vladimir-nabokov-official

[vladimir-nabokov-official]

VN would be 122 today

[vladimir-nabokov-official]

“The Gift” is a celebration of Nabokov’s freedom to explore some of the most sensitive aspects of his attitude toward Pushkin. It is a celebration of his freedom to envisage and imagine, a triumph of his fantasy and fiction. It is a further step away from the sterile tradition of Russian cultural sacerdotalism that customarily ascribed Pushkin supernatural powers but prevented one from establishing a closer, more immediate contact with the human being behind the myth. If “The Gift” was one spectacular result of this shift in Nabokov’s attitudes, “Eugene Onegin” was another. Every bit as important as Nabokov’s ability to overcome ritualized fears regarding what is and what is not appropriate as far as Pushkin is concerned was his ability [to] conduct a dialogue with Pushkin, to contradict him. “Pnin” offers one telling manifestation of this newly acquired freedom. On its surface this is a story of an unfortunate and persecuted man whose life is played out in full accordance with the Pushkinian formulation of ‘nature’s indifference’ to man’s travails, drawn directly from Pushkin’s “Brozhu li ia vdol’ ulits shumnykh” (1829), translated here as “Whether I wander along noisy streets.” The submerged but discernable significance of this novel’s dénouement – Pnin’s ability to elude his taunters – contradicts its famous Pushkinian leitmotif. It asserts nature’s compassionate attitude toward the protagonist, who manages to emerge ruffled but triumphant from his clash with scoundrels and cheats, one of whom is his ostensible maker. In Pnin, fate – Pushkin’s lifelong obsession – is repeatedly exposed as a superstition, whereas nature is presented as a fundamentally sympathetic entity. Here as elsewhere Pushkin’s rationalist pessimism is counterbalanced with a sense of metaphysical certainty that is distinctly Nabokovian. In “Pnin” and especially in the “Onegin” opus, Nabokov challenges Pushkin in the personal idiom he succeeded in developing in his English-language works.

Stanislav Shvabrin, Between Rhyme and Reason: Vladimir Nabokov, Translation, and Dialogue (306–7)

[vladimir-nabokov-official]

what nabokov got absolutely right is that a translation is not a replacement for the original. english readers are arrogant and lazy when it comes to foreign books and many of them really don’t care about the original assuming they can feel comfortable with a replacement, or an englishing of proust, flaubert or even an americanized borges (soft g). in nabokov’s hands pushkin becomes a hybrid between russian and english (and the nineteenth and twentieth century) that readers have to exert effort in order to understand even vaguely. so what? would it really hurt a reader to have to use their brain even a little? complaints about nabokov’s version do generally come, i think, from a frustration that it cannot be immediately understood or “enjoyed.” lest we forget, one reviewer complained native english readers would have to look up obscure words in the dictionary; the audacities of national & linguistic vanity! rather than national entity, nabokov treats pushkin as the individual writer he was: a specifically russian writer who knew french fluently, a man who invented a great many more brilliant metaphors than bland ones, a writer who was influenced, according to the dictates of his talent, by early and late romanticism, etc.. the problem, really, is the arrogance of english thinking itself the legislators of everybody else & that all that is abroad can simply be absorbed into its remit. has anybody noticed how the writer abroad, once translated into english, is always regarded as transcending nationality and culture but the canonical “english” writers like shakespeare and dickens are just writers of genius located firmly in their nation? there is no such thing as national literature, only world literature.

[vladimir-nabokov-official]

It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision.

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (261)

[vladimir-nabokov-official]

‘Why,’ asks Mr. Wilson, ‘should Nabokov call the word “netu” an old-fashioned and dialect form of “net.” It is in constant colloquial use and what I find one usually gets for an answer when one asks for some book in the Soviet bookstore in New York.’ Mr. Wilson has mistaken the common colloquial ‘netu’ which means ‘there is not,’ ‘we do not have it,’ etc., for the obsolete ‘netu’ which he has never heard and which as I explain in my note to Three: III: 12, is a form of ‘net’ in the sense of ‘not so’ (the opposite of ‘yes’). ‘The character called “yo,”’ Mr. Wilson continues, ‘is pronounced […] more like “yaw” than like the “yo” in ‘yonder.’” Mr. Wilson should not try to teach me how to pronounce this, or any other, Russian vowel. My ‘yo’ is the standard rendering of the sound. The ‘yaw’ sound he suggests is grotesque and quite wrong. I can hear Mr. Wilson—whose accent in Russian I know so well—asking that bookseller of his for ‘Myawrtvye Dushi’ (“Dead Souls”). No wonder he did not get it.

Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Reply to My Critics’ (re: Nabokov’s 1964 translation of Eugene Onegin) in Strong Opinions (216–7)

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The ragged sparks blew down the wind. The prairie about them lay silent. Beyond the fire it was cold and the night was clear and the stars were falling. The old hunter pulled his blanket about him. I wonder if there’s other worlds like this, he said. Or if this is the only one.

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (334)

[vladimir-nabokov-official]

Minutes or even hours may have passed while I stood in that empty space beneath a ceiling which seemed to float at a vertiginous height, unable to move from the spot, with my face raised to the icy grey light, like moonshine, which came through the windows in a gallery beneath the vaulted roof, and hung above me like a tight-meshed net or a piece of thin, fraying fabric. Although this light, a profusion of dusty glitter, one might almost say, was very bright near the ceiling, as it sank lower it looked as if it were being absorbed by the walls and the deeper reaches of the room, as if it merely added to the gloom and were running down in black streaks, rather like rainwater running down the smooth trunks of beech trees or over the cast concrete façade of a building. When the blanket of cloud above the city parted for a moment or two, occasional rays of light fell into the waiting room, but they were generally extinguished again halfway down. Other beams of light followed curious trajectories which violated the laws of physics, departing from the rectilinear and twisting in spirals and eddies before being swallowed up by the wavering shadows.

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (189–90)

[vladimir-nabokov-official]

Since J. Thomas Shaw’s 1965 observation that Nabokov’s translation was ‘written in a language of his own,’ much ink has been spilt in an effort to conceptualize this effect. Did Nabokov seek to ‘estrange’ Pushkin and by doing so elevate him to the level of the ‘creative genius’ he believed he was? If no ‘poetical’ paraphrase can do justice to Homer or Shakespeare, as he states in “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English,” no translation can attain the level of Pushkin’s perfection. Tempting as it is to follow this ennobling interpretation, it proves to be based on a misunderstanding. As Brian Boyd has pointed out, not only did Nabokov never intend for his translation to stand on its own, he laboured to underscore its dependence on the original by interspersing Pushkin’s lines with his. It was only due to the technical difficulty of achieving such an effect that ‘the translation was not printed […] in interlinear fashion, beneath Pushkin’s transliterated lines.’ As Judson Rosengrant has shown, however, no matter where it is reproduced, Nabokov’s English may never become altogether neutral and transparent. As if to compensate for its inability to recreate the stylistic interplay of its model, it seeks to become a ‘concoction,’ ‘a hybrid of modern British and American English (with Gallic and archaic admixtures) […] a pastiche of Pushkin’s early nineteenth-century Russian.’ This quality of Nabokov’s English proves that it may never be separated from its Pushkinian model.

Stanislav Shvabrin, Between Rhyme and Reason: Vladimir Nabokov, Translation, and Dialogue (298)

[vladimir-nabokov-official]

In front of darkened houses, alongst the slumbering street in rows the twin lamps of coupés pour forth a merry light and project rainbows on the snow. Studded around with lampions, glitters a splendid house; across its whole-glassed windows shadows move: there come and go the profiled heads of ladies and of modish quizzes.

Aleksandr Pushkin (tr. Vladimir Nabokov), Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse (107)

[vladimir-nabokov-official]

Bug of the Day

A fresh BotD, distinct Quaker, Achatia distincta, from the light last night.

[vladimir-nabokov-official]

Even on sunny days only a faint greyness, scarcely illuminated at all by the globes of the station lights, came through the glass roof over the main hall, and in this eternal dusk, which was full of a muffled babble of voices, a quiet scraping and trampling of feet, innumerable people passed in great tides, disembarking from the trains or boarding them, coming together, moving apart, and being held up at barriers and bottlenecks like water against a weir. Whenever I got out at Liverpool Street Station on my way back to the East End, said Austerlitz, I would stay there at least a couple of hours, sitting on a bench with other passengers who were already tired in the early morning, or standing somewhere, leaning on a handrail and feeling that constant wrenching inside me, a kind of heartache which, as I was beginning to sense, was caused by the vortex of past time.

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (181–2)

[vladimir-nabokov-official]

The three facets of the great writer—magic, story, lesson—are prone to blend in one impression of unified and unique radiance, since the magic of art may be present in the very bones of the story, in the very marrow of thought. There are masterpieces of dry, limpid, organized thought which provoke in us an artistic quiver quite as strongly as a novel like “Mansfield Park” does or as any rich flow of Dickensian sensual imagery. It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature (6)

[vladimir-nabokov-official]

i just don’t think i will ever understand literary criticism like this. it’s so beyond my understanding of the text that i can’t even begin to grasp what’s being described here.

[vladimir-nabokov-official]

In his childhood, he said, he used to walk beside the chalk cliffs of Devon and Cornwall, where hollows and basins have been carved and cut out of the rock by the breakers over millions of years, admiring the endless diversity of the semi-sentient marvels oscillating between the vegetable, animal and mineral kingdoms, the zooids and corallines, sea anemones, sea fans and sea feathers, the anthozoans and crustaceans over which the tide washed twice a day while long fronds of seaweed swayed around them, and which then, as the water went out, revealed their wonderfully iridescent life in the rock pools exposed once more to the light and the air, showing all the colours of the rainbow – emerald, scarlet and rosy red, sulphur yellow, velvety black.

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (126–7)

[vladimir-nabokov-official]

Nabokov might not have shared Greenberg’s Marxism but he shared his cultural politics. In “The Proletarian Novel,” a lecture he gave at Wellesley in 1941, Nabokov warned his undergraduate audience that, ‘at the present moment this country is facing a grave danger: that danger is the best-seller.’ In a lecture on Pushkin delivered in Paris four years earlier, Nabokov had argued that ubiquity diluted the power of a literary work and that only after ‘its literary fame has tarnished’ can its ‘true character’ be revealed. ‘The greater the number of readers’, he said, ‘the less a book is understood, the essence of its truth, as it spreads, seems to evaporate.’ This was not a problem Nabokov had to contend with in his early years as an American writer. The challenge for Nabokov was to find a way to square his commitment to high modernist aesthetic autonomy with the life of a professional writer in the literary marketplace of 1940s and 50s America. […] To some critics, Nabokov’s writing after “Lolita” exhibited a deliberate refusal to conform to the market expectations his bestseller had created. Dwight Macdonald argued that in “Pale Fire” (1962) there was ‘a perverse bravado’ on Nabokov’s part, ‘as if the author, with a superior smile, is saying to the large public that read “Lolita”: “So you think I’m a manufacturer of best-sellers? Try this on your pianola!” I must confess I find this attitude, if not its product, attractive.’ His next novel, “Ada” (1969), was, if anything, even more inaccessible, yet on its publication Nabokov was pictured on the cover of “Time” magazine. Both these novels were designed to encourage nonlinear recursive readings, defying the logic of consumption inherent in the idea of books as commodities. These were not books to be consumed and disposed of after a single reading and their value as cultural object bore little relation, by this way of thinking, to the cost of purchase.

Duncan White, ‘Publishing: American Literature,’ in Nabokov in Context (151–2 & 156)

[vladimir-nabokov-official]

Art: Mœbius

[vladimir-nabokov-official]

Nabokov’s books are populated with doubles and ‘passportless spies,’ characters whose full humanity—or inhumanity, in the case of Humbert Humbert—is invisible to the natives around them. They are unaccommodated in the world and thus potentially monstrous, and can fully exist only in the linguistic space Nabokov provides for them. His language is so vast and sovereign that it can even accommodate a sociopath like Humbert Humbert, whose pathology is the very cause for his perpetual displacement. If someone like Humbert Humbert can find a place for himself in language, then just about anyone can. What “Lolita” thus accomplishes is nothing short of blissfully miraculous, but it does so at a price of Humbert’s monstrous solipsism and Dolores’s silence. The project of “Lolita” is not to represent the processes occurring in a rapist’s mind, nor to titillatingly convey sexual pathologies of mid-century America. Its project is to create for a displaced writer a sovereign territory within a monstrously foreign language. What “Lolita” showed me is not how to wrangle the beast of the English tongue, but that it is possible to transform it enough to compensate for ceaselessly feeling that wherever I may be, I am never at home. For those of us who struggle daily to write in a language into which we were not born, the fact that the greatest American novel of (at least) the twentieth century was written by a displaced foreigner means that there is a space in which we can be and continue being.

Aleksandar Hemon, ‘Aquiring Lolita’s Language,’ in Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century (280)