Subject: (whorl) Re: Digest whorl.v009.n005

From: Kieran Mullen <kieran at phyast.nhn.ou.edu>
Date: Sat, 31 Oct 1998 17:26:29 +0000

>From: "Greg Neyman" <Greg.Neyman at gte.net>
>Subject: what's up with hy? ... plus building fusion reactors
>Date: Thu, 29 Oct 1998 20:45:48 -0800

[deletia]

>Anyhoop, I've always wondered about Hy ... I mean, Silk is a sophisticated,
>mild-mannered clergyman, and Hy, is basically still a fourteen years old
>girl, and not a well educated one at that ... every time  the two
>interacted, starting with the "wee flea" letter, I got this sensation in the
>pit of my stomach, reminiscent of the one I get when people scratch their
>fingernails across a chalk board ... basically, I could never shake the idea
>that the two were ALL wrong for each other ...

  Well, she is beautiful and passionate, a combination that is pretty
attractive.  If you want a more literary interpretaion, I figured that
it was related to the allegory of the church as the bride of Christ
which is also tied up with Mary Magdelene imagery ("whoring after false
gods" sort of thing).  Silk is a redemtive figure (though not exactly
Christic) and Hy seemed to me to be the worldly person who is loved, for
all of their faults and failings.  Certainly Silk is on a mission to
save her - especially at the very end of the book.

  I'm still not sure I understand the change in Silk that takes place
after he and Hy sleep together and he has a second illumination from
the Outsider.  (It's also been a while since I read that part.)  Silk
certainly seems changed to me.  But the storyline also seems to get
murkier.

  [deletia]

>Finally, a mil plus years after all of us are dust ... why are people STILL
>speaking English?  (or is it explained in Urth, in which case, don't ruin it
>for me ... )

   Didn't you read "Heh-asugh !ktungari" in the original?  Or did you
read its English translation, "Nightside the Long Sun"?   ;-)

              Kieran Mullen

*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
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---

From: Greg Neyman <greg.neyman at gte.net>
Date: Sat, 31 Oct 1998 22:41:22 +0000

Thanks everyone for responding to my questions ... here goes ...

Rostrum -
    Chems must be able to access this information ... it's not like they
shove the raw material in one end of them, and little chems come out (like
bios) ... they've gotta assemble all the stuff themselves, by hand ... it's
true that each has only half the plans, but if a rich person wanted fusion
packs, all he'd have to do is take a male and female chem, and ask them to
build fusion packs for him.  If they were building a child, they'd get to
that step eventually.
    Hey, something just occurred to me ... Hammerstone mentions on many
occasions that chems don't eat at all ... even potto says that, when
alluding to the fact that his tunnel army can go a long time on little
supplies cuz most of them are chems ...  but even fusion packs don't run
forever ... energy has to be input at some time ... I refuse to believe that
Maytera Marble, of Moly, or whatever her name is, who's lived for 300 years,
is still running on original fuel.  Thoughts?
    Thank you Keiran for replying to my question bout Hy ... as for English,
two things ... first of all, as Ranjit points out, French and  Latin are
mentioned BY name .. second, poetic effects like puns and deliberate
alliteration (Overseeing Outsider, marvelous molpe, etc) are bound to the
language they originated in, and would be lost in translation.  Plus note
the use of shag as their "f" word, a throwback of British English.
    that's it for now ...

    /\/\     Greg Neyman               Greg.Neyman at gte.net
___/____\___ http://www.trailerpark.com/siesta/thehat/
  |HE  HA|

---

From: Alex David Groce <adgroce at eos.ncsu.edu>
Date: Sun, 01 Nov 1998 10:50:03 +0000

> the use of shag as their "f" word, a throwback of British English.

	Hmmm...  But, unless we assume that the people of the future are ALSO
speaking British slang that's no longer used in 1999, we have to assume that
the whole thing is a translation, and that slang terms, puns, etc. are
analagous to the original (although, of course, really non-existent because
Wolfe wrote it in English, but means it to be a translation of a fictional
book) ones.  This can be done, although it's very hard (see Douglas
Hofstadter's Le Ton Beau de Marot for a beautiful book on translation issues,
such as these, although I don't recall him really getting into the issue of
translations of fictional books...)
-- 
"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." - John 8:32
--
Alex David Groce (adgroce at eos.ncsu.edu)
Senior (Computer Science/Multidisciplinary Studies in Technology & Fiction)
'98-99 NCSU AITP Student Chapter President
608 Charleston Road, Apt. 1E (919)-233-7366
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~adgroce

---

From: Matthew Malthouse <matthew.malthouse at guardian.co.uk>
Date: Sun, 01 Nov 1998 20:35:05 +0000

> the use of shag as their "f" word, a throwback of British English.

