GR translation: her glassy wastes

[Mike Jing]

In the case of "social eye", I think I misread the sentence from the
very beginning, so did many others, and that was why it was so hard to
make sense of it.  Once it was read differently, the meaning became
much more clear, and the translation easier.  Poetic resonance is all
well and good, but even poetic language has to make sense on some
level.

On Sat, Oct 29, 2011 at 7:06 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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
>>>
>>
>