AtD translation: the title

[David Morris]

I would start with the earliest and most known uses of the phrase in
English: King James Bible:  There it is about storing up power to resist
defeat in a future battle.  "That day" is a time of war in that context.
War against evil.

David Morris

On Thu, Jan 3, 2019 at 11:27 PM Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I'm still busy with other things, but I thought it would be a good idea to
> think about how to translate the title, which I find rather difficult. The
> prevailing Chinese translation I can find is "抵抗白昼", or roughly "Resisting
> Daylight", and I'm not sure it's correct. Here's a passage from an article
> in Chinese written about the book shortly after it was published, which I
> have translated into English below:
>
> 'For Pynchon, the world of daylight is reality, tyranny, a waking
> nightmare, it's what the characters in the book are striving to run away
> from. At the beginning of the book, Pynchon quotes black American jazz
> musician Thelonious Monk: "it's always dark, in other words, we don't need
> light." Light signifies daylight, and the book title suggests that the
> characters are resisting daylight, seeking the refuge of the night, looking
> for transcendence in the fourth dimension, hoping to escape the shackles of
> reality and live according to their own free will.'
>
> The problem here is that the quote from Monk was completely butchered. In
> the original quote, the word "or" means "otherwise", not "in other words".
> I consider this a major mistake, and it weakens the author's argument
> considerably. Of course, the rest of what she said here may still be true,
> but the quote certainly does not help make the case.
>
> Any thoughts and ideas will be greatly appreciated.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>