Subject
Re: Pale Fire's Conmal + TT Title
From
Date
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DBJ: not to mention the CON as in Brassens¹ Roi des Cons and my extension
to CONtext? If we accept con¹ in both senses, the pun & our pleasure are
doubled.**
I¹m ALL excited, having just acquired the less-expensive 2-volume paperback
of VN¹s translation/commentary of Eugene Onegin. EO was the first Russian
text I had at school (1942) 8 years before VN embarked on his stakhanovite
labor of LOVE!
I¹ve long been shy in asking whether others have asked if TT (³Transparent
Things²) also relates to a key theme in the novel: the various parents who
transpire (expire) therein? I¹ve had fun searching the N-L archives so
many distractions that defeat the aim. E.g., DBJ¹s reminder on titling from
TT itself:
³ ... the title to which the author had grown so accustomed during the years
of accumulating the
written pages that it had become part of each and of all. No, Mr. R.
could not give up the title _Tralatitions_ (70).²
** I also found BB¹s email on the con-mal pun dated 15 Feb 2004
Yes, as I discuss in N's PF 81-82, insofar as Conmal has a model it is
definitely Grand Duke Konstantin Konstaninovich Romanov, the son of
Alexander II's younger brother Konstantin Nikolaevich. Peter Zaionchkovsky,
in his time the foremost historian of Russian politics of that period (which
was Dmitri Nikolaevich Nabokov's era as a minister), thought "K.R."'s
translation of Shakespeare "fairly good," but Nabokov's own attitude to KR
is clear in "The Admiralty Spire": "That upper-class milieu-the fashionable
set, if you will-to which Katya had belonged, had backward tastes, to put it
mildly. Chekhov was considered an 'impressionist,' the society rhymester
Grand Duke Constantine a major poet. . . '" (Stories of VN 347). In SM, he
decries as the "worst of all" the weaknesses in his own first poem "the
shameful gleanings from Apuhtin's and Grand Duke Konstantin's lyrics of the
tsïganski type" (ch XI:5, p. 225). I don't think VN's rating of KR as
translator has ever been recorded, but it is likely if anything to be have
been harsher than his judgments of him as poet.
Though I note the "con mal" pun, I had no idea of those details of KR's life
that Mary has discovered. It seems highly likely that VN would have known
the gossip about KR (as a poet, he seems to have been the subject of Nabokov
family fun) through his father and through his grandfather's close
connection with Alexander II and Alexander III.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 9/2/07 19:52, "D. Barton Johnson" <chtodel@COX.NET> wrote:
> From: Don Johnson
>
> Quite aside from the lines of inquiry suggested by Carolyn and Jansy re
> Conmal, has anyone noticed the simple fact that the name consists of CON "to
> study carefully", "to learn" plus MAL ("bad, badly")--perhaps a reference to
> his pathetic command of English as witnessed by his Shakespeare translations.
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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to CONtext? If we accept con¹ in both senses, the pun & our pleasure are
doubled.**
I¹m ALL excited, having just acquired the less-expensive 2-volume paperback
of VN¹s translation/commentary of Eugene Onegin. EO was the first Russian
text I had at school (1942) 8 years before VN embarked on his stakhanovite
labor of LOVE!
I¹ve long been shy in asking whether others have asked if TT (³Transparent
Things²) also relates to a key theme in the novel: the various parents who
transpire (expire) therein? I¹ve had fun searching the N-L archives so
many distractions that defeat the aim. E.g., DBJ¹s reminder on titling from
TT itself:
³ ... the title to which the author had grown so accustomed during the years
of accumulating the
written pages that it had become part of each and of all. No, Mr. R.
could not give up the title _Tralatitions_ (70).²
** I also found BB¹s email on the con-mal pun dated 15 Feb 2004
Yes, as I discuss in N's PF 81-82, insofar as Conmal has a model it is
definitely Grand Duke Konstantin Konstaninovich Romanov, the son of
Alexander II's younger brother Konstantin Nikolaevich. Peter Zaionchkovsky,
in his time the foremost historian of Russian politics of that period (which
was Dmitri Nikolaevich Nabokov's era as a minister), thought "K.R."'s
translation of Shakespeare "fairly good," but Nabokov's own attitude to KR
is clear in "The Admiralty Spire": "That upper-class milieu-the fashionable
set, if you will-to which Katya had belonged, had backward tastes, to put it
mildly. Chekhov was considered an 'impressionist,' the society rhymester
Grand Duke Constantine a major poet. . . '" (Stories of VN 347). In SM, he
decries as the "worst of all" the weaknesses in his own first poem "the
shameful gleanings from Apuhtin's and Grand Duke Konstantin's lyrics of the
tsïganski type" (ch XI:5, p. 225). I don't think VN's rating of KR as
translator has ever been recorded, but it is likely if anything to be have
been harsher than his judgments of him as poet.
Though I note the "con mal" pun, I had no idea of those details of KR's life
that Mary has discovered. It seems highly likely that VN would have known
the gossip about KR (as a poet, he seems to have been the subject of Nabokov
family fun) through his father and through his grandfather's close
connection with Alexander II and Alexander III.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 9/2/07 19:52, "D. Barton Johnson" <chtodel@COX.NET> wrote:
> From: Don Johnson
>
> Quite aside from the lines of inquiry suggested by Carolyn and Jansy re
> Conmal, has anyone noticed the simple fact that the name consists of CON "to
> study carefully", "to learn" plus MAL ("bad, badly")--perhaps a reference to
> his pathetic command of English as witnessed by his Shakespeare translations.
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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