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

[Monte Davis]

I read it as "whatever the directors [and implicitly the audience] DESIRED
[but weren't getting from Dietrich and Heim]". So I'd call the published
translation not wrong, but... roundabout.

"Wanted" in the sense of "lacked" has been fading in idiomatic English for
a long time, surviving mostly in "for want of X".

On Sat, Jun 17, 2017 at 5:31 AM, Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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?
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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