Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0017064, Wed, 17 Sep 2008 18:07:37 +0100

Subject
Re: [NABOKOV-L] [QUERY] Sebastian Knight
Date
Body
JM: By coincidence, my online French tutor (Laura Lawless [sic]) has just
been discussing that mysterious misleading spurious subjunctive ³ne² without
the ³pas² as a ³single negative² == a ³positive!² Things ain¹t never no how
what they seem, innit?!

Elle a peur qu¹il NE revienne (She¹s afraid that he WILL come back)

But:

Elle a peur qu¹il NE revienne PAS (She¹s afraid that he WON¹T come back!)

This quirk reminded me of Tu me manque which means I MISS YOU! While Je te
manque means YOU MISS ME!
Getting this wrong may damage your love life.

Your example IS different, of course, and may be just Mallarme¹s
uncharacteristic translational glitch. BUT I¹ld welcome a NATIVE Francophone
opinion in view of the above counter-intuitive idioms. We are always at
risk with CONDITIONALS involving mutliple negations! IF NOT-X THEN NOT-Y is
NOT the same as IF X THEN Y! I recall a related debate on a debatable VN
³syllogism² in Pale Fire. ³No free man needs a God; but was I free?²

The English

³do ought [anything/something] unseemly² == ³do naught [nothing] seemly²

would negate as

³do naught [nothing] unseemly² == ³do ought [anything/something] seemly²

Here we have ³do ought unseemly² translated as ³NE font RIEN d¹INCOVENANT²
which I take to mean the OPPOSITE, viz ³do NAUGHT unseemly.² Cox¹s English
would require ³font QUELQUECHOSE d¹incovenant?² With this reading, it would
seem that Mallarme has indeed negated the IF clause and followed it by
negating the THEN clause. This is still an ERROR (of logic), but perhaps not
the error (of language) that Jansy reported!

Stan Kelly-Bootle

On 16/09/2008 17:05, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:

> I - J.A. In my Library of America edition of the book, pg. 53, the title to
> Goodman's biography reads The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight, with the article
> out front; JM: ...on page 4..."Tragedy of Sebastian Knight."
> JM: On the other hand ( or cuff?) in vthe New Directions ed, we find
> "Tragedy.."with no araticle in the first chapter, b ut "The Tragedy" ( twice)
> in the seventh chapter. And the same occurs in The Library of America (Boyd's
> 1941-1951), on page 47 we get "The Tragedy"...
> Indeed, a proliferating oversight. Perhaps...
> Something equally intriguing occurred with Mallarmé, in one of his
> translations intended to "abolish randomness from writing."
> Instead of George W.Cox's original euripidean "If the gods do ougth unseemly,
> then they are not gods at all", in Mallarmé this came out as "Si les dieux ne
> font riend d'incovenant, c'est alors qu'ils ne son plus dieux du tout" ( If
> the god don't do ought unseemly, then. In French a "ne" was added!)
>


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