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Re: I began badgering Dmitri Nabokov ...
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I can forgive Ron Rosenbaum's schoolboy giggle over "Sometime diverted their
poor balls are tied ... " in the Lover's Complaynte. As a 12-year old Scouse
Bassanio I struggled in vain to deliver "Or whether, riding on the balls of
mine / Seem they in motion?" with a straight face while all around were
rolling in the aisles. We know that the Elizabethans enjoyed their naughty
puns (some rather lost on us, like 'will' for penis) but in the common use
of 'balls' for 'eye-balls,' I don't detect any sly, gonadic innuendo. Even
in the tennis-balls insult (Henry V), I think that only modern noses sniff a
hint of the testicular! So, joking aside, Rosenbaum's negative gut-reaction
("Those cartoonish 'balls' did it for me") seems misplaced as a clue to
authorship. Incidentally, the Vickers/Duncan-Jones debate has been a regular
feature in the TLS over recent months, so it has certainly reached out
beyond the ivory-towers.
But to a matter more directly related to VN. John Derbyshire cited VN's
"One cannot hope to understand an author if one cannot even pronounce his
name."
This seems one of VN's teasing off-the-cuff opinions that cannot be strongly
defended (even if one ignores the gender implication)! Nabokov himself
finally accepted that most of his devoted readers could not be expected to
master the finer points of Russian phonetics, not to mention the problems of
transliteration. The idea of a uniquely correct pronunciation (of any word!)
over space-time is quite untenable. Non-natives do their best, each language
bristling with its own challenges. An international conference of Adam Smith
scholars will hear many risible approximations to that final 'th.' Worse
still, we have NO IDEA how Shakespeare (or its diverse spellings) was
pronounced -- almost certainly the vowels came out differently as you moved
south! Then, even worser, was it Kikero, Sisero, or Chichero? And how would
that affect our understanding of all those pre-tape-recorded writers?
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 12/06/2008 21:45, "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:
>
> <http://www.slate.com/>
>
> Complete article at following URL:
> http://www.slate.com/id/2193477/pagenum/all/#page_start
>
> the spectator: Scrutinizing culture.
> Are Those Shakespeare's "Balls"?
> Should "A Lover's Complaint" be kicked out of the canon?
> By Ron Rosenbaum
> Posted Thursday, June 12, 2008, at 3:15 PM ET
>
>
>
> If I can be said to have a favorite kind of column, it's one in which I can
> bring to your attention an exciting literary developmentone whose importance
> has not received the notice it deserves outside the ivory towerand then tell
> you what to think about it.
>
> Or, to put it more gently, interactively, Webbily: suggest what questions you
> might want to ask about it. It's true some don't find this approach gentle. I
> began badgering Dmitri Nabokov back in 2005 to make a decision about
> publishing The Original of Laura (his father Vladimir's final unfinished work,
> which V.N. had asked his heirs to destroy) and renewed my pressure in two
> <http://www.slate.com/id/2181859/> recent <http://www.slate.com/id/2185222/>
> Slate columns. When Dmitri finally gave in and announced he would save the
> manuscript, he attributed his decision to make a decision at least in part to
> that "impatient writer, Ron Rosenbaum."
>
> OK, I'm not generally known as a patient sort, but here's an important
> literary developmenta Shakespearean controversythat I've patiently waited
> for someone outside academia to make a fuss over for more than a year! I've
> been holding back because of my peripheral personal involvement in the matter.
> But now I think the time has come to get youthe educated reading
> publicinvolved.
>
> [ ... ]
>
> Should we risk the posthumous "wrath" of Shakespeare, famous for having put a
> curse in his epitaph for anyone daring to move his bones? Or has he been
> suffering from four centuries of wrath at having the awful "Complaint"
> attributed to him? Would he have wanted it burned, like Vladimir Nabokov, if
> he'd had a chance? Is Jonathan Bate risking the curse or the blessing of the
> bard?
>
> I don't think there's a way of answering this with certainty. Almost every
> method of analysis has its drawbacks. Vickers and Duncan-Jones rely on
> literary history and yet come to different conclusions. (I'm sure Vickers has
> an answer for each of Duncan-Jones' objections.) Nonetheless, I tend to
> believe thatat a certain point, having read and reread Shakespeare
> attentively for a good portion of my lifeone can go by the aesthetic
> equivalent of a gut check. Those cartoonish "balls" did it for me. Unless, of
> course, the whole thing is parody, but it just feels too leaden for that.
> (Slate readers who want to conduct their own gut checks can go to the RSC Web
> site <http://www.rscshakespeare.co.uk/poems.html> , where the poem is at least
> preserved in pixels, and decide for themselves.)
>
> [ ... [
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