GR translation: A touch of whatever it was they wanted, though

Mike Jing gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com
Sat Jun 17 04:31:44 CDT 2017


V393.33-394.3, P400.315   She’s passing through: another of the
million rootless. Looking for her daughter, Bianca, bound east for
Swinemünde, if the Russians and Poles will let her. She’s in
Neubabelsberg on a sentimental side-trip—hasn’t seen the old studios
in years. Through the twenties and thirties she worked as a movie
actress, at Templehof and Staaken too, but this place was always her
favorite. Here she was directed by the great Gerhardt von Göll through
dozens of vaguely pornographic horror movies. “I knew he was a genius
from the beginning. I was only his creature.” Never star material, she
admits freely, no Dietrich, nor vamp à la Brigitte Helm. A touch of
whatever it was they wanted, though—they (Slothrop: “They?” Erdmann:
“I don’t know. . . .”) nicknamed her the Anti-Dietrich: not destroyer
of men but doll—languid, exhausted. . . .

The published translation interpreted the word "wanted" here as
"lacked", and "they" to mean Dietrich and Brigitte Helm. That's not
right, is it?
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