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

[Monte Davis]

Make that "(3) Draw on..."

On Wed, Dec 9, 2015 at 1:55 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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