Stan Kelly-Bootle:... Einstein did
indeed make many famous errors. When corrected by his peers, he acknowledged his
mistakes, but added the claim: I’ve earned the right to be wrong! VN, the great
novelist/memoirist, has earned similar rights.
JM:
The present Shakespearean thread has been linked to Vladimir Nabokov's
birthday. Like Shakespeare's, the anniversary of Cervantes'
death is celebrated in the same day, April 23.
To this calendric correction, I'll be adding a few
lines concerning Cervantes and Nabokov'sa "similar rights"
Here's a resumé from the Wikipedia:
"Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish novelist, poet, and
playwright. His magnum opus, Don Quixote, considered the first modern European
novel...His influence on the Spanish language has been so great that the
language is often called la lengua de Cervantes ("the language of Cervantes").
Cervantes died in Madrid on April 22, 1616, but he was buried on April 23, 1616,
when it is used to celebrate this death.
To honor the date that both Miguel
de Cervantes and William Shakespeare died, UNESCO established April 23 as the
International Day of the Book. However, Shakespeare and Cervantes died on
different days: Shakespeare on April 23, 1616 of the Julian calendar that was
used in England and Cervantes April 23, 1616 of the Gregorian calendar that was
used in Spain. Since the Gregorian calendar was ten days ahead of the Julian,
Cervantes actually died ten days earlier than Shakespeare, whose date of death
according to the Gregorian calendar was May 3, 1616."
A few
excerpts, related to Nabokov, from "Translating Cervantes: Una vez más"* - by
Burton Raffel. The author argues against Vladimir Nabokov's negative appraisal
of the Don Quixote, while taking into account the bad quality of the
translations which had been available to Nabokovat that time and, also, to
promote his new translation of Cervantes' major work.
"Vladimir Nabokov,
whose critical opinions tend to be both absolute and absolutely untrustworthy,
did not think much of Don Quijote. If I do not misread his words, he could and
did read the novel only in translation, which explains a good deal, for
virtually all the translations into English have been at best (in Nabokov's
words) only “more or less adequate,”... Nabokov wrote not as a critic, with the
responsibilities and also with the relative humility of the scholar, but as a
practicing novelist of unlimited ambition and boundless arrogance....“The [emigré Russian] author that interested me most,” he records
in a memoir, Speak Memory, “was naturally Sirin ...Among the young writers
produced in exile he turned out to be the only major one" [Vladimir
Nabokov, Speak Memory (N.Y.: Grosset and Dunlop, 1951), p. 216.]
All of
Nabokov's considered judgments, accordingly, have most emphatically to be
considered in the light of who framed them, and why:
"Don
Quixote has been called the greatest novel ever written. This, of course, is
nonsense...the book lives and will live through the sheer vitality that
Cervantes has injected into the main character of a very patchy haphazard tale,
which is saved from falling apart only by its creator's wonderful artistic
intuition that has his Don Quixote go into action at the right moments of the
story"**
It may not seem of any particular significance, in a
discussion focussed on translating Don Quijote, to show how easy it would be for
so brilliant a writer as Vladimir Nabokov, reading Cervantes' book only in
English translation, to be so incredibly wrong about the greatest novel ever
written. Nabokov's motivations are indeed of no relevance, here, but since
translations may well have been the source for his error, and for similarly
flagrant misjudgments by others, both living and dead, the inadequacies of those
translations are extraordinarily
relevant."
...................................................................................
*
- From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America13.1 (1993):
5-30. Copyright © 1993, The Cervantes Society of America
**- Nabokov, Lectures, pp.
27-28.