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[NABOKOV-L] To bowlderize or not too bowld ....
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Jim, the Lasdun's examples you directed us to ( http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,2196751,00.html ) are pretty amazing. There seems to be a "real" Carver ( gone religious) and Lish's creation of a Carver.* As I see it (with no other recommendation except a common reader's audacity), the issue at stake is "un-authored great art" versus "authorial true artsiness." ** Must readers be intent on feeling the unadulterated individual soul, animus, style in a writer, or are they sometimes entitled to be treated to filtered art? This issue is as undecidable as getting used to the Parthenon wearing its full original colors.
And ...I'll discipline myself to avoid associating "Solus Rex," not to PF or to BS, but to TOoL's leftovers, since it is clear that, as regards these two Russian chapters, Nabokov still cherished "the dust and debris" of his old fancies. In a way his position marks a point against editorial interventions, like Lish's. Another point relates to Nabolkov's opinions about "translation" (ie: they shouldn't improve the original. The specific words he applied to this kind of translation escape me now, but there's a posting about Georg Steiner, in the N-L Archives, where they are mentioned).
Here are his words (cf. final notes in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov): "The winter of 1939-40 was my last season of Russian prose writing. In spring I left for America, where I was to spend twenty years in a row writing fiction solely in English. Among the works of those farewell months in Paris was a novel which I did not complete before my departure, and to which I never went back. Except for two chapters and a few notes, I destroyed the unfinished thing. Chapter 1, entitled "Ultima Thule," appeared in 1942 (Novyy Zhurnal, vol. 1, New York). It had been preceded by the publication of chapter 2, "Solus Rex," in early 1940 (Sovremennyya Zapiski, vol. 70, Paris). The present translation, made in February 1971 by my son with my collaboration, is scrupulously faithful to the original text, including the restoration of a scene that had been marked in the Sovremennyya Zapiski by suspension points [...] one thing is clear enough. In the course of evolving an imaginary country (which at first merely diverted him from his grief, but then grew into a self-contained artistic obsession), the widower becomes so engrossed in Thule that the latter starts to develop its own reality [...] His art helps him to resurrect his wife in the disguise of Queen Belinda, a pathetic act which does not let him triumph over death even in the world of free fancy [...]That is about all I can make out through the dust and debris of my old fancies[...] Prince Adulf, whose physical aspect I imagined, for some reason, as resembling that of S. P. Diaghilev (1872-1929), remains one of my favorite characters in the private museum of stuffed people that every grateful writer has somewhere on the premises [...] Freudians are no longer around, I understand, so I do not need to warn them not to touch my circles with their symbols. The good reader, on the other hand, will certainly distinguish garbled English echoes of this last Russian novel of mine in Bend Sinister (1947) and, especially, Pale Fire (1962); I find those echoes a little annoying, but what really makes me regret its noncompletion is that it promised to differ radically, by the quality of its coloration, by the amplitude of its style, by something undefinable about its powerful underflow, from all my other works in Russian."
Returning to the hazel-filbert issue, I got a delightful color-rendering in another set of Nabokovian first lines( "La Veneziana"): "...It was about five in the afternoon. The ripe sunshine dozed here and there on the grass and the tree trunks, filisred through the leaves, and placidly bathed the court, which had now come alive. "
............................................................
* "Gordon Lish, cut the stories radically before publication, jettisoning as much as half of the original in some cases, reshaping them and changing the way they ended. Carver wasn't at all pleased with the results and begged Lish to withdraw the book from publication...Certainly he seems to have felt uncomfortable with the Carver persona created by the collaboration (if that's the word) with Lish. And judging from these earlier versions, as well as his post-Lish work, that persona is at best only a partial reflection of Carver's actual temperament as a writer.
As precedents for this kind of restoration, Stull and Carroll cite, among other things, Plath's Ariel, and Lawrence's The Lost Girl. Personally I think The Waste Land would be more apposite. As Pound's cuts did with Eliot's original, Lish's audacious slashings liberated Carver's densely expressive artistry from the superfluous connective tissue of his rather mediocre rumination... But in literature there's no right and wrong, only good and bad. Pragmatism trumps "authenticity", a dubious notion at the best of times. Auden didn't want his great poem September 1939 included in his Collected, but at this point it belongs to us, not him, and we have no intention of letting it disappear. The great taxi scene in Conrad's The Secret Agent is said to have been partially written by Ford Maddox Ford, but we wouldn't dream of cutting it in the name of "authenticity" or anything else. Bowdler's Shakespeare on the other hand... Etcetera."
