Re: GR translation: better, then, “like a noose”

[alice wellintown]

It's quite fragmented too. There are, muddy, shitty, splatterings
here, of the associations that Pudding makes. He fits in well with
this crew because he too has tendencies and we are getting a good
glimpse at how such "tendencies" or gifts or paranoid insights can be
used by narrators to characterize individuals, relationships, forces,
even the war-state itself.  The contrasting word "But" between Pudding
and Pointsman suggests that the relationship is, despite Pudding's
desire to keep things civil, a stressful one. Thinking on the un-civil
relationship, Pudding recalls Pointsman's old man, who was there with
BP in Polygon. He remembers that Pointsman's dad was wounded and that
it took seven hours before they...and it is here that the thoughts
begin to slip in that mud, in that post-traumatic muddied mind, here
when Pudding thinks on the mud and that terrible smell (not Proust's
nostrils remembering the past), and the waiting without a word before
THEY. Who are they? They who came to save men? They who came to cart
dead men out of the mud and the terrible smell? They? On 'they"
Pudding slips and his mind is muddied and he fixes his thoughts on the
lad with ginger hair, but the chap is lost. Lost in muddied memory,
lost in the fields of blood, mud, shit, and they seem to slip away and
inot the next paragraph and into the next war, and are them.

On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 1:40 AM, Mike Jing
<gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 9:34 AM, alice wellintown
> <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> That Pynchon inserts a second simile ("like the gold-lit boarders of
>> consciousness") and then a third simile ("like them" and P italicizes
>> but does not capitalize the word "them") makes matters rather muddy if
>> not shitty for translators.
>
> Muddy indeed.  So what are "them" in "exactly like them" anyway?  So
> far I have always thought it refers to "the gold-lit boarders of
> consciousness", but that doesn't seem sinister enough, does it?