The only point I would take issue with:

“There is also a ‘missing’ name in the holy trinity; we hear of the Increate (Holy Ghost) and the Pancreator, but never of any son.”

It makes sense that GW, as a Catholic, would involve the Trinity. But I don’t see why it is that the Pancreator and Increate should be considered different aspects of God. That which is the only Creator, the one who created everything (Pancreator) is itself the only thing which is not created (Increate). Thus, I would consider these two epithets to be synonymous.

This is not to say that Severian does not represent Christ. He isn’t Christ as perfection, as it’s obvious he is a sinner, but rather Christ’s human nature.

Aaron, the fountain is another example of the joyous ambiguity that GW is a master of…
I hadn’t thought of the White Fountain, but of course that seems more likely than my suggestion.

I knew about it from “Urth-Man Extraordinary” — no, wait . . . looking over my annotated copy, the original only goes up to 1990. Well, then. I knew there were Urth-related articles and reviews in Vector, most of which I have never seen.

Anyway, I like the article, especially the part about the mirror book and the eclipse on its spine. That’s an excellent example of the Melville-like layering of symbols going on in the Urth Cycle (if not all of Wolfe’s work).

=Michael=

Thank you for posting, and thank you for your kind words!

=Michael=

I apologize for the long delay in responding–I only just saw the note you posted months ago!

You asked if the terms are all in katakana, or if some are translated. I believe that some, or maybe many, are translated.

Here, I’ve gotten the books out again. “League” is in katakana (p. 15), but then we get “exultant” (p. 17). This is written in kanji, three characters “high,” (something), “person,” and the furigana (“how to pronounce the kanji” subtitle) in katakana reads “eguzarutanto.” That seems complicated to me, but there it is.

The next two, angel (18) and bear (19), are both katakana. As is Erebus (19).

Well anyway, there’s a quick look from the beginning of the text!

Thanks for this article. Having lived in Japan, I was impressed by the variety of translations available there.

Were all the terms you list written out in katakana (for the non-Japanese speaker, this is the form of writing used, among other things, to signify that a word is a loan word from another language)? Or were some of them somehow translated into native Japanese words?

The Japanese are, of course, great borrowers and synthesizers of culture. I lived there for three years and finally began to see what at first seem like cultural thefts — such as loan words — as phenomena unto themselves. Especially in learning the language, the student has to understand that the loan word has its own meaning in Japanese instead of clucking his tongue over how the word has been mispronounced, or, worse, misappropriated, its “true” range of meanings elided or lost. The loan word is embedded in the culture, and becomes Japanese, and recognition of the word’s origin in the Japanese learner’s native language shouldn’t deceive him — he has to learn it as a Japanese word.

All this is to say that there is typically a judgmental aspect on the learner’s side that sees Japanese cultural borrowing as sad, or childish, or the product of something lacking in Japanese culture. But that judgment hopefully recedes as the Japanese learner settles in.