News from Victor Fet:
To all Carrollians and Nabokovians:
In memoriam Igor Prikhozhay (Sirin) (1987-2025)
Ігор Прихожай
I am very sad to report that a Ukrainian Russophone poet and translator Igor Prikhozhay (Sumy, Ukraine), call name Polyglot, was killed in action in December 2025, fighting the Russian aggression.
Igor adopted the pen name Sirin, in reverence to Nabokov (Vladimir Sirin) who had translated to Russian the first book of Alice (Berlin, 1923)—but not the Looking-Glass.
The latest Russian translation of the Looking-Glass by Igor Sirin was finished in 2020 and is available online at kursivom.ru.
It is a skilled rendering in Nabokov’s style, with an amazingly rich Russian, with quaint words and expressions of early 1900s. I admit that while dozens of older words Igor skillfully used are known to me I would never expect to see them in a modern translation!
Igor’s many inventions are clearly very Nabokovian.
The Looking-Glass insects are three portmanteau butterflies: kolybelianka, neopalimonnitsa, and napolupapollon.
These are complex puns on belianka, the Cabbage White; limonnitsa, the Brimstone; and apollon, the Apollo.
The first one fuses the insect with a baby cradle (kolybel); the second, with the Mosaic burning bush (neopalimaya kupina); and the third blends into a nursery phrase “chto an pol upalo, to propalo” (<food> dropped on the floor is gone’). In reverence to the first Russian translation by Vladimir Azov (1924), Humpy Dumpty is Van’ka-Vstan’ka (a rolypoly doll often made of a blown egg).
All poems were also translated by Igor, including a very good Jabberwocky.
This Looking-Glass is definitely at the level of Nina Demurova’s version (1967, 1978), which is now closer in time to Azov’s than to us.
Igor’s another major project was a translation of Nabokov’s famous Pale Fire (1962) poem (999 lines) from English to Russian, finished in 2023.
His YouTube channel, in Russian, is still online featuring several lectures on his translations of Carroll and Nabokov.
Igor Sirin will be greatly missed as another poet murdered by russia.
"...Это крадутся коты в мешках и котики в мешочках —
то, что приобретают, ничего не зная о полезности
приобретаемого.
Но, кажется, я в этих строчках
и так уже сказал слишком много тайного.
Искусство вообще не имеет ничего общего
со словами, бумагой, культурой и прочая, прочая.
Как Сын Божий ничего не имеет общего с отчимом,
если даже любит его очень-очень.
Для нас искусство — полигон (или палиндром морд,
ни лап),
на котором мы испытываем сверхсекретное оружие." (2021)
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