GR translation: bone-deep laborings up impossible grades

[Mike Jing]

Just for laughs, the published translation turned it into something like
"people risking their lives working at incredible heights".



On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 2:09 AM, David Payne <dpayne1912 at hotmail.com> wrote:

>
> I think it's along the lines of the idioms "work it to the bone" or "work
> your fingers to the bone", which mean working very hard.
>
> I think that the basic image is of pain cutting deep into a person.
>
> (On the off chance that anyone here is as dumb as me, "la-borings" means
> "laborings" -- split across a line break in the original text.)
>
> On 7 Mar 2013 01:41:44 -0500, Mike Jing wrote:
> >
> > P260.25-40 A week later he’s in Zürich, after a long passage by
> > train. While the metal creatures in their solitude, days of snug and
> > stable fog, pass the hours at mime, at playing molecules, imitating
> > industrial synthesis as they are broken up, put together, coupled and
> > recoupled, he dozes in and out of a hallucination of Alps, fogs,
> > abysses, tunnels, bone-deep la-borings up impossible grades, cowbells
> > in the darkness, in the morning green banks, smells of wet pasture,
> > always out the windows an unshaven work crew on the way to repair some
> > stretch of track, long waits in marshaling-yards whose rails run like
> > layers of an onion cut end to end, gray and desolate places, nights of
> > whistles, coupling, crashes, sidings, staring cows on the evening
> > hillsides, army convoys waiting at the crossings as the train puffs by,
> > never a clear sense of nationality anywhere, nor even of belligerent
> > sides, only the War, a single damaged landscape, in which “neutral
> > Switzerland” is a rather stuffy convention, observed but with as much
> > sarcasm as “liberated France” or “totalitarian Germany,” “Fascist
> > Spain,” and others. . . .
> >
> > What is "bone-deep" trying to invoke here?
> >
>
>
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