Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0017429, Sun, 7 Dec 2008 19:35:16 -0200

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[NABOKOV-L] VN sighting in Alberto Manguel
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In his 1969 foreword to Poems and Problems Nabokov considered his most recent problems to be "excellent corollaries" to his latest poems. In a different way, I've been enjoying hints of VN novels in his early ( & translated) verses. The 1917 "The Rain Has Flown" made me travel from Vyra to PF and Zembla ("Golden orioles whistle, the rowan is in bloom/ the catkins on sallows are white") and also to TRLSK* : "Downward a leaf inclines its tip/and drops from its tip a pearl." His poem about Lilith suggested to my impressionable ears the name "Lolita"...

Concerning translations, Alberto Manguel wrote: "Vladimir Nabokov, criticized by his friend Edmund Wilson for producing a translation of Eugene Onegin "with warts and all", responded that the translator's business was not to improve or comment on the original [...]
Nabokov apparently believed (though I find it hard to imagine that the master craftsman meant this) that languages are "equivalent" in both sense and sound, and that what is imagined in one language can be reimagined in another..."

Here comes a part that might be of interest for the "skoramis" and, even, the "Lolita" censorship issue: "...classic Greek and Roman texts were recommended for the moral education of women only when purified in translation[...]" Reverend J.W.Burgon, 1884, "preached against allowing women into the university where they would have to study the texts in the original."

Cf. Reading Black for White PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Ver em HTML : stories by the late Marguerite Yourcenar.www.atelieraldente.de/manguel_0h4/pdf/Reading-Black-for-White.pdf -

...................................

TRLSK:..."she left husband and child as suddenly as a raindrop starts to slide tipwards down a syringa leaf. That upward jerk of the forsaken leaf, which had been heavy with its bright burden, must have caused my father fierce pain;

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