Although
my initial response to the swooners issue was at least partly
facetious, I was deadly serious in stating that a Nabokov translator
should first and foremost understand that not every noun has a precise
cognate, and that to look for one does a disservice to VN’s text. There
is no American girl’s garment called a “swooner.” I was probably too
subtle when I tried to illustrate the absurdity of postulating an
evolved bloomer or weirdly misnamed sweater by describing with NO
exaggeration the attire worn by some American girls of Lolita’s age
today. My subtlety met with what subtlety so often meets with — an
oblivious silence. The point, which I make more clearly in one of my
responses to an episode in PNIN, is that the translator who does not
possess an operative sense of humor, a grasp of the workings of irony,
and an appreciation of the supple possibilities of the language I’ll
call “American,” is going to be at a decided disadvantage in
translating Lolita.
As I’ve indicated, it is a fool’s errand to seek a young American
girl’s undergarment called a swooner. But if one understands that
Humbert is (as he described himself) a man possessed of a fancy prose
style, then we may be capable of approaching the notion that our prose
stylist is not specifying a sweater
by reference to a twelve-year-old girl’s breasts. Which, on a child of
that age are not usually of such noteworthy appearance. Or, even more
absurdly, bloomers that have undergone some inanimate, decade-leaping
evolution that turns underwear of the fin de siecle into curiously
named girl’s underwear of the 1950s.
Do the changes rung on the words swoon and swooners apply to the many
other appearances of the words, such as the Enchanted Hunters hotelier
known as Mr. Swoon? Best of all, how do our translators handle
Humbert’s effusion, “Oh Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe’s and
Bea’s Dante’s, and what little girl would not like to swirl in a
circular skirt and scanties?”
What sort of feats of leaden literality did our translators pull out of
their ... minds to express the idea of a circular skirt? Or “scanties?”
Andrew