Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0022256, Mon, 19 Dec 2011 21:02:11 -0200

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[SIGHTING] A prefatory remark...
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Another out-of-date sighting, from a 2007 Penguin Classic Deluxe edition of "Franz Kafka - Metamorphosis and other stories" newly translated with an introduction by Michael Hofmann. While the translator was writing about "diction, alliteration and the twos and threes of rethorical structures" in the sentence 'Gregor lag breit, verbittert und unbeweglich auf dem Kanapee,' he "caught a brief glimpse of Baudelaire or a spotty teenager supine with cafard. And that in turn reminded [him] of Kafka's suggestion as to how his story might be illustrated. - not, pace Nabokov, with an entomologically or coleopterically correct beetle (attentive readers will notice that [he uses] 'cockroach' in the opening paragraph, because the German Ungeziefer ('vermin') is a flat-out rejection that denies all possible scientific curiosity), but with a picture of a man lying in bed."

In relation to a past posting about Nabokov's commentary to Eugene Onegin, another trip to the book-store allowed me to copy the reference more precisely.
In Nabokov's Russian translation to his Comientárii a Ievguêniu Oniéguinu Aleksandra Puschkina Moscou: NPK "Interval", 1999 the editors substituted the word "bottom." by a dash (Boris Schnaiderman observes that in the Soviet editions a censored word has its first letter printed out to be followed by dots)

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