SB: "I'm particularly
intrigued that Richard Burton's translations have come up, since I offered his
translation of Catullus as one possible source of the phrase "light of my life"
in the latest Nabokovian--although I preferred Philip Sidney's
Astrophil and Stella in the end."
JM: Just to report a coincidence,
it's such a Nabokovian thing after all. A grandkid was watching Walt
Disney's movie "Bolt" ( spoken in Portuguese) and, when I popped my head
in to call her for lunch, at the exact moment, I heard the sentence: "luz
da minha vida" ( light of my life).
When I later tried to check the original in English
(using the internet)the exclamation was different: "I have a little
girl at home, love of my life." So, the coincidence was only valid for
Brazilian ears! Perhaps the word "love" was transformed into "luz" (light)
following an "euphonic" caprice, although its rendering could be
considered of the same order of "reality" as Shade's
forthcoming manuscripted cards...
G. Shafiee: "One needs only to read a few pages of
Burton’s translation to see the parasitical relationship of the author to the
host text. Like Kinbote, Burton tries to control the reader's response
through insistent reminders of his views at the foot of nearly every
page."
JM: I cannot now find the source in
which I read that it was Dante Alighieri who first made it into a habit to
annotate his poems to control the reader's response. I only remembered this item
because (for a very short while) I entertained the hypothesis that Kinbote
might have been fashioned after Dante ( Are there any Dante scholars in the
room?)