Last thoughts (?!) on Platonov 'Never to return'

[Robert Chandler]

Dear Patricia and all,

I'm struck, above all, by the extent of the general disagreement, even among
native speakers.  This seems to say something about the subtlety of the
relationship between Platonov's work and grammatical rules.

И Жачев уполз в город, более уже никогда не возвратившись на котлован.
For what it is worth, my guess (intuitive - I am no linguist) is that the
oddity here arises from the fact that, whatever you expect after 'более уже
никогда' (bolee uzhe nikogda ne), it is NOT a perfective gerund.

Even if I am wrong here, and even if the question about Platonov's Russian
has not been resolved to everyone's satisfaction, discussing it in public
nearly always does help us to find something appropriate in English.  I'm
happy now with this: 'And Zhachev crawled away into the city, nevermore
returning to the foundation pit.'  The more obvious pathos of our earlier
'never to return to the foundation pit' seems un-Platonovan.  And another
version, 'never again to have returned to...' seems irritatingly fussy.

So: MANY THANKS to everyone who has contributed to this debate!

Robert

> To follow up on Wayles Brown's comments, the
> current language for characterizing gerunds/verbal
> adverbs is that
> 
> -they no longer have tense, only aspect, so in the
> contemporary language they are only imperfective
> or perfective;
> 
> -they are specifically timeless in morphology,
> unlike their tensed counterparts (present or past
> tense forms);
> 
> -because of the variety of adverbial and tensed
> phrases that they can replace, all that we can say
> is that the clause with gerund/verbal adverb is
> *subordinate* to the action of the main clause.
> 
> It would seem that gerunds/verbal adverbs might
> particularly appeal to Platonov and his
> non-linearity.  I am not sure that you can come up
> with a comparable subtlety in English for this
> particular construction.
> 
> Pat Chaput
> Harvard University
> 

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