GR translation: he had written it down for her, as sailors do

[Jochen Stremmel]

re: hustle: 3 [ no obj. ] N. Amer. informal engage in prostitution.

re: as sailors do – how does that matter for the translation?

2017-06-11 4:24 GMT+02:00 Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>:

> V351.33-352.7, P357.1-16   The girl may have stood on some promontory
> watching the gray ironclads dissolve one by one in the South Atlantic
> mist, but even if you’d like a few bars of Madame Butterfly about
> here, she was more probably out hustling, or asleep. She was not going
> to have an easy time. Tchitcherine had left her with a child, born a
> few months after the gunner went down in sight of the steep cliffs and
> green forests of Tsushima, early in the evening of 27 May.
>        The Germans recorded the birth and the father’s name (he had
> written it down for her, as sailors do—he had given her his name) in
> their central files at Windhoek. A travel pass was issued for mother
> and child to return to her tribal village, shortly after. A census by
> the colonial government to see how many natives they’d killed, taken
> just after Enzian was returned by Bushmen to the same village, lists
> the mother as deceased, but her name is in the records. A visa dated
> December 1926 for Enzian to enter Germany, and later an application
> for German citizenship, are both on file in Berlin.
>
> Here the aside "as sailors do" is not serious, is it?
>
> Also, what does "hustling" refer to here, most likely?
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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