7300. MONUMENT VALLEY

MONUMENT VALLEY

Mind you, my monument is only

in the superlative, you'd better

understand that first. This

wheelbarrow that I carry, anyway,

does cartwheels whenever it wishes.

If a translator came through here, a

really good one, I wonder what

he'd make of that sentence. Is there

a neutral word enough to conjure

what I mean by 'superlative' in this

sense. Does any other language carry

the force enough to get across the idea

of the wheelbarrow doing cartwheels?

You see, it's all too much, and I really

don' think it's that translatable. How and

why would they try saying I'm 'carrying'

a wheelbarrow? That's something, of

course, you're supposed to push. You see

what I mean. I'd sound like Uwe Johnson,

in one of his dry and droll and really

mixed-up East German novels from

40 years ago. Nothing so hip as the

rest of the ship  -  the East German ship

I mean, that went down on the shoals

of inertia, battered by its

own dead weight.