case, of illusory value. (Cherrycoke is not fooled)
> "Wastes" probably refers to areas of desolation and damnation. (wastelands)
>  Or maybe it just means emanations.
> Would Pynchon himself be able to parse these passages of the book in any
> straight forward way?

I never know what people mean by "parse" when they discuss a passage
from imaginative literature (prose fiction, poetry, etc.); the word
has so many meanings, even in literary circles, that one is easily
confused by its use. If by "parse" we understand "interpret" and then
add the "straight forward way" phrase to this meaning, we might ask
why an author or anyone else would bother to make literate sense of
figurative language. This exercise, even for a translator, has a very
limited value and is riddled with pitfalls and wastes. The better
question is how the author makes sense. Of course, this sense of
parsing the text is what excellent translation must start from. Then,
the translator, not in any straigh foward manner, must play the poet's
part and hold up, as it were, not the mirror to the text to be
translated, but to his own reading of the world.