GR translation: very selectively blighted rainfall

[Monte Davis]

I don't know - but my god, what a passage! My respect for your ambition in
tackling the translation just went up another notch.

 

From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Mike Jing
Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2012 11:56 PM
To: Pynchon Mailing List
Subject: GR translation: very selectively blighted rainfall

 

P241.34-242.13  Unity gain around the loop, unity gain, zero change, and
hush, that way, forever, these were the secret rhymes of the childhood of
the Discipline of Control-secret and terrible, as the scarlet histories say.
Diverging oscillations of any kind were nearly the Worst Threat. You could
not pump the swings of these playgrounds higher than a certain angle from
the vertical. Fights broke up quickly, with a smoothness that had not been
long in coming. Rainy days never had much lightning or thunder to them, only
a haughty glass grayness collecting in the lower parts, a monochrome
overlook of valleys crammed with mossy deadfalls jabbing roots at heaven not
entirely in malign playfulness (as some white surprise for the elitists up
there paying no mind, no . . .), valleys thick with autumn, and in the rain
a withering, spin-sterish brown behind the gold of it. . . very selectively
blighted rainfall teasing you across the lots and into the back streets,
which grow ever more mysterious and badly paved and more deeply platted, lot
giving way to crooked lot seven times and often more, around angles of
hedge, across freaks of the optical daytime until we have passed, fevered,
silent, out of the region of streets itself and into the countryside, into
the quilted dark fields and the wood, the beginning of the true forest,
where a bit of the ordeal ahead starts to show, and our hearts to feel
afraid . . .

What does "blighted" mean here?

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