Not P but Moby-Dick (11)
Mike Jing
gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com
Tue Sep 19 08:30:20 UTC 2023
I see where the problem is now.
In both cases, the semicolon was throwing me off, and everyone of the
previous translators. The problem is that the part before the semicolon was
not a complete sentence at all. So I was treating "To have been Belshazzar,
King of Babylon" as an exclamation of some sort, thus my question, while in
fact, it's just the first part of a compound subject. Similarly, "that
man’s unchallenged power and dominion of individual influence for the time"
is also part of the subject of the verb "transcends". All the previous
translations got it wrong. I saw the second one right away, but just now
realized how the first sentence should be read.
On Mon, Sep 18, 2023 at 3:14 AM Mike Jing <gravitys.rainbow.cn at gmail.com>
wrote:
> The following excerpt is from Chapter 34:
>
> Wherefore this difference? A problem? Perhaps not. To have been
> Belshazzar, King of Babylon; and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but
> courteously, therein certainly must have been some touch of mundane
> grandeur. But he who in the rightly regal and intelligent spirit presides
> over his own private dinner-table of invited guests, that man’s
> unchallenged power and dominion of individual influence for the time; that
> man’s royalty of state transcends Belshazzar’s, for Belshazzar was not the
> greatest.
>
> First, what does "To have been Belshazzar, King of Babylon" indicate? Is
> it a wish, or something else entirely?
>
> Second, in the last sentence, are "that man’s unchallenged power and
> dominion of individual influence for the time" and "that man’s royalty of
> state" in parallel? Melville’s liberal use of the semicolon is confusing
> sometimes.
>
>
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