traveling north

Jerry Friedman · 04 Jun 2010, 03:45 · from 2010-June.txt.gz

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From: jerry_friedman at yahoo.com (Jerry Friedman)
Date: Thu, 3 Jun 2010 20:45:41 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) traveling north
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From: Adam Thornton <adam at io.com>
>On Jun 3, 2010, at 5:21 PM, Jerry Friedman wrote:>
>> From: Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com>
>>> ...
>>> 
>>> Some of the "Urth is in a previous universe" is double-talk to cover for the overlooking of the rainbow
>>>covenant.
>> 
>> I kind of suspect that, though I hadn't connected it with the covenant, since I'm in denial about the existence
>> of /TUotNS/.  The bit in /Shadow/ about the artifacts that have survived so many centuries of futurity, and
>> photographing the era's few extant buildings, doesn't seem compatible with the "previous universe" business.
>> (AWB, so I'm sorry if I got the wording wrong.)  Just a joke?

>The scene with the plane in the Garden Of Time does it for me.

Another striking one is that "Verthandi" meant both "now" and "a gift" in some past language.

But I see two possibilities in addition to Mr. Wolfe's starting with the idea that Urth was in our future and retconning it into a past universe.  One is the apparently Brunian possibility that different universes and iterations will have overwhelming similarities for reasons we don't understand (unless Josh does).  In that case many or all of the universes have the names "Robert" and "Marie" at some point ("Marie" coming from "Miriam" even though there was no Mary Mother of Jesus).  Even the saints' names could be names of exemplary people who were equivalent to the saints of our world.

This would also explain why Severian learned that a constitutional representative democracy like ours was the highest form of government--his world once had equivalents to our governments of that type, even if none of the history we know about was anything like that.  (Which would throw an interesting light on the argument about Jesus' effect, if his universe passed through our stage and returned to widespread tyranny and slavery, as ours could.)

The other is that the fictional Wolfe, the translator, says in the appendices that he has used the "closest twentieth-century equivalents" for "yet undiscovered concepts"; he, not Severian, put an athame into Agia's hands.  He uses Latin for a language Severian considers obsolete and presumably changes the images in "a serpent in the last letter but one, and a sword in the last."  So along those lines, maybe the names Robert, Marie, Isangoma, Kimleesoong, and Paris are only his translations of names from the distant past that were unfamiliar to Severian, and maybe the translator even changed the description of the plane so we could recognize it.  Maybe the double meaning of "Verthandi" was different.  Maybe he put in all the clues for South America, for instance by using Quechua to translate a language that Severian says is indigenous, because he knew somehow that the Commonwealth was in South America.

Or maybe this is taking the translator conceit too seriously.

Jerry Friedman

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