GR translation: Reminders of impotence and abstraction

[Mike Weaver]

Hi Mike,

I'd say 'impotence' is metaphorical here and 'abstraction' mathematical, 
rather than the very literal translation made by your predecessors. The 
reality of flight is eternal but film, a simulation of motion, lacks 
real power, and the abstractions, when represented by the shape of the 
stone Treppengiebel, erode to nothing.

cheers
Mike


On 15/08/2025 00:37, Mike Jing wrote:
> V567.8-25, P577.3-19   The most persistent of these, which seem to show up
> at the least real times of day, are the stairstep gables that front so many
> of these ancient north-German buildings, rising, backlit, a strangely wet
> gray as if risen out of the sea, over these straight and very low horizons.
> They hold shape, they endure, like monuments to Analysis. Three hundred
> years ago mathematicians were learning to break the cannonball’s rise and
> fall into stairsteps of range and height, Δx and Δy, allowing them to grow
> smaller and smaller, approaching zero as armies of eternally shrinking
> midgets galloped upstairs and down again, the patter of their diminishing
> feet growing finer, smoothing out into continuous sound. This analytic
> legacy has been handed down intact—it brought the technicians at Peenemünde
> to peer at the Askania films of Rocket flights, frame by frame, Δx by Δy,
> flightless themselves . . . film and calculus, both pornographies of
> flight. Reminders of impotence and abstraction, the stone Treppengiebel
> shapes, whole and shattered, appear now over the green plains, and last a
> while, and go away. . . .
>
> The published translation interpreted "impotence" as erectile dysfunction,
> and "abstraction" as extraction. That can't possibly be correct, can it?
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l