Jansy Mello: Although I read Eliane Moraes's paper with pleasure, and this was motivation enough to try to translate and share it with the list, I still perpretated various mistakes ("remains" instead of "remain", sentences in blue to represent Nabokov's checked quotes incorrectly marked, aso). I confess that I was charmed to find a non-psychoanalyst writing in a magazine published by São Paulo's Society of Psychoanalysis with the authority of a literary critic and as a teacher of literature and aesthetics.Eliane Moraes is "Professora de Estética e Literatura na PUC-SP e no Centro Universitário Senac-SP. Atua como crítica literária e publicou, dentre outros, os livros Sade: A felicidade Libertina (Imago, 1994), O corpo impossível (Iluminuras/Fapesp, 2002) e Lições de Sade: Ensaios sobre a imaginação libertina (Iluminuras, 2006)."

Two points were particularly interesting to me. Her reference to Nabokov's "vocation towards the ephemeral" and her assessment about Lolita, seen as a novel written by a pervert, when she states: "Lolita brings to us an artificial, imaginary, syncretic language. The writer uses this instrument as a toy... an instrument that'll translate his most arcaic erotic experiences when ...words perforated the silence of infancy." (quoting her in Portuguese: "Trata-se, pois, de uma língua outra que já não é mais o inglês" and "A verdade é que Lolita nos coloca diante de uma língua sincrética, artificial, imaginária. Uma vez desobrigado das convenções que o “ilusionista local” deve obedecer, o escritor se serve dessa língua como se tivesse em mãos um brinquedo e, tal qual uma criança, ele a explora à vontade para traduzir vivências eróticas arcaicas, descobertas quando as primeiras palavras perfuraram o silêncio da infância."

Mikhail Epstein in "Good-bye to Objects, or, the Nabokovian in Nabokov" mentions Nabokov's courtship of personal experiences of loss and in regard to transitoriness. Eliane Moraes seems to observe this same emotional attitude, one which Epstein associates almost exclusively to the Russian soul (?). Although I always felt a special strangeness towards Nabokov's use of English in Lolita, I was never in any authoritative position to point it out, as E.Moraes did. I always heard a French music, together with something probably Russian, in HH's confessions...

However, to my great distress, while I was engaged in translating the excerpts which I thought were significant, I realized that E.Moraes departed from Nabokov's Lolita and Speak,Memory in their Brazilian translation, but not from the original.

The title of her article mentions "a ingenuidade de um perverso" and her translation (which I changed) favored the word "ingenuity" instead of "naiveté," as it is found in Nabokov's original novel. Her quotes often emphasized the meanings of a specific word but, at least it seems to me to have been the case, it only corresponds to the manner in which the translator chose to render it - instead of referring directly to VN's American novel.

Even when we agree with other philosophers and linguists (Derrida?) that we only have access to different versions of the world and not to any "real" object, I (humbly) think that the language in which a novel is written is a sufficiently "real" object and only its versions (translations) must be regarded with caution. Eliane Moraes was full of ingenuousness and ingenuity (both) when she pursued her intuitions concerning Humbert Humbert's perverted use of language... And I share her intuitions, but I must doubt the resources that she used to reach them...