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an Irish Gogol as imagined by Nabokov?
an Irish Gogol as imagined by Nabokov?
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How to bring a giant of Russian literature to the Irish stage: start with the lads
Irish Times
I was sitting in the kitchen at about half past six the morning after I started my version, reading Vladimir Nabokov's book on Gogol, when I turned to page 38 and met this: "None but an Irishman should ever try tackling Gogol. ...
"...It already felt like a good day's work. The gentlemen had become the lads, and The Government Inspector stopped being a Russian classic and became something that I was going to write. I had the plot and now, I thought, I had my language, the language of the lads.
MAYOR Gentlemen - lads. I have some shocking news.
I was sitting in the kitchen at about half past six the morning after I started my version, reading Vladimir Nabokov's book on Gogol, when I turned to page 38 and met this: "None but an Irishman should ever try tackling Gogol." I calmed down later but - then, there - I made it my own religious moment: Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was talking to me.
Nabokov was criticising the rigidity of English translations of The Government Inspector . "The English is dry and flat, and always unbearably demure." The English we speak in Ireland might occasionally be flat or dry, even damp, but it's never fucking demure, and Nabokov was giving me licence to use it. The extra elbows we give the grammar, the way we pull open the words and hide things in them, the way a phrase like "Ah now" can fit a thousand occasions from tasting tea to murder; I was going to use all this. I'd make the play more Russian by translating it into Irish! Or something like that."
Roddy Doyle, 2011
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