The translator of ADA into Portuguese has been
making curious mistakes and there was a coincidence about it yesterday.
You sent me a message about a painting where you thought there was a
girl, and yet, the depiction represented a boy ( "but epicene", you then
added ).
Soon after my daughter came for a visit and I was telling her
how the Brazilian translator altered some attributions of gender in
the sentences and she exclaimed: " Is he having epicene
problems?" ( the word "epicene" is not part of our regular vocabulary and
here it refers chiefly to grammatical problems!
)
In Portuguese we donīt have the neutral " it "
or "the" or " a/an " articles ( the French have the "įa" but they also need
to write "le boeuf et la vache" thus pointing their gender).
In
Portuguese it is always necessary to write, for example: "o menino" (
the boy ) and " a menina" , or "o trigre & a tigresa" ( the
tiger & the tigress ) but several animals are "epicene" ( the
designation covers both sexes which can be either feminine: for example, "the
snake" turns it into a "she" ( a cobra ) - or masculine: "the
crocodile" or "the jaguar" becomes "o crocodilo" or "o jaguar" ( one word only
for both for male and female crocodiles or jaguars or snakes ).
There is some internal pressure in VNīs text in ADA
that requires the translator to put turn the masculine into a feminine in
what would normally be simply an "epicene designation" so, Ada in
Portuguese is teeming with "epicene problems"!
In one of my letters to Akiko I discussed with her
an analogy between Van and Hamlet but I havenīt yet understood how it
functions. The word "Voltemand Hall" anagramatically contains the
name Van, as well as Hamletīs, and Vanīs pseudonym is Voltimand, Voltemand,
Mandalov .Nabokov point out this Hamlet/Voltemand proximity
quite clearly in the chapter in which Van encounters Lucette and
she then delivers Adaīs letter to him. There is even an inversion of
directions about which the writer notes something like: " the problem
is solved if the sign is transparent..."