Tolkien, in his exposition upon the Common Toungue and the languages of Middle
Earth, says that he uses English to _represent_ the Common Tounge and as such
names like Merriadoc, Samwise and Brandywine/Branduin have been changed to
"work" rather than leave them in the "original". I haven't got a copy but the
"real" names are given.

I've usually taken this to be a reasonable way of looking at much fantasy/sf
so that the language doesn't intrude. It certainly covers the alliterative
phrases in Whorl and the French & Latin as "analogue foreign/ancient languages
in Urth.

Matthew

---

From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Date: Mon, 02 Nov 1998 08:43:38 +0000

> build fusion packs for him.  If they were building a child, they'd get to

I guess I'm imagining that a male and female get together and start making
the little chem and go into an different mode of consciousness, after
which they couldn't really tell you what they did or how they did it.
All part of Typhon's plan to keep technology out of the wrong hands.

And OF COURSE they would demand privacy.

-Rostrum

---

From: Alex David Groce <adgroce at eos.ncsu.edu>
Date: Mon, 02 Nov 1998 11:53:21 +0000

> And OF COURSE they would demand privacy.

	Yes.  Clearly the whole system has been designed by Typhon to keep
useful technology out of the cargo's hands--not that Typhon did such a hot
job...  It's easy to imagine a program that the Chems can run but can't
consciously access--they can "do it", but are made so they can't figure out how
they do it.  I mean, people can have kids, but for most of history, if you'd
taken two people aside and said--"When you have sex and out comes a kid, how
does that work?  I'm thinking of using hearts for power packs on my new
catapults," well you get the picture.
-- 
"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." - John 8:32
--
Alex David Groce (adgroce at eos.ncsu.edu)
Senior (Computer Science/Multidisciplinary Studies in Technology & Fiction)
'98-99 NCSU AITP Student Chapter President
608 Charleston Road, Apt. 1E (919)-233-7366
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~adgroce

---

From: Derek Bell <dbell at maths.tcd.ie>
Date: Wed, 04 Nov 1998 21:10:20 +0000

In message <199811021653.IAA28654 at lists1.best.com>, Alex David Groce writes:
>job...

	I think Typhon had more than one motive for giving the cargo
lower tech - control is the obvious one, but it might also give them
an advantage if things go badly on the destination planet. A lot of
knowledge and skills that were relatively common a century or two ago
(horseriding, blacksmithing) are scarcer now. They still exist, but if
some emergency occured that wiped out the infrastructure (a large, protracted
non-nuclear war), it would take longer to get back to the level of
technology than if the skills hadn't been cultivated.

	Put it another way, the Amish *may* be Y2K insurance policy! :-)

>It's easy to imagine a program that the Chems can run but can't
>consciously access--they can "do it", but are made so they can't
>figure out how they do it.

	Put it another way - describe how to walk - in detail. Now try
to build a two-legged robot that walks like a human.

>I mean, people can have kids, but for most of history, if you'd taken
>two people aside and said--"When you have sex and out comes a kid,
>how does that work?  I'm thinking of using hearts for power packs on
>my new catapults," well you get the picture.

	;-) I have this image of sex manuals for chems - or would that
be in firmware?

	Tercel

---

From: Derek Bell <dbell at maths.tcd.ie>
Date: Wed, 04 Nov 1998 20:56:03 +0000

>translations of fictional books...)

	You've reminded me of a metaphor that Hofstadter used in one
of his books (I forget which). Translation can be thought of as like
crossing a river on stepping stones. Here's a diagram:
(This is using a non-proportional font)

--------------------------------------------------------------
                o  X                              s

                X o                             s

              X                               s
                  o
                X                               s
                 X  o                            s
--------------------------------------------------------------

	Imagine the "X"s as representing the spirit of a text to be
translated. The "o"s represent words that are close in sense, but
that have a different spirit. Meanwhile, there are stones further along the
river ("s"s) that have a closer spirit, but a spirit "parallel" to the
original.

	I agree entirely with Alex that it's very hard to translate
text that relies a lot on puns, allusions and other wordplay: some
philosophers, such as Heidegger[1], Nietzsche & Derrida[2] have been
difficult to translate because of this.

	Derek

[1]Hmmmm... the 3 philosophers I've chosen are all controversial.

[2]I know there's a huge controversy over whether Derrida's a
philosopher or merely a sophist with a big following, but his writings
do seem to rely on a lot of wordplay, which made, for example, _Glas_
difficult to translate because of French puns ("Hegel" & "eagle")
which don't translate well