GR translation: turned aside, stepped down, rectified or bled to ground

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Yes, it's all about industrial processing of electricity. Though rectifying is a little paradoxical here. A rectifying circuit converts AC current into DC current. But direct current is the natural state of electricity. Alternating current is a by-product of electrical generators. So one could argue that rectifying is a form of restoring to a natural state.

Laura


-----Original Message-----

From: Mike Jing 

Sent: Dec 5, 2015 12:00 AM

To: Pynchon Mailing List 

Subject: GR translation: turned aside, stepped down, rectified or bled to ground



“How can my story be sadder than that?” Shameless girl, she isn’t humoring him, she’s actually flirting with him now, any technique her crepe-paper and spider-italics young ladyhood ever taught her, to keep from having to move into his blackness. Understand it isn’t his black-ness, but her own—an inadmissible darkness she is making believe for the moment is Enzian’s, something beyond even the center of Pan’s grove, something not pastoral at all, but of the city, a set of ways in which the natural forces are turned aside, stepped down, rectified or bled to ground and come out very like the malignant dead: the Qlippoth that Weissmann has “transcended,” souls whose journey across was so bad that they lost all their kindness back in the blue lightning (the long seafurrows of it rippling), and turned to imbecile killers and jokers, making unintelligible honks in the emptiness, sinewed and stripped thin as rats—a city-darkness that is her own, a textured darkness in which flows go in all directions, and nothing begins, and nothing ends. But as time passes things get louder there. It is shaking itself into her con-sciousness.

I assume the words "stepped down, rectified or bled to ground" are used in the sense pertaining to electricity, is that correct?  I guess it's obvious, but the published translation reads something like "(are) stepped upon, transformed, even wounded and bleeding lying on the ground", which is not what was intended at all.
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