Tomasz: I do think that for "links" to merit more than a passing nod, they need to be made of sterner stuff than "lost gloves" and the like. Gloves were widely worn and commonly misplaced in most of VN's social-generational settings. Gloves, hats, canes, and cigarette lighters are like that! Eminently misplaceable, offering every novelist endless plot devices. In particular, gloves and hankies are regularly dropped deliberately by female predators to catch their beaux. Characters losing trivial things offer the novelist an almost universal thematic device for contrast with life's major losses (love, country, freedom, language). Or maybe just a passing hint of dizzy carelessness, as when Clare Bishop drops a glove _and_ leaves a package behind in the Paris restaurant (Chap 8, The Real Life o Sebastian Knight.
Matt: re-The Book of Names. By coincidence, just re-reading VN's Intro Vol 1 Eugene Onegin. N explains his three famous definitions of "translation." (i) Paraphrastic (ii) Lexical (or constructional) (iii) Literal.
You are on a slippery slope to deny the "reality" of PF's The Book of Names on the grounds that the claimed "English translation (Oxford, 1956)" is "almost impossible," whence casting doubt on any original. Here we are talking about "existence" within a Nabokovian literary context -- at this level of "reality" we accept that there is a college-town called New Wye, populated with characters capable of doing and saying all kinds of things (under VN's control) -- and we need to check if the assertion by JS/CK of the book's existence is a provable falsehood within the context of all the other things JS/CK do and tell us. I claim that a book translatable into English as "The Book of Names" is abundantly plausible, not only possible, but demonstrably factual! Whether JS/CK are lying or not is a separate isse. We simply cannot prove the lie by denying the real possibility of a book matching that specification. Indeed, drumroll, here's one particular "The Book of Names" by Sarah Petersen Hage available new or second hand at amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0842301232/ref=sib_dp_ptu#reader-link
You'll see that a book of names can be (and usually is) more than a straight list of names as mooted and ridiculed by Matt. Under any of VN's definitions of "translation" you can envisage Hage's book (and similar) being translated from or to any other languge, including Zemblan!
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 23/07/2008 13:59, "Matthew Roth" <MRoth@MESSIAH.EDU> wrote:
Dear Tomasz,
I agree with you--as I think everyone would--that there are many threads that connect VN's novels. I'm not sure that is enough to surmise that Kinbote's "remarkable book on surnames" is, in fact, Pnin. I rather suspect that Kinbote's book is another marker placed there by Nabokov to show us that this dialogue never actually took place. In the scene, Shade and Kinbote together assert that there is an English translation ("Oxford, 1956") of the book; but a book on surnames would be almost impossible to translate. It would be even more difficult than Pale Fire! Why? Because many of the differences and connections between names and their origins would disappear when translated into a different language. Imagine, for instance, if a book on surnames were translated from English into German. What would we do with a last name like Steinmann? The German translation would say that Steinmann comes from the German and means "steinmann." I think Jansy once pointed out something similar in Pale Fire, where the Portuguese translation obliterated the difference between two words in the original English. In any case, as JF recently noted, the whole of the dialogue in C.894 is highly suspect.
If you have not read Barabtarlo's exhaustive annotations to Pnin, you might give it a look. He does a great job unpacking many of the name associations there.
Best,
Matt Roth
>>> On 7/23/2008 at 6:10 AM, in message <Q133924221-c58ce054889d4b4058a845f2bae8f0c1@pmq3.test.onet.pl>, "[Tomasz Kaminski]" <profesor_kinbote@POCZTA.ONET.PL> wrote:
I am not sure it it was stated here or not, but for me it is almost 100% sure
that 'book of names' mentioned in professors dialogue in Pale Fire
is "Pnin". I think that Pnin and Pale Fire (and possibly also Lolita)
are mysteriously interconnected. I have no strong evidences
for that, only weak - lost glove in pnin and pale fire, haze in lolita
and hazel in pale fire - but for that, that _pnin_is_that_book_of_names_
I am reasonably sure. I think that Pnin and Pale Fire are
complementary parts of one vision in different optics
(and maybe even crown jewels should be searched in pnin
as i wrote some time ago) Pnin is for me very strange book
because it is really a 'book of many names', enumeration
of names. I would appreciate if someone maybe would find once
more about it in Pnin - what that 'book of names' is all about
Tomasz Kaminski