** - I remember the famous answer given by a student in his term-paper on "The Odyssey":
"The Odyssey was not written by Homer but by another guy with the same name."
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And ...I'll discipline myself to avoid associating "Solus Rex," not to PF or to BS, but to TOoL's leftovers, since it is clear that, as regards these two Russian chapters, Nabokov still cherished "the dust and debris" of his old fancies. In a way his position marks a point against editorial interventions, like Lish's. Another point relates to Nabolkov's opinions about "translation" (ie: they shouldn't improve the original. The specific words he applied to this kind of translation escape me now, but there's a posting about Georg Steiner, in the N-L Archives, where they are mentioned).
Here are his words (cf. final notes in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov): "The winter of 1939-40 was my last season of Russian prose writing. In spring I left for America, where I was to spend twenty years in a row writing fiction solely in English. Among the works of those farewell months in Paris was a novel which I did not complete before my departure, and to which I never went back. Except for two chapters and a few notes, I destroyed the unfinished thing. Chapter 1, entitled "Ultima Thule," appeared in 1942 (Novyy Zhurnal, vol. 1, New York). It had been preceded by the publication of chapter 2, "Solus Rex," in early 1940 (Sovremennyya Zapiski, vol. 70, Paris). The present translation, made in February 1971 by my son with my collaboration, is scrupulously faithful to the original text, including the restoration of a scene that had been marked in the Sovremennyya Zapiski by suspension points [...] one thing is clear enough. In the course of evolving an imaginary country (which at first merely diverted him from his grief, but then grew into a self-contained artistic obsession), the widower becomes so engrossed in Thule that the latter starts to develop its own reality [...] His art helps him to resurrect his wife in the disguise of Queen Belinda, a pathetic act which does not let him triumph over death even in the world of free fancy [...]That is about all I can make out through the dust and debris of my old fancies[...] Prince Adulf, whose physical aspect I imagined, for some reason, as resembling that of S. P. Diaghilev (1872-1929), remains one of my favorite characters in the private museum of stuffed people that every grateful writer has somewhere on the premises [...] Freudians are no longer around, I understand, so I do not need to warn them not to touch my circles with their symbols. The good reader, on the other hand, will certainly distinguish garbled English echoes of this last Russian novel of mine in Bend Sinister (1947) and, especially, Pale Fire (1962); I find those echoes a little annoying, but what really makes me regret its noncompletion is that it promised to differ radically, by the quality of its coloration, by the amplitude of its style, by something undefinable about its powerful underflow, from all my other works in Russian."
Returning to the hazel-filbert issue, I got a delightful color-rendering in another set of Nabokovian first lines( "La Veneziana"): "...It was about five in the afternoon. The ripe sunshine dozed here and there on the grass and the tree trunks, filisred through the leaves, and placidly bathed the court, which had now come alive. "
............................................................
* "Gordon Lish, cut the stories radically before publication, jettisoning as much as half of the original in some cases, reshaping them and changing the way they ended. Carver wasn't at all pleased with the results and begged Lish to withdraw the book from publication...Certainly he seems to have felt uncomfortable with the Carver persona created by the collaboration (if that's the word) with Lish. And judging from these earlier versions, as well as his post-Lish work, that persona is at best only a partial reflection of Carver's actual temperament as a writer.
As precedents for this kind of restoration, Stull and Carroll cite, among other things, Plath's Ariel, and Lawrence's The Lost Girl. Personally I think The Waste Land would be more apposite. As Pound's cuts did with Eliot's original, Lish's audacious slashings liberated Carver's densely expressive artistry from the superfluous connective tissue of his rather mediocre rumination... But in literature there's no right and wrong, only good and bad. Pragmatism trumps "authenticity", a dubious notion at the best of times. Auden didn't want his great poem September 1939 included in his Collected, but at this point it belongs to us, not him, and we have no intention of letting it disappear. The great taxi scene in Conrad's The Secret Agent is said to have been partially written by Ford Maddox Ford, but we wouldn't dream of cutting it in the name of "authenticity" or anything else. Bowdler's Shakespeare on the other hand... Etcetera."
** - I remember the famous answer given by a student in his term-paper on "The Odyssey":
"The Odyssey was not written by Homer but by another guy with the same name."
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
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/