Dear List,

From today's random find in the Archives, with Donald Barton Johnson's abstract of "Signs & Symbols":Nabokov & Iconicity [ NABOKOV SYMPOSIUM (July 15-19,   2002) Saint Petersburg ], I learned that "Iconicity is.... the use of a letter's physical shape to carry meaning: words mean; letters (sometimes) illustrate or mimic topic and/or theme [...] We shall see that Nabokov, the consummate artist, employs these almost subliminal signs and symbols and integrates them into the architecture of his art."
I decided to use this opportunity to bring up something that  has recently struck me in relation to "iconicity".
It concerns how words may dangerously and inevitably change shape by translation.
In the German edition of "Pale Fire",Fahles Feuer, there is a surprising  visual outcome of CK's very first sentence dealing with Shade's poem of nine hundred ninety-nine lines.
We see: "ein Gedicht von neunhundertneunundneunzig Zeilen".  
What a fat worm of a number and it needs no echo of "nine/lines" to make its presence felt.

( Sandy Klein's posting on "how the lead organization lobbying on behalf of special privileges for Mexicans in the U.S.A. manages to get away with calling itself “National Council of La Raza.” ...and  Russian Noses ("There you have it: Russia is the nasal nation.") was a delightful find. Just for the fun of it ( but the initial issue is far from amusing) I'll add a palindrome which even serves as a criticism for "raza". I think was authored by Julio Cortazar while playing with his own name:
 "Adan y raza; azar y nada".)
---
Jansy: Agreed! Add 'iconicity' to the long list of things that can be 'lost in translation,' however hard we try!

It's also clear that "iconicity" can "take shape" and "change shape" by authorial choices _within_ his/her original language/idiom. The poor translator (doomed, unrecognized, and underpaid!) faces the extra challenge of deciding which "shapes" (iconic resonances?) are really intended by the author, and which may be happy accidents or simply fanciful constructions by the reader. Here, I take 'translator' to be a very special kind of 're-re- ... re-reader' fully immersed not only in all the quirks and twists of the source and target languages, but deeply in tune with the author's 'bag of tricks.'

E.g., Dmitri's wonderful New Yorker translation of Natasha is surely as close to his father's 1924 Russian in mood, rhythm, pathos, location, and dilligent 'realism' (ma non tropo), as we semi-demi-Slavophones can get or deserve! Just one word seemed misplaced, and I'm sure it's my own failing, not DN's. The adjective 'chipper' struck me as a tad anachronistic for 'cheerful/bright,' but perhaps American usage doesn't relate 'chipper' to the Brit RAF 'stiff-upper-lip' reaction to adversity? Or does VN's Russian have some 1920s colloquialism, i.e., other than the usual 'bodry'?

Jansy: Are you making too much of the 'dangers' in translating the English noun string for 999 into the unavoidably 'denser' German equivalent, neunhundertneunundneunzig? To my Brit ears/eyes, CK's 'nine hundred ninety-nine lines' already provides a mild shock that may be missed by non-Brits. For no plausible historical reason, most Brits pronounce and 'picture' 999 as 'nine hundred AND ninety-nine!' The missing AND is what rowdy Brits (those who write angry letters to the TIMEs) call 'an Americanism: the  unpardonable sin.' You can imagine that some Brit readers might pick up the possibly spurious signal that whoever CK may really be (or may think he is!), he is writing like a (Damned) Yankee. This particular signal may or may not be intended by VN -- suffice it to note that the master is uniquely versed in Anglo-American diversities, not to mention all those magically exploitable Anglo-Russian and Zemblo-American nuances.

The relevance to Jansy's iconicity theme is that most American readers would simply not notice the missing AND, because this is how Americans usually 'spell out' 999. In fact, like the non-barking dog at night, is there really a missing AND to be missed! What's missing and sorely missed is that elusive 1000th line, putatively taken up by re-cycling Shade's epic. [In mathematical modulo terms, however, we still lack the line 0, since 0 and 1000 = 1000(mod 1000) but 1000 = 1(mod 999)]

(Recall, in passing, the list's discussion of '1001 Nights' and how English, Persian and Arabic conventions vary allowing the dramatic 'One Thousand Nights and One Night?')

I may be wrong, but I doubt if one can easily indicate in _standard_ German that 'nine hundred ninety-nine' IS an Americanism to many/most Brits. And, perhaps, it may be considered grotesquely irrelevant to even try. After all, there's no consensus that the American form for 999 carries any deep-textual significance in identifying CK's true nationality or mother tongue. IF a translator thinks otherwise, a footnote can gloss away ad lib. No German reader (one hopes) is going to ask "How come this CK is writing such fluent German, when all the extra-textual clues indicate that he's an American scholar, or at least posing as one?" (We meet the extreme case of nationality-bending in the movies, where the Germans speak to each other in English with heavy German accents!)

Nor is it fair to see a reprehensible fat worm-like shape in neunhundertneunundneunzig. Those brought up with agglutinating languages (and German is relatively mild in this respect) consider such amalgamations as perfectly normal, readable, and, indeed eminently sensible and green (saved-spaces equal conserved-energy equals saved rainforests in Jansy's Brasil!)

The German, interestingly, says 'nine hundred nine and ninety' with the conjunction in a different place from the Brit's. What is remarkable, and gives the German a special shape, is the accidental recurrence of the letters u-n and u-n-d: neunhundertneunundneunzig.

In a parallel universe, VN settled in Berlin, wrote Fahles Feuer in German, & triggered a whole set of different problems for English translators.

Finally: the NABOKOV-L-archives have many comments on the mirror-image (or inversion) of 999, viz the numerologist's gematric obsessive 666, and whether this influenced VN's choice of lines, knowing that VN would be skeptical of the mad-crank excesses stirred by the Book of Revelation. Without re-opening this can of worms, let us just note that 666 is usually pronounced six-six-six rather than 'six-hundred-[and]-sixty-six' (or ' ... three-score and six' as the KJV has it) so we usually avoid CK's 999 Americanism. There are so many hilarious confusions as to how Greek and Hebrew letters are mapped to numbers*. Indeed, given any NAME, my friend Underwood (Woody) Dudley can produce a convincing rule converting that name to 666. (See his "Numerology: Or, What Pythagoras Wrought" --  Spectrum Paperback) One deflating fact is that the earliest NT papyrus ms gives the 'number of the beast' as 615! Woody can adjust his mappings to suit.

* http://www.justgivemethetruth.com/tarsus_is_666.htm
http://www.religioustolerance.org/666a.htm

Genug for g-now.

Stan Kelly-Bootle.
curmudgeon@acmqueue.com

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.