You have raised a subject very dear to
my heart. I confess that I hadn't thought of Nabokov as being a good subject for
illustration, but Pnin and other
pre-Lolita works lend themselves very nicely. I can even "see" Pale Fire: bird-and-pane, an escutcheon, a
chateau in the Midi, etc.
I have been working with an excellent artist
named Mary Kuper for several years and we have produced (but not published yet)
the first two in our series of "Illustrated Fairy Tales for
Adults."
The first collaboration was my translation of the
original 1740 version of La Belle et la Bete
(ostensibly by Madame Suzanne Gabrielle de Villeneuve, but my research shows
probably in collaboration with the rakish Crebillon fils) and the second
is a story about a child lost in Czechoslovakia during the second world war,
Sevenby Katherine Winter. Other works
we are thinking about include Isaak Dinesen's "The
Monkey" and Flaubert's St Julien (which
even Flaubert wished to have printed with an illustration of a particular
stained glass window).
I don't yet know how to post a scan to the List,
but if you would like to see some examples of Mary's work, please check out
these two sites:
an
oil painting http://www.artistsinresidence.co.uk/service.htm
There
are other examples of course. A few that come to mind: Mervyn Peake illustrated
his own Gormenghast trilogy; Voltaire's Candide in Rockwell
Kent's beautiful edition was recently re-published (and is available for a
ridiculously low price at a discount house on the internet); there are several
books illustrated by Barry Moser's wood engravings, including The Bible
and of course many fine press books. A novel by Sena Jeter Naslund Ahab's
Wife is beautifully illustrated by Christopher Wormell (published in 1999).
And Marina Warner edited Wonder Tales was published by FSG in 1994. So
the idea is definitely in circulation.