The editor's 2008
choice was (n.12) " I am thinking of aurochs and
angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art.
And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.
–Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)"
Certainly an epigraph
doesn't count as offering a novel's first lines but, in this kind of
competition, we find that John Ray Jr's "Foreword" is never considered
as an important artifice which belongs integrally to the
novel. The so called first lines when "Lolita" is chosen, usually are:
"Lolita, light of my life, etc."
When Imre Kertész in 2005
"Liquidation" opened his novel by quoting Beckett (Molloy), I rushed to locate
the sentence in Beckett. As a first line I could be set side by side to
Nabokov's in "The Original of Laura" ( "Her husband,
she answered, was a writer, too - at least, after a fashion.").
However (what fun and this is how I happened on the Nabokovian "sighting")
Beckett's are among the 100 Best Last Lines from Novels... He wrote:
"Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is
beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not
raining."
A query: In "Ada"
Nabokov mentions a variation on the sheepskin coat his parent's coachman
wore (SM), an inversion that is similar to Longfellow's Hyawatha glove. There
are a few words in Russian and I'd like to know if the translation that was
appended is correct, or if there remain innuendos that only an ear attuned to
Russian would identify.
I quote: "...or some ludicrous blunder in the
current column of Elsie de Nord, a vulgar literary demimondaine who thought that
Lyovin went about Moscow in a nagol’nïy tulup, ‘a muzhik’s
sheepskin coat, bare side out, bloom side in,’ as defined in a
dictionary our commentator produced like a conjurer, never to be procurable by
Elsies." "
Bloom side in" certainly indicates Joyce's
"Ulysses", since the discussion is about "Paul Bourget’s
‘monologue intérieur’ borrowed from old Leo..." and I
remember that Nabokov vindicates the priority for this specific
literary flow of free-associations to Leo Tolstoy, and not to Joyce. I
wish I could know the exact (literal) translation of nagol’nïy tulup
...