Last evening's New York Lottery numbers were 123 and 5597.
The 123 suggests page 123 of DeLillo's Underworld .
(For some context, see searches in this journal for Los Muertos and for Pearly Gates of Cyberspace .)
The 5597 suggests the birth date of literary theorist Kenneth Burke— May 5, 1897.
These two topics—
- the afterlife (in the Latin-American rhythms context of yesterday's Shine On, Edmundo)
- and Kenneth Burke
are combined in Heaven's Gate, a post from April 11, 2003—
Babylon = Bab-ilu, “gate of God,” Hebrew: Babel or Bavel.”
|
Modern rendition |
Kenneth |
The above observations on lottery hermeneutics, on a ridiculously bad translation, and on Latin rhythms did not seem worth recording until…
The New York Times Book Review for Sunday, October 30, arrived this morning.
From page 22, an extract from the opening paragraph of a review titled…
Making Sense of It
David Bellos offers a new approach to translation.
The theory of translation is very rarely— how to put this?— comical. Its mode is elegy, and severe admonishment…. You can never, so runs the elegiac argument, precisely reproduce a line of poetry in another language…. And this elegiac argument has its elegiac myth: the Tower of Babel, where the world's multiplicity of languages is seen as mankind's punishment— condemned to the howlers, the faux amis , the foreign menu apps. Whereas the ideal linguistic state would be the lost universal language of Eden.
See also Saturday's Edenville.