a pine smell

The curtness of Elfriede Czurda in Rosmarie Waldrop's 2012 translation, Almost 1 Book | Almost 1 Life (a combination of two books originally published in '78 and '81), is something like Beckett's mutter in How It Is, which is a tone of resistant exhaustion (if that's a reasonable interpretation) that seems to wear down the speaker after even the shortest utterance; then the strength or insensitivity is regained for a moment, the next few sentences uttered, then the gap again with an implied rebuilding below as the speaker hardens themselves or takes another breath towards perishing. Czurda is not – now that I think about it I am not considering very much of Czurda here, mainly pieces like Paranoia I: the rearrangement of words in that style, whereas elsewhere it is more Stein, not rationed.

But the speaker in Paranoia I has a constellation of fairytale things: a virgin, some wolves, and a monk's robe; appearing in different configurations. And all through the book there is a love of storytime adventure details: the journey through a jungle in all that matters is the road, the vision of the grandfather galloping across the steppe on a gelding, the desire for some sort of joy, fun, or figuration, the speaker not really despairing, or at least they are rescuing or distracting themselves.

claudius takes the rifle's pine smell and hands it to the virgin paranoia is contagious even a pine smell could have contacted it and rushed to the pater and borrowed his robe the robe would have hidden it since the hole had been mended

Meanwhile Vernon Watkins was not as much like Edward Thomas as I thought he'd be: more rapt in glory effects, more in love with heavenly endings, messages of hope, etc; softer, as if the lure of that romantic distraction or variety is too much for both of them, and it coaxes them off into metaphor, Czurda corkscrewing inwards with it, Watkins working to stream out (I like Czurda very much, I want to add --).