GR translation: her glassy wastes

[Paul Mackin]

On 10/29/2011 1:37 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
>> 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.

Which brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to the 
question of what in the heck the author is talking about.


P