GR translation: her glassy wastes

[alice wellintown]

The sentence with social eye was not made sense of with parseing; a
few stabs at the dictionary, then reader-response (a stereotypical
male reading), then another attempt, this one nearly hit the mark as
it took a shot at Pynchon's general practice of subverting
expectations (his use of irony)...,  but by considering the tone.
Though the tone may be ironic, it is more than irony we need to
disciver the menaing. Once the tone was discovered the sentence was
worked out.  Tone is primarily conveyed through diction, point of
view, syntax, and level of formality. The diction, the words and
phrases, and specifically "deepening" and  "social eye", though other
words and phrases complicated matters, did not quite make sense
through the simple parse, but required a deepening of tone.

I don't know if you are wasteing your time, but if  I thought you were
wasting mine I wouldn't respond to your quires.
You simply can not translate a huge poem like GR without being a poet.
I'm sure you know this or you are surely wasting your time.




On Sat, Oct 29, 2011 at 10:21 PM, Mike Jing
<gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com> wrote:
> Again, sorry for being thick.  I guess I don't fully understand what
> exactly you mean by "how it makes sense".  Anyhow, I am trying to
> figure out what it might mean in order to aid the translation.  I am
> certainly not directly translating the words into what I think it
> might mean.  There might not be definite answer to these questions,
> but one can't help but wonder.  If you think it's a waste of time, so
> be it.
>
> As I said before, a poetic translation is far beyond my ability.  I am
> not even sure if it's possible.  The bar I have set is much lower.  If
> it means it's not worth reading, well, I'd still give it my best shot.
>
> On Sat, Oct 29, 2011 at 9:24 PM, alice wellintown
> <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 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.
>>
>> The evening sun goin down on the social eye and that surrender does
>> resonate with Faulkner's tale and the song from the father of the
>> blues. But this is only poetic dancers and the dance and has nothing
>> to do with Yeats or Faulkner or W.C. Handy.
>>
>> The social eye is described with a simile, in space (the edge) and in
>> time (ten minutes) about the sun going down. The list after the colon
>> runs into elipsis then the light is said to diminish like certain
>> music.
>>
>> It makes sense on a bunch of levels. How it makes sense, I contend, is
>> far more important to a translator than what it means. A translation
>> of WHAT it means will not be worth reading.
>>
>