Elfriede Jelinek's radio essay on Pynchon from 1976

Thu Feb 1 02:57:58 CST 2018

Naumann is certainly pretentious, but what gives you the idea that it was him who fucked up the title? Actually Die Enden der Parabel was published in 1981; Naumann didn't start to work for the Rowohlt publishing house before 1985 ...

> Laut Übersetzer Thomas Piltz wurde dieser Titel gewählt, weil sich der Originaltitel Gravity’s Rainbow nicht befriedigend ins Deutsche übertragen ließ. (eng. 'According to translator Thomas Piltz this title was chosen because the original title Gravity's Rainbow could not be translated into German in a satisfying way') <

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Enden_der_Parabel

What Piltz here says is - see the French and the Dutch example - obviously nonsense. He  simply didn't get it respectively couldn't find any meaning that made enough sense to him. But that doesn't give the translators the right to withhold the beautiful original title to the German readership.

Not that the title is easy to decipher. We had several debates about it here. It doubtlessly has religious connotations. The story from the Old Book  - "I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth" (KJB, Genesis 9:13) - and Simone Weil's La pesanteur et la grâce (Gravity and Grace) were mentioned in this context. But there's another, more concrete meaning of the title Gravity's Rainbow, that was first hinted at by Friedrich Kittler: During the blast-off the V2's exploding liquid fuels were generating a rainbow. Well, I don't know if this goes through as an adequate technical description (Monte?), but I remember having read more than once that Kittler always insisted that this concrete meaning is the most important one.

Do Pynchon's letters, as far as they are known yet, contain thoughts about the title Gravity's Rainbow?

Am 01.02.2018 um 06:14 schrieb Jochen Stremmel:
I'm sure that Jelinek/Piltz would have translated it literally. The German title sounds like Michael Naumann, a pretentious asshole.

Am 31. Januar 2018 um 11:12 schrieb Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de<mailto:lorentzen at hotmail.de>>:

On Pynchon in general and Jelinek's (co)translation of Gravity's Rainbow. I nominate "Blocksbergsausgelassenheit" as word of the week ...

I still do not understand why Jelinek/Piltz didn't translate the beautiful title literally. (Actually Die Enden der Parabel sounds quite unattractive.) The French --- L'Arc-en-ciel de la gravité --- did it, the Dutch --- Regenboog van Zwaartekracht --- too. So why can't we have Der Regenbogen der Schwerkraft?

https://www.swr.de/swr2/programm/sendungen/essay/swr2-essay-am-29-januar-2018-nachricht-ueber-thomas-pynchon/-/id=659852/did=20867062/nid=659852/21g0z9/index.html

„Pynchon würde ich nicht noch einmal übersetzen. Nicht, dass ich ihn nicht genial fände. Es ist ein Witz, dass er den Nobelpreis nicht hat, und ich habe ihn. Ich halte Pynchon für einen der bedeutendsten lebenden Schriftsteller, weit vor Philip Roth übrigens. Ich kann doch den Nobelpreis nicht kriegen, wenn Pynchon ihn nicht hat! Das ist gegen die Naturgesetze.“ Gab Elfriede Jelinek 2004 in einem Interview zu Protokoll.

Bereits 1976 hatte sie für die Essay-Redaktion des SWF einen Text über diesen Pynchon und ihre Übersetzung seines opus magnum „Die Enden der Parabel“ geschrieben, der hier in der SWR-Archiv-Reihe wiederholt wird.

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