GR translation: the black face keeping watch from some winter embankment

[jochen stremmel]

Just wanted to tell you as much. Some of the most beautiful sentences of
American prose are missing their main verb, like this one:

Robert Jordan watching Pablo and as he watched, letting his right hand hang
lower and lower, ready if it should be necessary, half hoping it would be
(feeling perhaps that were the simplest and easiest yet not wishing to
spoil what had gone so well, knowing how quickly all of a family, all of a
clan, all of a band, can turn against a stranger in a quarrel, yet thinking
what could be done with the hand were the simplest and best and surgically
the most sound now that this had happened), saw also the wife of Pablo
standing there and watched her blush proudly and soundly and healthily as
the allegiances were given.

An "is" where you did suggest it would have made Pynchon's sentence much
more ordinary.
Jochen


2013/6/2 Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>

> Nevermind.  It was obviously meant to be just the way it was.  I think I
> understand.
>
> And "gaming" means "playing games", of course.
>
>
> On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 12:39 AM, Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> P346.40-347.9     . . . Facing east, the black face keeping watch from
>> some winter embankment or earth-colored wall of a fine-grained stone into
>> low wastes of Prussia, of Poland, the leagues of meadow waiting, just as
>> Tchitcherine grows each month now more taut and windsmooth at his westward
>> flank, seeing History and Geopolitics move them surely into confrontation
>> as the radios go screaming higher, new penstocks in the night shudder to
>> the touch with hydroelectric rage, mounting, across the empty canyons and
>> passes, skies in the day go thick with miles of falling canopies, white as
>> visions of rich men’s heavenly džurts, gaming now and still awkward, but
>> growing, each strewn pattern, less and less at play. . . .
>>
>> It seems to me that this sentence is missing its main verb.  This may be
>> intentional, but grammatically, it would make more sense to read " the
>> black face _is_ keeping watch from some winter embankment . . . just as . .
>> ."  Or maybe I am just reading it wrong.
>>
>> Also, what is the meaning of "gaming" here in "gaming now and still
>> awkward"?
>>
>
>
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