GR translation: the hollow of an upended trunk

[alice wellintown]

Where P was raised there are still some old trees. Most of them, as we
read in that beautiful and haunting passgae at the end of Fitzgerald's
_The Great Gatsby_, have been cut down, but there are arboritums near
by and I suspect that P, as a boy, spent a good deal of time roaming
the woods, most of which, again, has been paved and made a sprawling
suburban wasteland. Who knows, he may hav efallen in love with trees
on vacations to the North East, or even at Cornell, and if not, as any
New Yorker who has walked the canyon of skyscrapers and then been out
to California to see the giant trees knows, there is something
haunting about these wonderful creatures, something that, as Prairie
reminds us, is comensurate with our capicity to wonder, and though P
may have used a Guide Book here, the sentiment is the same, the
destruction of the trees the water, the land, by Hitler;s builders, by
war, by urban mismanagement and the like...can never quite extinguish
the magic, the wonder, the death in life and life in death, the
shitting Slothrop high on bad water and wafting Reefer and the Tulip
bulb brews, the senctreatism that, of course, mix memory with desire
and breed wonders out of the dead land.

How does a translation deal with the palimsest? How is Black America,
for example,  scratched into the surface, translated?

Better you than me. Yesterday, as I was reading in a Brasillian News
about the pen being lighter than the shovel, an admonishment to the
young in Brasil to go to school, I was inspired to translate Seanus
Heaney's poem, "Digging", where the weight of the pen is much greater
than the spade, but failed. What Heaney call the frontier of writing
is, though a place where languages meet and cross, not a place we can
translate exactly.

 http://awp.diaart.org/poetry/87_88/heaney3.html


http://easylifehacks.blogspot.com/2013/05/history-of-supernatural-destruction.html


On 7/6/13, Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Almost -  the tree is upended - up out of the ground with the roots dangling
> around -  but the hollow is in the tree trunk.   This hollow in the tree is
> where he finds Emil and the two girls with the star.  It must be a big
> hollow - like it was a big tree which fell down an has a big chunked out
> part in its side.    Somewhat bigger than this:
>
> http://feridasbackyard.blogspot.com/2010/10/sometimes-it-takes-tree.html
>
> So Emil and the girls were just sitting in a hollow  in the trunk like it
> was a bench or something - not all hidden down in a little hole like owls.
>
> This is the way I read it,  anyway -  hope you can see what is in my mind.
> (heh)
>
> Bekah
>
> On Jul 6, 2013, at 12:25 AM, Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> OK, that makes sense.  So they are really sitting in a shallow hole in the
>> ground left by the tree, with roots dangling above from the tree trunk
>> lying on its side.
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Jun 30, 2013 at 4:11 PM, Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>> It's out of the ground, for sure - whether it's on its side or not is a ?
>> but I'd say probably - I mean,  how else?
>> http://www.everystockphoto.com/photo.php?imageId=3409766
>>
>>
>> Bekah
>>
>> On Jun 30, 2013, at 9:29 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Yes, but upended trunk is more likely on its side.
>> >
>> > On Sunday, June 30, 2013, Mike Jing wrote:
>> > P371.12-19   Sure enough, in the hollow of an upended trunk, long roots
>> > fringing the scene like a leprechaun outpost, Slothrop finds one Emil
>> > (“Säure”) Bummer, once the Weimar Republic’s most notorious cat burglar
>> > and doper, flanked by two beautiful girls, handing around a cheerful
>> > little orange star. The depraved old man. Slothrop’s on top of them
>> > before they notice. Bummer smiles, reaches up an arm, offering the
>> > remainder of what they’ve been smoking to Slothrop, who receives it in
>> > long dirty fingernails. Oboy. He hunkers down.
>> >
>> > Does this actually refer to a tree trunk that's standing upside down and
>> > partially hollowed out?
>>
>>
>
>