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

[Monte Davis]

I can't resist adding that "Understand it isn’t... and nothing begins, and
nothing ends" is one of countless Pynchon sentences which

(1) couldn't be any other writer alive

(2) for all their syntactic complication are extraordinarily vivid,
muscular and somehow *clear* in intent -- "where they'rte going" -- even
before you begin to work out the details

aw on -- and add new layers to -- more of the book's Big Thematic Metaphors
(death embodied in earthly strata and cities, the dead as spiritual essence
*and* empty shells, controlled electric current vs natural lightning, the
Pan as Arcadian nature *and* Pan-ic terror) than most authors can manage in
a chapter.

Once again, Mike, what you are doing is flatly impossible (but that's OK,
what Pynchon did was, too) and thank you so much for doing it.

On Wed, Dec 9, 2015 at 1:20 PM, Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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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