Jansy: you have (in my book!) earned Tavares a wider English audience. How can we encourage more translations? We have met, and giggled over, similar author-caricatures: clerihews for the clerisy? Haiku for the highbrow? But fantasy-sketches offer a broader canvas for creative mockery.
The better snide jokes always embed some element of ‘reality’ (whatever that means). However, readers must never fall for the various dubious Proof Methods in the endless search for Truth (repeat the whatever warning).
Popperian-Nabokovians (like BB, SHB and me) know that Deduction beats Induction; Induction beats Proof by Assertion, Proof by Epigram, Proof by Sarcasm, ... We do allow, under duress, VN’s Proof by Strong, Superior Authority (see Tavares) and even, for an occasional laugh, VN’s Proof by Spoonerism/Anagram.
Fun to guess (or can we deduce, induct?) who the three men are meant to be in Tavares’ tale. With Pale Fire never far from my mind, I wondered if they are Shade/Kinbote-Botkin/King Charles, having somehow escaped Nabokov’s authorial control, are disputing their own identities. In comes the creator to end the meta-meta-fictional nonsense?
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 06/12/2010 15:19, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
The cover of "Biblioteca" ("Library"), dated 2004 and published in Brazil only in 2009, informs that the young Portuguese writer Gonçalo M. Tavares has had his works translated and distributed in Spain, India, Italy, Sweden, Hungary, Holland, Belgium, Brazil and Portugal.
I found no indication that his books were translated into English.
In "Biblioteca," the list of authors whose work inspired him to create a short fantasy-sketch runs to over two-hundred names. Most of them appear in the alphabetical index, under their first name, such as J.D.Salinger, Jean Genet, James Joyce, Hart Crane, Robert Browning, Harold Bloom.
Others, as Apuleio, Aristóteles, Empédocles, Euripedes, Dostoievsky and Nabokov, are just that - singles.
Here is what he constructed about Nabokov:
"A tall animal with a dictionary in his pocket entered a room where three men have been engrossed, for seven hours, in a debate about who was the first, the second and the third man at the table.
A tall animal, with a profile that is incompatible with the multitude, menaces to open his mouth with the same intensity as the threat of wielding a weapon promotes. Nevertheless he only carries his tallness and a dictionary. And the way by which he made his entrance into the room. However, the three men were too weak and the man was so strong."
(my translation).
//schnip