Lewis Carroll's Alice: The
Photographs, Books, Papers and Personal Sale L01912 , 6-Jun-2001
8vo, translated by V. Sirin [vladimir nabokov], 12 illustrations
and cover
design by S.V. Zalshupin, original pictorial boards, slightly
soiled, spine
faded
very rare, and a landmark in the art of translation.
Vladimir Nabokov began this translation while still an undergraduate at
Cambridge. It was published when he was 24 in Berlin, a year before the
appearance of his first short story. It is one of the most sympathetic and
imaginative of all of the translations of Lewis Carroll's work. This,
coupled
with Zalshupin's Constructivist illustrations, make it one of the
more
interesting foreign language editions. Nabokov was greatly influenced
by the
Alice books and their radical use of language. His second novel King,
Queen,
Knave was published in 1928; his third, The Defense, was based around
chess
and its problems (1930); Invitation to a Beheading followed in 1935.
His
masterpiece, of course, was Lolita (1955).
References: Lovett 793;
Morgan/Houghton p.132; Michael Juliar, Vladimir
Nabokov: A Descriptive
Bibliography (New York, 1986), A7.1 (variant a)