S.K-B: Tu me
manques which means I MISS YOU! While Je te manque means YOU MISS ME! Getting
this wrong may damage your love life.Your example IS different, of course, and
may be just Mallarme’s uncharacteristic translational glitch... it would seem
that Mallarme has indeed negated the IF clause and followed it by negating the
THEN clause. This is still an ERROR (of logic), but perhaps not the error (of
language) that Jansy reported!
JM: The comment on the glitch
by Mallarmé was by Roberto Calasso and not a discovery I
made.
Você me faz falta ( I miss you). Você tem
saudades de mim (You miss me)... Kinbote's draft
alters a first "death is coming fast" into "life is ebbing fast".
The second choice makes more sense to me for what doth mean
"come away, come away death" in a half-full or half-empty
life?
JA:... the characters are methods of composition, like ways of painting
a landscape whose harmonious fusion discloses the landscape the way the artist
sees it. Isn't this precisely the real life of Sebastian Knight in a literal
sense? [...]One thing the book reminds me of is Orson Welles first film Citizen
Kane, a story in which the man as he really was never appears. We know him only
through the biased accounts of the people whom the reporter visits so that by
the end we think we understand the man without ever really knowing him--they're
actually quite similar works.
JM: V. writes: "...where is the third party? Rotting peacefully in the cemetery of
St Damier. Laughingly alive in five volumes." And yet, there is
something elusive here, right at the moment when
V. realizes that the real Sebastian Knight is to be found in his
published work, his fiction.
So,V. observes that
"Clare intimately witnessed the first three-fifths of his
entire production" and adds that, after SK and Clare broke up,
Sebastian became a distraught, deeply unhappy man:"Sebastian returned to London in the beginning
of 1930 and took to his bed after a very bad heart attack. Somehow or other he
managed to go on with the writing of Lost Property: his easiest book, I
think[...]. In The Doubtful Asphodel, his method has attained
perfection[...].There seems to be a method, too, in the author's way of
expressing the physical process of dying[...].First the brain follows up a
certain hierarchy of ideas[...] But the dying man knew that these were not real
ideas; that only one half of the notion of death can be said really to exist:
this side of the question[...] the quay of life gently moving away aflutter with
handkerchiefs: as if he was already on the other side, if he could see the
beach receding; no, not quite — if he was still thinking.' How could SK be "laughingly alive in five
volumes"?
And we know that V. insisted on finding
real clues to SK, inspite of his partial insights:"all the same I must find that woman. She is the missing link in
his evolution." We learn, too,
that V could not mimick his brother's style because: "Told to write like Mr Everyman he would have written like none. I
cannot even copy his manner because the manner of his prose was the manner of
his thinking and that was a dazzling succession of gaps; and you cannot ape a
gap because you are bound to fill it in somehow or other — and blot it out in
the process."
Citizen Kane and TRLSK? Interesting
comparison but have reach no rosebud sliding in the end,
although we do find a Rosanov to reject him.