Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0012743, Sat, 20 May 2006 13:05:41 -0400

Subject
Re: Nabokovian Pastiche
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Date
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> Two brief spins on Jansy's mellow fruitfulness:

Dear List ( and Stan Kelly-Bootle),

A nominal autumn cheer and two enticing spins away, I was reminded of
J.L.Borges and his list of all the visible works by Pierre Menard who,
unlike most other authors, wanted to write "Don Quixote" by becoming
Cervantes, fighting the moors, thinking in medieval Spanish and, as his epic
progressed, by writing a Menardian Quixote that would bring out precisely,
word for word, Cervantes´s own book.
Perhaps Kinbote had hoped to produce a similar effect on Shade and achieved
a reflexion that functioned like Hermann´s double to Hermann himself, in
VN´s "Despair" - actually a novel that was written both in English and in
Russian in Berlin ( Otchayanie, 1932; Despair, 1936) reproduced itself the
mistery of how a text may simultaneously remain the same and become
something entirely different just by having been expressed in two different
languages.
Jansy

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