Stan
Kelly-Bootle: VN's teasing playfulness with words does cross breathtaking borders
(but stopping short at the "incoherent midden heaps of Dublin"), yet his
greatness as a writer surely transcends this transient "icing on the cake." His
sublimely inventive, richly detailed characters, plots, and (dare we say it?)
socio-political insights are available in all languages for all generations.
That is to say, the important, Universal bits are translatable!
Preferably, each age will receive fresh translations since natural languages are
forever on the move semantically, and more slowly, grammatically.
Jansy:
I agree with S K-B's point about the
translatability of VN's "universal bits" and that "preferably each age will
receive fresh translations"...But I cannot join him when he
states that VN's teasing playfulness is merely a "transient 'icing on
the cake' ". The signifying matrix remains, even
when specific words were mishandled and mis-translated.
VN's polisemic and irradiating "interlingual" games are
an integral part of his style (at least ever since he started to write in
English) and echo his "universal bits".
The recently revised translation of "The
Defense", now edited in Brazil ( "A Defesa Lujin") prompted me to re-read
his novel and luck had it that I then realized that my love-affair with Nabokov
didn't begin with "Lolita", but with "The Defense" & inspite of my
total ignorance of chess. There are few verbal fire-works and shimmer in this
"Russian"novel. It seems to me that his "electrical shocks" derived at
that time from the invisible forces of chess and not from explosive
words and sentences that chimed in hismetafictional arguments and
transcendent intuitions.
VN wrote in his foreword: Of all my
Russian books, The Defense contains and diffuses the greatest 'warmth' —
which may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract chess is supposed to be. In
point of fact, Luzhin has been found lovable even by those who understand
nothing about chess and/or detest all my other books. He is uncouth, unwashed,
uncomely — but as my gentle young lady (a dear girl in her own right) so quickly
notices, there is something in him that transcends both the coarseness
of his gray flesh and the sterility of his recondite
genius. When he describes this young
lady ( "nobody yet
had been able to dig down to what was most captivating about her: this was the
mysterious ability of her soul to apprehend in life only that which had once
attracted and tormented her in childhood, the time when the soul's instinct is
infallible; to seek out the amusing and the touching: to feel constantly an
intolerable, tender pity for the creature whose life is helpless and unhappy; to
feel across hundreds of miles that somewhere in
Sicily a thin-legged little donkey with a shaggy belly is being brutally
beaten..." ) I think he is also speaking about himself
( his ecstatical writing, his compassion, his unbounded sensitivity, even his
"transcendental vision")