Jansy: does Dauster’s translation reflect the
impact on Anglophone ears of “and her lovely
young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torn”?
HH’s devotion seems genuinely human, tender, and remorseful at first
reading. Yet there’s that forced alliteration, sign of an academic poet
manqué? (Where have we met one those elsewhere?!). The indelicately
coy euphemism velvety delicate delta
also, I feel, reveals HH’s devious mind. He calls a nipple a nipple but
goes all clinically abstract and geometric when reaching Lo’s lower
attractions. I fancy that this is VN the novelist brilliantly planting
ambiguous clues about HH’s character: on the brink of waxing sincerely,
poetical-lyrical of his deep love, but not quite convincing.
There’s a relevant song by English chanteuse Joyce Grenfell about a
woman in love with her doctor. The doctor praises all her body parts
using the medical terms (“He thought my epiglottis delightful; my
pancreas filled him with glee ...”). But, sad chorus: “He never said
he loved ME!”
Jansy: I also had this song in mind when we discussed (offline, I
think) VN’s use of omoplates
in TOoL. It wasn’t that this word would be more familiar to doctors,
anatomists and Latinate-Romance speakers, than to lay(-about)
Anglo-Saxons (until they reached for their Webster II’s). It’s just
inexplicably FUNNY. Like the Beatles singing I Wanna Hold Your
Metacampus.
To which the Scouse Judy would say, Sod off, yer dirty-minded git!
Stan Kelly-Bootle