DBJ: not to mention the CON as in Brassens’ Roi des Cons — and my extension to CONtext? If we accept ‘con’ in both senses, the pun & our pleasure are doubled.**
I’m ALL excited, having just acquired the less-expensive 2-volume paperback of VN’s translation/commentary of Eugene Onegin. EO was the first Russian text I had at school (1942) 8 years before VN embarked on his stakhanovite labor of LOVE!
I’ve long been shy in asking whether others have asked if TT (“Transparent Things”) also relates to a key theme in the novel: the various parents who transpire (expire) therein? I’ve had fun searching the N-L archives — so many distractions that defeat the aim. E.g., DBJ’s reminder on titling from TT itself:
“ ... the title to which the author had grown so accustomed during the years of accumulating the
written pages that it had become part of each and of all. No, Mr. R.
could not give up the title _Tralatitions_ (70).”
** I also found BB’s email on the con-mal pun dated 15 Feb 2004
Yes, as I discuss in N's PF 81-82, insofar as Conmal has a model it is
definitely Grand Duke Konstantin Konstaninovich Romanov, the son of
Alexander II's younger brother Konstantin Nikolaevich. Peter Zaionchkovsky,
in his time the foremost historian of Russian politics of that period (which
was Dmitri Nikolaevich Nabokov's era as a minister), thought "K.R."'s
translation of Shakespeare "fairly good," but Nabokov's own attitude to KR
is clear in "The Admiralty Spire": "That upper-class milieu-the fashionable
set, if you will-to which Katya had belonged, had backward tastes, to put it
mildly. Chekhov was considered an 'impressionist,' the society rhymester
Grand Duke Constantine a major poet. . . '" (Stories of VN 347). In SM, he
decries as the "worst of all" the weaknesses in his own first poem "the
shameful gleanings from Apuhtin's and Grand Duke Konstantin's lyrics of the
tsïganski type" (ch XI:5, p. 225). I don't think VN's rating of KR as
translator has ever been recorded, but it is likely if anything to be have
been harsher than his judgments of him as poet.
Though I note the "con mal" pun, I had no idea of those details of KR's life
that Mary has discovered. It seems highly likely that VN would have known
the gossip about KR (as a poet, he seems to have been the subject of Nabokov
family fun) through his father and through his grandfather's close
connection with Alexander II and Alexander III.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 9/2/07 19:52, "D. Barton Johnson" <chtodel@COX.NET> wrote:
From: Don Johnson
Quite aside from the lines of inquiry suggested by Carolyn and Jansy re Conmal, has anyone noticed the simple fact that the name consists of CON "to study carefully", "to learn" plus MAL ("bad, badly")--perhaps a reference to his pathetic command of English as witnessed by his Shakespeare translations.