Lake of Birds

Bruno de Albuquerque Furtado · 22 May 2012, 17:43 · from 2012-May.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: meuemaildobruno at gmail.com (Bruno de Albuquerque Furtado)
Date: Tue, 22 May 2012 14:43:47 -0300
Subject: (urth) Lake of Birds
In-Reply-To: <1337705775.8065.YahooMailNeo at web84501.mail.ne1.yahoo.com>
References: <CAHPveYaQo9iYV1+3uHmvZcVpt2p9qgHhk=iNK=NBDOyzP+F27g at mail.gmail.com>
	<F9E76414D3194AAEB84EED9D12732DE2@Rover>
	<4FB90582.4050606 at verizon.net> <4FB91007.80709 at verizon.net>
	<CAHPveYa9+NobVsEhJzqGRzdXjo_hiqJGcP77aJ1uX2J=bXPR_w at mail.gmail.com>
	<9D042E0A8B974564B316446A05B692B6@Rover>
	<4FB9479A.2060209 at verizon.net>
	<CAHPveYYEzfHcVb=4BpCJk13xyQdkfy11kQ3hjDUVyNCwOKQTSw at mail.gmail.com>
	<CAHPveYbTWMj3eOH4kn7FEWPRSd3JjAr89DUxpM6J5nn+EvJzhA at mail.gmail.com>
	<CAHPveYbL7Rk4FaLSkr4q+Jw93TSW9ju+v38-HX2Exs8sJsCsiw at mail.gmail.com>
	<43A29C07-ED16-454B-BF94-DA29B4F0BB9B at gmail.com>
	<4FBB857A.5030806 at verizon.net>
	<CAHPveYZkRF_RLJNFiSCT4KLWaXVfqES6J+Xqjwgfmv+u4NiEwA at mail.gmail.com>
	<CAHPveYYbwfU9nNgVc_LdryJZUOmnLbYfj+MtPSx4MH89GokFSA at mail.gmail.com>
	<1337705775.8065.YahooMailNeo at web84501.mail.ne1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <CAHPveYYgBJkB5VmWsswyYSiqudfDHXR4SbJ2S7UbG91zVJs+Nw at mail.gmail.com>

" Yep. I take it to be a reconstruction myself, but I can't argue against
it being the real thing. "

For me, the problem with it being a reconstruction is that the Commonwealth
is so far in the future, that it's highly unlikely that the Lake is still
there, or that any descriptions of it have survived. Without time travel,
where would an Autarch have gotten Lake Avernus from, anyway?

"In fact I think this is one of those points where I can hear Wolfe
chuckling at his postmodern joke, because it was of course Wolfe himself
who "made the Lake of Birds to look like" Avernus."

Certainly, specially since Wolfe makes sure to indicate that the author is
also part of the story. As I see it, he even includes himself as a
character: the "G.W." that translates a text in "a language that has not
yet achieved existence". It's easy to forget, but the BotNS is supposed to
be a "translation", and furthermore one in which the translator is striving
not to invent words. Therefore names and terms that seem to evoke mythology
for us, such as "Dorcas" and "Cumaean" and "Typhon", may not be the
mythological beings themselves at all, nor even those characters' "real"
names. They might actually be conscious choices by the "translator", who in
his unwillingness to invent new words, ends up making parallels between the
characters of the supposed "original text", and creatures from Earthly
lore. But that should be the subject of a whole other thread.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20120522/e5c14c16/attachment.htm>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net