GR Translation: she has lost her surface

[alice malice]

"Unreal City,
        Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
        A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
        I had not thought death had undone so many." - The Waste Land 60-64

So Pynchon's question is answered by Eliot and Dante and a string of allusions.

https://sites.google.com/site/eliotanddante/thewasteland

On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 8:25 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think T.S. Eliot is the key to understanding this allusive parable
> (GR.537-548),  and, thus, the  details, the words, etc.  that a
> translator needs to focus on. While I agree with David and Ricky, it's
> difficult to know, without reading a passage in translation, or what
> the translator has done with the rest of the episode, what one word
> means or conveys, or as is often the case with GR, evokes from a
> reader through allusion, figurative language and so forth.
>
> In any event, the very useful Companion of Weisenburger numbers this
> parable Episode 24 and provides a good start on the Thomas Gospel
> allusion here, and others have written about this epigraph, the magic
> nationalism and youthful piety, cult followings, a common enough
> target of Pynchon's satire of the 60's youth, etc,  but it is to the
> question the episode begins with, Who would have thought...so many...?
> an allusion to Eliot's Wasteland, that I would turn to if I wanted to
> translate the language here. Eliot is the source, the parody is of
> Prufrock, and, as mentioned, The Wasteland, and the allusions are
> linked, therefore, to Eliot's allusion to Dante.
>
> In any even, this is the dance of faces and masks, masques....and I
> like Ricky's water reading, one could say water or soap bubbles
> even....
>
>
>
> Prufrock's paralysis follows naturally from this subjectivizing of
> everything. If each consciousness is an opaque sphere, then Prufrock
> has no hope of being understood by others. "No experience," says
> Bradley in a phrase Eliot quotes, "can lie open to inspection from
> outside" (KE, 203). Prufrock's vision is incommunicable, and whatever
> he says to the lady will be answered by, "That is not what I meant at
> all./That is not it, at all" (CP, 6). The lady is also imprisoned in
> her own sphere, and the two spheres can never, like soap bubbles,
> become one. Each is impenetrable to the other.
>
> http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/prufrock.htm
>
> On Thu, Jan 1, 2015 at 8:11 PM, Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com> wrote:
>> V545.30-38  She only raises her eyebrows. It was a shitty thing to say.
>> Remorse, or some late desire to be pure, rush into his blood like dope.
>>        “But—” astonished to feel himself beginning to collapse, like a stack
>> of rifles, around her feet, caught in her gravitation, distances abolished,
>> waveforms unmeasurable, “Katje . . . if I could never betray you—”
>>        He has fallen: she has lost her surface. She is staring at him amazed
>>        “Even if the price for that were . . . betraying others, hurting . .
>> . or killing others—then it wouldn’t matter who, or how many, no, not if I
>> could be your safety, Katje, your perfect—”
>>
>> What does "she has lost her surface" mean?
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l