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

[Mike Jing]

OK, just wanted to make sure I wasn't out of my mind. Thanks, Monte and David.


On Sat, Jun 17, 2017 at 7:50 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree with Monte.  Her willingness to be whatever they wanted makes her a
> "doll," implying without a will of her own.
>
> David Morris
>
> On Sat, Jun 17, 2017 at 6:32 AM Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l