NP except tangentially. More remarks on Anniversaries. if interested.

[Jochen Stremmel]

re: your question in PS. At the end of the entry for November 14, 1967 for
example the whole little dialog between the wolf and Cresspahl (the
italicized part, that is not *kursiv* in the original) is in dialect (
*niederdeutsch*):

Dat's nich üm mintwillen: secht de Wulf / – Oewest so'n Schap schmeckt doch
gaud: secht he.
Das geschieht nicht um meinetwillen, sagt der Wolf. / – Aber  so ein Schaf
schmeckt doch gut, sagt er.

The translator chose to give only the "secht" an equivalent in English.
A-and Schap is Schaf, as you see, and not "a little lamb". That's no small
difference if you consider the historical and ecological dimension.


Am Sa., 16. Feb. 2019 um 10:47 Uhr schrieb Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com
>:

> There is a fine scene in the book occasioned by a NYT article
> on the completion of whole new aspects and line arrangements
> of the subway system. The thematic bandwidth here is that the
> 10 year-old girl in the novel is so smart and self-confident she
> can navigate the whole subway system better than anyone.
>
> But the narrator, who is her mother, the one who journalizes the NYT
> stories blended with an overarching narrator-- that stylistic
> free indirect discourse kind of narrator who is Johnson effectively--
> writes of wanting to debunk some subway myths that others---he/she is from
> Germany, of course---
> have about NYC. That everyone is always in a hurry, always rushing about,
> is not true in the subways, he sez. He describes people getting off and on
> and the description can remind Pynchon readers of the dance of anarchy
> under the bridge scene in CoL49. Ways: like a massive dance of entrance and
> egress. No one collides. It's 1967. All self-organize at
> a steady pace to come off flowing around those waiting to go on. The
> finding
> a seat or a place to stand inside allows lots of freedom to flow around
> other people. (Of course,
> contact does often happen here but it's all good usually. {he does have an
> unknown to us friend of Gesine
> report she once found semen on her coat---but we seem free to disbelieve
> that since no substantiating
> details are ever offered.)) Maybe she too partakes of the 'myths' of NY
> subways.
>
> Another comparison beyond the anarchic dance is, of course, the description
> of the traffic leaving LA
> going up that famous--to locals--major highway hill in Inherent Vice and
> merging as smoothly as if such self-organizing, no
> contest of wills, no aggression, is operable. Or was at the end of the
> sixties anyway.
>
>
> PS: And, the English of this book has, occasionally, Pynchon's 'sez' for
> "says' and I'd love to know how
> the translator arrived at that use.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>