AtD translation: invested in, invested by

[Mike Jing]

Now I understand what you are talking about. I did have to consult the OED
just to be sure. You were using sense #4, which I was aware of but wasn't
confident about. As for sense #5, it's not labelled archaic or obsolete
yet, and the most recent quote is from 2014. Of course that doesn't mean
much, as it may well be on its way out.

It is probably true that most readers were unaware of this sense of the
word when they encountered this passage. I certainly wasn't when I read
through the book the first three or four times before I worked my way up to
this point in my translation. The problem is that a lot of things are
glossed over in casual reading. And I agree with Mark in thinking that the
author probably knew what he was doing. I have encountered instances of
near-archaic senses being used in other places in P's work, and in my
translation of Joseph Heller's work as well.

The real question, of course, is what other sense would fit. I myself find
none of the others makes sense when I think it through. Others may disagree
though.


On Fri, Feb 5, 2021 at 3:26 PM Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com> wrote:

> Mike,
>
> your reading isn't primitive at all, in fact it's quite elaborate; but
> perhaps you were being ironic – then I agree.
>
> As for the Investing of Words by the Passing of Time I'm sure you know it
> from the Chinese language as well: in German and English words can grow old
> and lose their original meaning or get new ones. Let's take "to invest". I
> would imagine that the OED terms the meaning "to surround a place in order
> to besiege it" as archaic, meaning that nobody speaking today would use it
> in that sense.
>
> To make myself perfectly clear: I believe that no reader of that passage
> you quoted in your first mail had the meaning "besieged by the siegecraft
> of Time and its mysteries" in mind. Including the author.
>
>
>