GR translation: their furnished dustbin

Mike Jing gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com
Sat Aug 20 05:32:57 UTC 2022


Thanks for the confirmation, Michael.


On Fri, Aug 19, 2022 at 3:43 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Mike Jing wrote:
>
> *V160.12-15, P162.38-41   He’d been out all day, the proletarian husband,
> *>>* out pasting up bills to advertise some happy Max Schlepzig film
> fantasy,
> *>>* while Leni lay pregnant, forced to turn when the pain in her back got
> too
> *>>* bad, inside their furnished dustbin in the last of the tenement’s
> *>>* Hinterhöfe.
> *>>>>* The published translation thinks they were literally living in a
> dustbin,
> *>>* which I find hard to believe. It gotta be a metaphor, right?
> *>>* --*
>
>
> *Deprecatory hyperbole, like in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” when
> Martha walks into their house and says, “What a dump!” (Quoting a
> movie)*
>
> *Or any of a number of evocative nouns used to deprecate a small
> apartment: cracker box, match box, shoe box, broom closet, probably
> lots more.*
>
>
> *Anyhoo, yeah, not a literal dump; not a literal dustbin. *
>
>
> *But that is interesting about dustbins made of brick!*
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>


More information about the Pynchon-l mailing list