Today’s random item from the archives is a memorial article written by Irene Dalichow shortly after Terence’s death in April 2000 for the German alternative spirituality magazine Esotera: Das Magazin Für Neues Denken und Handeln and appears in their July 2000 issue. I would be greatly obliged to any capable German language readers who might be willing to provide a translation of the article in English (which would be much preferable to a Google Translate version)–please email translations to terencemckennaarchives@gmail.com or just post in the comments below.

The title for the piece is simply (translated) ‘Obituary on Psychedelic Researcher Terence McKenna’. The Google translation of the quote attributed to him in the opening photograph is a good example why translation by a real person is still preferable to translation by a computer. There are nuances and idioms that are difficult to translate literally: “I saw the light of eternity shining through every sheet.” I’m sure there is a more evocative rendering of whatever Terence said in English, which was then translated to German, and which we are now attempting to translate back into English. I wonder how close our final English renderings after going through that translation and reverse-translation process come to whatever Terence’s actual original words were. Anyway, there’s also some nice photos of Terence here that I don’t think are otherwise represented online at the moment. So, the community of TM-enthusiasts and meme-makers will no doubt be happy about the addition of those to the general corpus. Unfortunately, the magazine doesn’t give photographer credits. If you shot either of these photos, or know who did, please do get in touch.

[Update: a Facebook member was kind enough to crop and clean up the two photos of Terence, so I thought I’d add them here for your enjoyment. Thanks, Micki!]