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Re: bloopers and traps for translators
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I swore to myself I would have nothing whatsoever to do with this particular
topic. I must be a serial topic invader.
1. I never believed that swooners was meant to be a cognate for any
particular item of clothing, it was simply another of Humbert¹s elisions of
passion and cultural confusion. People who are pretty good at language make
up terms like this all the time.
2. Jansy¹s ³playful good hearted trap for translators² comes kind of close
to my meaning, but I do not believe in trying to catch Nabokov peeking
through the text all the time. If any one is a playful trap-setter, it is
Humbert. We must never confuse an author¹s voice with the voices of
protagonists or other characters. Never.
3. However dicey Lolita¹s history may have been it would have made no
difference whatsoever to the word choices this most professional of authors
made in his works. I don¹t think Nabokov had anachronistic expectations. He
knew that his choice of the word swooners was the right choice for Humbert
to make. The artist¹s decision is the law, and you don¹t look back. I doubt
that Nabokov sucked the tip of his Ticonderoga very often, thinking either
of ways to trick translators, or how he would look to posterity, of of how
much money he would make. Nabokov created art, and when artists do that they
do it completely, so that the characters they create can live. Humbert is
NOT Nabokov.
4. The word for howler is not blooper. Blooper is a term derived strictly
from television and it is approximately 30 to 45 years old. It was first
used when legitimate actors in television shows fluffed or flubbed, or
³blew² their lines. This last term has fallen out of favor in North America,
for reasons that may be obvious to some of us. This howler-bloomer
controversy should be recognized as international and not merely colloquial.
I have heard an Australian man refer to a howler as a clanger. The main
difference between howlers, bloomers, and clangers is that they are all, to
an extent ³intellectual² solecisms. Today, bloopers has degenerated to
audience-supplied video tapes of such hilarious scenes as granny falling out
of the pickup truck while it travels at 60 mph on the gravel road, or
granddad's pants falling down at his brother¹s funeral, or dancing couples
falling into a vat of hot chicken gravy.
Andrew ³please don¹t hit me² Brown
On 8/31/06 11:32 PM, "Carolyn Kunin" <chaiselongue@EARTHLINK.NET> wrote:
>
>
> Therefore, I think that my hypothesis still holds in that, when writing about
> "swooners" in "Lolita", Nabokov was mainly setting a playful, good-hearted
> trap for his translators
>
> Dear Jansy,
>
> Aren't you giving Nabokov rather anachronistic expectations? Lolita's early
> history was quite dicey, and her very survival was doubtful. Nabokov had no
> way to foresee Lolita's eventual gale-force success.
>
> Not until after that unexpected phenomenon could he conceive of laying traps
> for translators, surely?
>
> Carolyn
>
> p.s. I think you are still a little confused about these bloomers - - the word
> for howler is blooper.
>
>
>
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