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Birthdays, celebrations and Don Quixote: "the right to be wrong"
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Re: [NABOKV-L] Seeking information on Nabokov's poem "Shakespeare" (1924)?Stan Kelly-Bootle:... Einstein did indeed make many famous errors. When corrected by his peers, he acknowledged his mistakes, but added the claim: I've earned the right to be wrong! VN, the great novelist/memoirist, has earned similar rights.
JM: The present Shakespearean thread has been linked to Vladimir Nabokov's birthday. Like Shakespeare's, the anniversary of Cervantes' death is celebrated in the same day, April 23.
To this calendric correction, I'll be adding a few lines concerning Cervantes and Nabokov'sa "similar rights"
Here's a resumé from the Wikipedia:
"Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His magnum opus, Don Quixote, considered the first modern European novel...His influence on the Spanish language has been so great that the language is often called la lengua de Cervantes ("the language of Cervantes"). Cervantes died in Madrid on April 22, 1616, but he was buried on April 23, 1616, when it is used to celebrate this death.
To honor the date that both Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare died, UNESCO established April 23 as the International Day of the Book. However, Shakespeare and Cervantes died on different days: Shakespeare on April 23, 1616 of the Julian calendar that was used in England and Cervantes April 23, 1616 of the Gregorian calendar that was used in Spain. Since the Gregorian calendar was ten days ahead of the Julian, Cervantes actually died ten days earlier than Shakespeare, whose date of death according to the Gregorian calendar was May 3, 1616."
A few excerpts, related to Nabokov, from "Translating Cervantes: Una vez más"* - by Burton Raffel. The author argues against Vladimir Nabokov's negative appraisal of the Don Quixote, while taking into account the bad quality of the translations which had been available to Nabokovat that time and, also, to promote his new translation of Cervantes' major work.
"Vladimir Nabokov, whose critical opinions tend to be both absolute and absolutely untrustworthy, did not think much of Don Quijote. If I do not misread his words, he could and did read the novel only in translation, which explains a good deal, for virtually all the translations into English have been at best (in Nabokov's words) only "more or less adequate,"... Nabokov wrote not as a critic, with the responsibilities and also with the relative humility of the scholar, but as a practicing novelist of unlimited ambition and boundless arrogance...."The [emigré Russian] author that interested me most," he records in a memoir, Speak Memory, "was naturally Sirin ...Among the young writers produced in exile he turned out to be the only major one" [Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory (N.Y.: Grosset and Dunlop, 1951), p. 216.]
All of Nabokov's considered judgments, accordingly, have most emphatically to be considered in the light of who framed them, and why:
"Don Quixote has been called the greatest novel ever written. This, of course, is nonsense...the book lives and will live through the sheer vitality that Cervantes has injected into the main character of a very patchy haphazard tale, which is saved from falling apart only by its creator's wonderful artistic intuition that has his Don Quixote go into action at the right moments of the story"**
It may not seem of any particular significance, in a discussion focussed on translating Don Quijote, to show how easy it would be for so brilliant a writer as Vladimir Nabokov, reading Cervantes' book only in English translation, to be so incredibly wrong about the greatest novel ever written. Nabokov's motivations are indeed of no relevance, here, but since translations may well have been the source for his error, and for similarly flagrant misjudgments by others, both living and dead, the inadequacies of those translations are extraordinarily relevant."
...................................................................................
* - From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America13.1 (1993): 5-30. Copyright © 1993, The Cervantes Society of America
**- Nabokov, Lectures, pp. 27-28.
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JM: The present Shakespearean thread has been linked to Vladimir Nabokov's birthday. Like Shakespeare's, the anniversary of Cervantes' death is celebrated in the same day, April 23.
To this calendric correction, I'll be adding a few lines concerning Cervantes and Nabokov'sa "similar rights"
Here's a resumé from the Wikipedia:
"Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His magnum opus, Don Quixote, considered the first modern European novel...His influence on the Spanish language has been so great that the language is often called la lengua de Cervantes ("the language of Cervantes"). Cervantes died in Madrid on April 22, 1616, but he was buried on April 23, 1616, when it is used to celebrate this death.
To honor the date that both Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare died, UNESCO established April 23 as the International Day of the Book. However, Shakespeare and Cervantes died on different days: Shakespeare on April 23, 1616 of the Julian calendar that was used in England and Cervantes April 23, 1616 of the Gregorian calendar that was used in Spain. Since the Gregorian calendar was ten days ahead of the Julian, Cervantes actually died ten days earlier than Shakespeare, whose date of death according to the Gregorian calendar was May 3, 1616."
A few excerpts, related to Nabokov, from "Translating Cervantes: Una vez más"* - by Burton Raffel. The author argues against Vladimir Nabokov's negative appraisal of the Don Quixote, while taking into account the bad quality of the translations which had been available to Nabokovat that time and, also, to promote his new translation of Cervantes' major work.
"Vladimir Nabokov, whose critical opinions tend to be both absolute and absolutely untrustworthy, did not think much of Don Quijote. If I do not misread his words, he could and did read the novel only in translation, which explains a good deal, for virtually all the translations into English have been at best (in Nabokov's words) only "more or less adequate,"... Nabokov wrote not as a critic, with the responsibilities and also with the relative humility of the scholar, but as a practicing novelist of unlimited ambition and boundless arrogance...."The [emigré Russian] author that interested me most," he records in a memoir, Speak Memory, "was naturally Sirin ...Among the young writers produced in exile he turned out to be the only major one" [Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory (N.Y.: Grosset and Dunlop, 1951), p. 216.]
All of Nabokov's considered judgments, accordingly, have most emphatically to be considered in the light of who framed them, and why:
"Don Quixote has been called the greatest novel ever written. This, of course, is nonsense...the book lives and will live through the sheer vitality that Cervantes has injected into the main character of a very patchy haphazard tale, which is saved from falling apart only by its creator's wonderful artistic intuition that has his Don Quixote go into action at the right moments of the story"**
It may not seem of any particular significance, in a discussion focussed on translating Don Quijote, to show how easy it would be for so brilliant a writer as Vladimir Nabokov, reading Cervantes' book only in English translation, to be so incredibly wrong about the greatest novel ever written. Nabokov's motivations are indeed of no relevance, here, but since translations may well have been the source for his error, and for similarly flagrant misjudgments by others, both living and dead, the inadequacies of those translations are extraordinarily relevant."
...................................................................................
* - From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America13.1 (1993): 5-30. Copyright © 1993, The Cervantes Society of America
**- Nabokov, Lectures, pp. 27-28.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
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
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/