Subject
Fw: [NABOKV-L] QUERY: Fiume, Riviera,
"flumine",SK-B and "The Defense" Luzhin.
"flumine",SK-B and "The Defense" Luzhin.
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Date
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Re: [NABOKV-L] QUERY: J Mello re: Fiume, Riviera, "flumine"Stan Kelly-Bootle: VN's teasing playfulness with words does cross breathtaking borders (but stopping short at the "incoherent midden heaps of Dublin"), yet his greatness as a writer surely transcends this transient "icing on the cake." His sublimely inventive, richly detailed characters, plots, and (dare we say it?) socio-political insights are available in all languages for all generations. That is to say, the important, Universal bits are translatable! Preferably, each age will receive fresh translations since natural languages are forever on the move semantically, and more slowly, grammatically.
Jansy: I agree with S K-B's point about the translatability of VN's "universal bits" and that "preferably each age will receive fresh translations"...But I cannot join him when he states that VN's teasing playfulness is merely a "transient 'icing on the cake' ". The signifying matrix remains, even when specific words were mishandled and mis-translated.
VN's polisemic and irradiating "interlingual" games are an integral part of his style (at least ever since he started to write in English) and echo his "universal bits".
The recently revised translation of "The Defense", now edited in Brazil ( "A Defesa Lujin") prompted me to re-read his novel and luck had it that I then realized that my love-affair with Nabokov didn't begin with "Lolita", but with "The Defense" & inspite of my total ignorance of chess. There are few verbal fire-works and shimmer in this "Russian"novel. It seems to me that his "electrical shocks" derived at that time from the invisible forces of chess and not from explosive words and sentences that chimed in hismetafictional arguments and transcendent intuitions.
VN wrote in his foreword: Of all my Russian books, The Defense contains and diffuses the greatest 'warmth' - which may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract chess is supposed to be. In point of fact, Luzhin has been found lovable even by those who understand nothing about chess and/or detest all my other books. He is uncouth, unwashed, uncomely - but as my gentle young lady (a dear girl in her own right) so quickly notices, there is something in him that transcends both the coarseness of his gray flesh and the sterility of his recondite genius. When he describes this young lady ( "nobody yet had been able to dig down to what was most captivating about her: this was the mysterious ability of her soul to apprehend in life only that which had once attracted and tormented her in childhood, the time when the soul's instinct is infallible; to seek out the amusing and the touching: to feel constantly an intolerable, tender pity for the creature whose life is helpless and unhappy; to feel across hundreds of miles that somewhere in Sicily a thin-legged little donkey with a shaggy belly is being brutally beaten..." ) I think he is also speaking about himself ( his ecstatical writing, his compassion, his unbounded sensitivity, even his "transcendental vision")
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Jansy: I agree with S K-B's point about the translatability of VN's "universal bits" and that "preferably each age will receive fresh translations"...But I cannot join him when he states that VN's teasing playfulness is merely a "transient 'icing on the cake' ". The signifying matrix remains, even when specific words were mishandled and mis-translated.
VN's polisemic and irradiating "interlingual" games are an integral part of his style (at least ever since he started to write in English) and echo his "universal bits".
The recently revised translation of "The Defense", now edited in Brazil ( "A Defesa Lujin") prompted me to re-read his novel and luck had it that I then realized that my love-affair with Nabokov didn't begin with "Lolita", but with "The Defense" & inspite of my total ignorance of chess. There are few verbal fire-works and shimmer in this "Russian"novel. It seems to me that his "electrical shocks" derived at that time from the invisible forces of chess and not from explosive words and sentences that chimed in hismetafictional arguments and transcendent intuitions.
VN wrote in his foreword: Of all my Russian books, The Defense contains and diffuses the greatest 'warmth' - which may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract chess is supposed to be. In point of fact, Luzhin has been found lovable even by those who understand nothing about chess and/or detest all my other books. He is uncouth, unwashed, uncomely - but as my gentle young lady (a dear girl in her own right) so quickly notices, there is something in him that transcends both the coarseness of his gray flesh and the sterility of his recondite genius. When he describes this young lady ( "nobody yet had been able to dig down to what was most captivating about her: this was the mysterious ability of her soul to apprehend in life only that which had once attracted and tormented her in childhood, the time when the soul's instinct is infallible; to seek out the amusing and the touching: to feel constantly an intolerable, tender pity for the creature whose life is helpless and unhappy; to feel across hundreds of miles that somewhere in Sicily a thin-legged little donkey with a shaggy belly is being brutally beaten..." ) I think he is also speaking about himself ( his ecstatical writing, his compassion, his unbounded sensitivity, even his "transcendental vision")
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm