It's popularly said among Portuguese speakers that there's an
untranslatable word in our language for sufferings related to an
unspecified absence: "saudades."
However, as it's the case of poets of genius (like Dante
and Shakespeare), who have the ability to add "something that goes
deeper" to a word, I read that the particular emotional
glow of "saudades" was engendered by Luís Vaz de Camões (who wrote
about sea explorers, like Vasco da Gama, in his epic "Os Lusíadas") after
reading an entry at the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1968)”
:
"So profound was the anguish he experienced because
of his exile from home and the trials he underwent, that it became an integral
part of his being, enabling him to give to saudade-soledad (“yearning fraught
with loneliness”) a new and convincing undertone unique in Portuguese
literature.”
If V.Nabokov didn't indicate one such
"untranslatable" word created by Pushkin (and perhaps he did?), he
certainly pointed at an entire poem. Would these
considerations fit into Nivat's
interpretation of V.Nabokov's vision of "Art is God without the
word God" [ "L'art, c'est Dieu sans le mot Dieu" ]*.
V.Nabokov himself refers to "saudades," but not from having
read the "Os Lusíadas" in Portuguese. He was coping with Miguel
de Cervantes and "Don Quixote" [Lectures on Quixote (69)]:
“The wretched sense of poverty mingles with his general
dejection and he finally goes to bed, moody and heavy-hearted. Is it only
Sancho´s absence and the burst threads of his stockings that induce this
sadness, this Spanish soledad, this Portuguese saudades, this
French angoisse, this German Sensucht, this Russian
toska? We wonder – we wonder if it does not go
deeper”.
As we can see, V.Nabokov has initially offered various words that
could serve a translator (they'd express "equivalent feelings" related
to loneliness, longing and loss) but,
next, he referred to something else that "goes deeper.", an
ineffable kernel that could be allied to inspiration.**
...........................................................................................................................................................
"He
then affirms the notion that creativity is subtraction, echoing legendary French
polymath Henri Poincare’s famous credo that 'to invent is to choose and speaking
to the essential role of editing, or filtering, inspiration': "This is, of course, where inspiration comes in. The words which
on various occasions, during some fifty years of composing prose, I have put
together and then canceled may have formed by now in the Realm of Rejection (a
foggy but not quite unlikely land north of nowhere) a huge library of scrapped
phrases, characterized and concorded only by their wanting the benison of
inspiration." This, he argues, is closely related to
why great literature sings to us:"No wonder, then,
that a writer who is not afraid to confess that he has known inspiration and can
readily distinguish it from the froth of a fit, as well as from the humdrum
comfort of the 'right word,' should seek the bright trace of that thrill in the
work of fellow authors. The bolt of inspiration strikes invariably: you observe
the flash in this or that piece of great writing, be it a stretch of fine verse,
or a passage in Joyce or Tolstoy, or a phrase in a short story, or a spurt of
genius in the paper of a naturalist, of a scholar, or even in a book reviewer’s
article. I have in view, naturally, not the hopeless hacks we all know — but
people who are creative artists in their own right, such as, say, Trilling (with
his critical opinions I am not concerned), or Thurber (e.g. in Voices of
Revolution: 'Art does not rush to the
barricades')."