EDNOTE. Below is Dmitri Nabokov's translation from
his own Introduction to his Italian translation of TRANSPARENT THINGS. He
(and the editor of NABOKV-L ) would like to thank Peter Hayes and Carolyn Kunin
for their useful versions.
----- Original Message -----
From: Dmitri
Nabokov
Sent: Sunday, July 25, 2004 1:40 PM
Subject: TT Foreword -- DN's translation
Translator's Foreword
Like certain
particles or certain stars, this volume may seem thin but is, in reality, highly
concentrated.
The transparency of objects, the ambiguity of space-time, pervade its every
theme to the point of becoming the underlying theme itself. This
sometimes results in apparent syntactic inconsistencies (scrambled verb
tenses, Hugh's words that hover in limbo among what is spoken, what is
thought, what is perceived by the omniscient narrator) that, in transit
from one language to another perhaps demanding greater discipline,
may momentarily perplex the reader.
Equally problematic is the task
of rendering in plausible Italian the English of a German writer who
fumbles an idiom, the French of a Russian lady who is translating from her
mother tongue, or the complex, polyglot wordplay of the
author.
I have sought throughout a
maximum fidelity to the original, even at the cost
of occasionally incurring a slightly clumsy or complicated
locution, categorically avoiding gratuitous stylistic embellishment,
and altering or omitting (with the author's consent) only certain details that
would have been meaningless to a reader with no English. The
word "shift," for instance, can have two senses: a switch of
frequency (as in Doppler Shift) or a woman's nightdress (in whose place I have
the false Julia wear a "Doppler Doll").
The title "Tralatitions" remains unchanged for obvious reasons.
When reading this
tralatition (tralation, translation, but not, in this case, metaphor), one
is advised to proceed without haste, paying appropriate attention to little
things like a rock traversed by certain small creatures, a very transparent
pencil, the dancing vegetables, the flames that flicker here and there -- and
also to dedicate a thought in passing to Julia Moore, to Mr. R.,
and to Adam von Librikov.
Dmitri Nabokov