Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0014351, Mon, 11 Dec 2006 15:52:05 -0200

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Re: dichten or Close Etymologies of the Koestlerian Kind
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A. Bouazza: ...As to Freud's British translator, one should know the context to decide in which sense Freud used the word verdichten.

Jansy: Freud's verdichtung/Strachey's condensation has a very special context: Freud's entire work, but more easily checked in his "Traumdeutung" ( cf. chapters VI or VII).
Later, with Lacan, the emphasis bt. the similarity of Freud's "condensation" and the linguistic understanding of "metaphor" etches the issue even most elegantly .

Nabokov, in Bend Sinister prefered to describe "dream producers" as..." usually several, mostly illiterate and middle-class and pressed by time" , but thankfully his animistic trait which I've been coming across over and over in the first chapters of this novel drops down and off in in VN's other novels to become brilliant metaphors.

He sounds as at his most "foreign" in BS - and rather close to Sheridan sometimes. Orthopterist, Amphiphorical or in sentences like: "your words are conundrums to me...utter misinformation had bedeviled him" ( that's how I must sound to JF's ears when joking about virgo and virago).
Even an apparent play with nursing a phone-call is too familiar to be pleasing to my foreign ears: "attend to the telephone" ( in a romance language familiar to me we say "atender o telefone" ) or "two polite paletoted dachsunds" where we doubt if dachshunde are kind pale tot[t]ers or dogs dressed with "farsical anachronistic" suitjackets ( paletot).
Time is strange,Adam Krug must sign a paper after midnight and after being taken home wishes his driver "good evening'...
Certain surprises suggest many languages intermingling, not simply Russian and American-English.. "Ember dialled fluently." and 'the torrent was loosed again' ( my old Penguin edition may be at fault). Lots of expressions must represent "mirok words" ( Penguin, page 18)...

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