C. Kunin enjoyed M.V.de Gato's sonorous translation of "loins" as "fogo
dos meus flancos." There are still unfanthomed mysteries in connection
to Portugal's Portuguese and the language we speak in Brazil. Here the meaning
of "flanco" comes close to the word "flanks" [Middle
English, from Old English flanc,
from Old French flanc, of
Germanic origin.]
and its sexual reference is
dimmed. For "The Enchanter," Jorio Dauster chose the word
"entranhas" (entrails) instead of "carne" (flesh) and, in this case, it
appears to me to be quite fitting. He wrote: "e o
antegozo de encontrar a menina sozinha derreteu-se como cocaína em suas
entranhas.” "
The sexual imagery and euphemisms are abundant and,
almost, gross in VN's novelette. His translator son explains one of those:
" A potentially more cryptic passage is that of the "strange, nailless
finger" scrawled on the fence (p.42,l.15). Here, again, deliberate ambiguity,
concurrent images and ideas, and multiple levels of interpretation are at play.
To spell this one out: The 'definite goal' that emerges from a substratum of the
man's brain is access to the girl via marriage to the mother. The imagined
graffito on the fence is a hybrid of the forefinger pointing the way on
old-fashioned signs and of some joker's phallic doodle that the digit's
stylized, nilless shape simultaneously suggests to a mind bent, basically, on
depravity, but not devoid of self-reproaching flashes of objectivity. This
ambiguous finger simultaneously indicates, in the fleeting image, the path of
courtship (to the mother), the secret parts of the yearned-for girl, and the
protagonist's own vulgarity that no amount of rationalization can explain
away." O, my. That's what the signaling nailless finger signifies to
"a mind bent on depravity"(the protagonist's, of course). In the novelette we
find the character's so-named "magic wand"
(his enchanter's penis with its spell),on p.91. There are the
imagetic substitutions related to sex: "the captive
would be ignorant of the temporarily noxious nexus between the puppet in her
hands and his puppet-master's panting, between the plum in her mouth and the
rapture of the distant tree.."(p.73) and storybook images "the pet giant, the fairy-tale forest, the sack with its
treasure" (p.72). Perhaps "loins" as "entrails" would be OK in relation
to the melting cocaine sensations spreading all over the body (who
knows)...
In his postface Dmitri N. wrote: " I shall leave to the
studious - among whom exist some superbly sensitive readers of Nabokov - the
detailed identification and the documentation of themes and levels (straight
narrative, tricky metaphor, romantic poetry, sexuality, fairy-tale sublimations,
mathematics, consciente, compassion, fear of being srung up by the heels), as
well as the search for hidden parallels with 'The Song of Igor's Campaign' or
'Moby Dick'..." (p.120).Good. There's some space left for all sorts of
"studious" readers. I wonder what are VN's "tricky metaphors" in "The
Enchanter". Surely the primitive sexual imagery belongs to the part related to
what DN distinguished under "sexuality, fairy-tale sublimations"
(whatever).