traveling north

Adam Thornton · 04 Jun 2010, 13:10 · from 2010-June.txt.gz

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From: adam at io.com (Adam Thornton)
Date: Fri, 4 Jun 2010 08:10:21 -0500
Subject: (urth) traveling north
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On Jun 3, 2010, at 10:45 PM, Jerry Friedman wrote:

> 
> 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.

Along this line of reasoning lies _A Deepness In The Sky_, with horrible spider-monsters whose tales are told as if they were hobbits.

Adam
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