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

[Mike Jing]

Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Laura.

On Sat, Dec 5, 2015 at 1:56 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:

> 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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