Brian Boyd wrote:... I
had lunch yesterday with Helen Vendler at Harvard, probably the greatest writer
on poetry in English alive magisterial books on Shakspeareøs sonnets...She
thinks PF a great poem, unqualifiedly.
...
Jerry Friedman
wrote "about what poets of the period I'd compare to Shade in his
relentless wit and wordplay. The best I came up with were Anthony Hecht
and James Merrill. Helen Vendler, as I understand it,fervently admires
Merrill's work."
....
Charles H.Wallace
wrote: "Re the quality of Pale Fire, the poem...In an effort
to get a better fix on VN as a poet writing in English, I have just read through
the contents of his "Poems", 1959... If I were reviewing it for some literary
rag, I would call it as interesting and by no means no worse than any other slim
volume of occasional verse."
...................
Matthew Roth
wrote: MR: VN was indeed keenly aware of the problems of
translating PF. A quick check of the descriptions of his correspondence with his
translators(from the Cornell library) reveals...
.............
Jansy
wrote:You read the article
on the "Botfly" I recently mentioned in our List and its author also
brings up the matter of VN's worries about translating PF.
..........
CHW, on translation:
"I noticed that in my question about what VN really believed about
literal translation I misdated his second strong opinion to 1990. It must have
been written, published, in 1964, ie about ten or so years after his first
opinion."
.............
Jansy &
miscelania:
1.Quoting from
"the article on the Botfly", i.e: from James Ramey on Parasitism
and Pale Fire's Camouflage :
"It may be
significant,therefore, that Nabokov was singularly anxious about correcting any
real misprints in this novel, even tiny ones, going so far as to open 'an Errata
Department' for Pale Fire in a 1966 interview with Appel."
2. Quoting from
Georg Steiner After Babel: "the extreme 'monadist' position - we
find great poets holding it - leads logically to the belief that real
translation is impossible".
3.VN (SO) about
Poems and Problems : "...several examples of the verse of my
early youth...This 'new" volume consists of three sections: a selection of
thirty-six Russian poems;fourteen poems which I wrote directly in English, after
1940 and my arrival in America..;and eighteen chess
problems..."
4. VN (SO) " I
seldom experience nowadays the spinal twinge which is the only valid reaction to
a new piece of great poetry - such as, for example, Richard Wilbur's
'Complaint,' a poem..."(1969, to A. Whitman).
5. VN (SO): "
In Cambridge I played football and wrote Russian verse"..."My Solus Rex
might have disappointed Kinbote less than Shade's poem..." [ JM: In the
Index of Pale Fire - entry on Charles II - we
find, in the last line: " Solus REx, 1000; See also Kinbote." ] ; "The form
of Pale Fire is specifically, if not generically, new. I would
like to thake this pleasant opportunity to correct the following misprints in
the Putnam edition, 1962, second impression..." and in a footnote the
interviewer mentions that Mr. Nabokov has opened an Errata Department..." (
A.Appell, 1966, page 75, S.O Vintage edition )
6. VN (SO) in relation to the translations
of his books: "...the system is a strict checking of every sentence. In the case
of Japanese or Turkish versions, I tru not to imagine the disasters that
probably bespatter every page",,, Answering about "conspicuous or secret flaw as
a writer": " The absence of a natural vocabulary...My English, this second
instrument I have always had, is however a stiffish, artificial thing, which may
be all right for describing a sunset or an insect, but which cannot conceal
poverty of syntax and paucity of domestic diction..."(1966, to
H.Gold)
7. Quoting from
Nabokov's SO, "Articles": on Alfred Appel,Jr.: "a rare case where art and
erudiction meet in a shining ridge of specific information ( the highest and to
me most acceptable funcion of literary criticism)".[ JM: The expression
"shining ridge" is also applied in Pale Fire, to describe Mt.Glittertin and, if
I recollect this correctly, in two other instances as well].
8. JM's personal remarks: The cumulative effect of
comments in the List, arch criticism and reference-search reinforced my
feeling concerning the difference between Pale Fire (John Shade's
'autobiographical' poem), Kinbote's Foreword and Commentary, and the
novel as a whole.
We have, in TT, the American writer of German extraction
who "writes English more correctly than he speaks it" ( VN in a 1972
interview,Vintage, page 195).
Now I haven't been able to figure out who, either Dr.
Botkin or John Shade, was the American scholar of
Russian extraction, but it seems to be a very good alibi for John Shade's
provicincial American poetry, with sudden cosmopolitan dashes typical of the
vocabulary used by another generation European.
Unfortunately I'm not equipped to distinguish (in
particular) if Kinbote's latinate expressions (reminiscent of the
style of "one of the authors" writing Pnin) are still in use among
poliglot academics recently arrived in America, or if they antecede
Kinbote's 1959 writings in Cedarn, but his vocabulary is completely
dissimilar in spirit from Shade's "iridules" and other similar creations.
After having a TQ (translation quotient) mentioned here,
along with SKB's humoristic quotient, I suggest we search for another quotient
pertaining to "dated words", a kind of Carbon testing device to
place Kinbote, or Shade...
Jansy