Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0011940, Tue, 20 Sep 2005 19:54:36 -0700

Subject
Fwd: Re:Interview in Libération
Date
Body
I am impressed by the number of people who celebrated Lolita's fiftieth birthday
on the forum and somewhat ashamed of my personal contribution or rather of what
was made of it by the stupid Frech journalist of Libération who interviewed me
on September 1. The interview came out on September 19; in the meantime I had
been traveling around Portugal and had no opportunity to edit the article. The
result is appalling. Antoine de Baecque completely rewrote what I said,
attributing to me things I never said or never claimed to have discovered, like
the date blunder in Lolita. Please don't bother to locate the article, and my
apology to those who already have read it.

The French journalists are so busy writing about Houellbech that they have not
paid attention to Lololita's birthday.

I take this opportunity to mention that on September 18, I sat on the doctoral
jury of Monica Manolescu in Paris who was defending an excellent dissertation
entitled "Jeux de mondes: La construction de l'ailleurs chez Vladimir Nabokov"
which, among other things, studies at great lengths Humbert's arctic expedition
with reference to Melville.

When I was teaching at the Sorbonne, I tried to teach a course on Lolita (this
was in 1976), but a senior colleague, who was a specialist of Whitman (!),
asked me to choose another novel, fearing that "Lolita might shock our coeds"

A new edition of my translation of Lolita is about to come out: I spent a great
deal of time correcting my text and trying to make it more faithful to the
original. This is the edition which will be published in the second volume of
the Pléiade.

Best,

Maurice Couturier

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