GR translation: her glassy wastes

[alice wellintown]

> Well, that is indeed the question.  I think Alice made a valid point.
> What I need here is interpretation.  Rather than trying to pick the
> words apart, I am trying to figure out what the author is referring to
> by "her glassy wastes".  Obviously, my own reading of the world, and
> of the book, is inadequate.  Thus I need your help.

And, as we discovered with the "social eye" translation and in other
attempts to discover WHAT the author means , a strict analysis of WHAT
that ignores HOW may only drive us in zeroes.

In Appendix III of his reader's guide to GR, Fowler proposes
the following "rule of thumb,"  "[when] reading Pynchon,
when chronology (or convention, or common sense) clashes
with poetic resonance, set aside chronology (or convention,
or common sense)."



> Since I am asking, what does it mean that each of them was "_used_ for
> the ideology of the Zero"? (P152.16)  What is the "ideology of the
> Zero" anyway?  And what is "Nora's great rejection" and why is it so
> great? (P152.17)  What is the "Outer Radiance" that Nora saw?
> (P153.13)  Clearly these things are closely related to each other and
> to "her glassy waste", and may have been discussed countless times
> before.  Or maybe not.  In any case, this this the most difficult
> episode in part 1 and I might as well ask all the questions now.
>
>
> On Sat, Oct 29, 2011 at 3:08 PM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net> wrote:
>> 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
>>
>