Subject
[NABOKOV-L] Eric Naiman's "Nabokov, Perversely", organ grinders,
Nabokov's and Ember's translations.
Nabokov's and Ember's translations.
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Date
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I was privileged to receive a copy of Eric Naiman's "Nabokov, Perversely" (Cornell University Press, 2010), which I soon expect to read.
The reviews are enthusiastic and challenging (Eliot Borenstein, New York University "a well-reasoned and brilliant attempt to revolutionize Nabokov studies"; Caryl Emergon, Princeton University "mind bending inquiry into Nabokov's strategies for harnessing unruly bodies...in a tour de force that will not only change the way we think about how we read but also compel anew our wonder at the intrincacy and toughness of fictional worlds"; Alexander Etkind, Cambridge University:" Wise or bawdy but invariably original, this book liberates Nabokov from the Nabokovians...").
There's only a link I want to add, due to the coincidence that brought together Zholkovsky's article, with its reference to organ-grinders and monkeys ("Just two years after his death and one year into Nabokov's American avatar, Nabokov published translations of several poems by Khodasevich, "The Monkey" among them! In other words, almost a decade before implicitly claiming that poem as his own in a fictitious non-fiction, he actually had penned it-in English," ...aso*) and the postman's delivery of Naiman's book [Ch.2: "Art as Afterglow (Bend Sinister)p.46-], describing the padograph ("a typewriter made to reproduce with repellent perfection...") and Ember's efforts to translate Shakespeare's Hamlet, observed by Krug (BS 119-20): "Nature had once produced an Englishman whose domed head had been a hive of words (...) Three centuries later, another man, in another countray, was trying to render these rythms and metaphors in a different tongue. This process entailed a prodigious amount of labour, for the necessity of which no real reason could be given. 9...0 From a practical point of view, such a waste of time and meterial (...) was almost criminally absurd, since the greatest masterpice of imitation presupposed a voluntary limitation of thought, in submission to another man's genius. Could this suicidal lmitation and submission be compensated by the miracle of adaptive tactivs, by the thousand devices of shadography (...) an exaggerated and spiritualized replica of Paduk's writing machine?" Naiman notes how just "before the arrest, as Ember is discussing his translation's fine points, Krug notices something strange by looking out the window. Naiman quotes (BS 121): " Some of his puns -" said Krug. "Hullo, that's queer." He had become aware of the yard [...[ "Never in my life, said Krug, have I seen two organ grinders in the same back yard at the same time [...[ I wonder what has happened? They look most uncomfortable, and they do not, or cannot play" [...] There is something familiar about the whole thing, something I cannot quite disentangle - a certain line of thought."
For Naiman " 'the line of thought' is the tangle of the novel itself, entwined with multiple references to homosexuality." (p.53). For me, in a puzzled superficial glance, Krug's "the line of thought" is mainly applicable to translation and the challenge of "submission/appropriation."
Of course, we can always conjecture about what the process of translating entails (hmmm) with its double transpositions and aping, in connection to some kind of obsessive, homosexual, dynamics. I haven't read Naiman's whole chapter (and I've been enjoying it more than its predecessor, on Lolita, whose emphasis on bawdiness and puns I found, on the whole, a bit reductive).
This monkey business may turn into an interesting hypothesis (and extension) into BS's references to translation and clues to homosexuality, but it rests on finding many more other instances, which I doubt can be as easily discovered as this accidental find.Perhaps they're already mentioned in Naiman's future chapters... My "precocious" connection is merely motivated by the permanent thrill I get from coincidences ( the Zholkovsky/Naiman parallel emergence in my life).
.................................................................................................................................
* Quoting Zholkovsky: "The affinities of Nabokov's "first poem" with Khodasevich's "Monkey" ...with the intention "to reconstruct the summer of 1914" ...The setting of Khodasevich's poem is a dacha near Moscow, that of Nabokov's "first poem," one near St. Petersburg. Thus the time and, in a sense, the place coincide, as does the monkey-cum-barrel-organ motif...Further parallels are, however, not traceable, since Nabokov's poem appears to have stayed "unwritten.
The link from the Nabokovian (Poem, Problem, Prank By Alexander Zholkovsky from the Nabokovian 47, Fall 2001. www.hunter.cuny.edu/classics/russian/russianlinks/ - ) offers a curious conclusion, which had struck me before, in its application to Nabokov's conundrums: "...After all, they are not age-old enigmas wrapped in mysteries of artistic creation, but rather, to continue paraphrasing the Churchillian description of Russia, hoaxes surrounded with riddles inside puzzles. Well-made, but man-made." It stresses Nabokov's intention to "taunt the reader" and the latter's habitual "lack of discernment." And yet, the matter he's been discussing is mainly for slavic language and literature scholars and not something a common reader, like me, can grasp. I stick to my own ideal "analogic incrustations," with no hoax-husked manipulations.
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The reviews are enthusiastic and challenging (Eliot Borenstein, New York University "a well-reasoned and brilliant attempt to revolutionize Nabokov studies"; Caryl Emergon, Princeton University "mind bending inquiry into Nabokov's strategies for harnessing unruly bodies...in a tour de force that will not only change the way we think about how we read but also compel anew our wonder at the intrincacy and toughness of fictional worlds"; Alexander Etkind, Cambridge University:" Wise or bawdy but invariably original, this book liberates Nabokov from the Nabokovians...").
There's only a link I want to add, due to the coincidence that brought together Zholkovsky's article, with its reference to organ-grinders and monkeys ("Just two years after his death and one year into Nabokov's American avatar, Nabokov published translations of several poems by Khodasevich, "The Monkey" among them! In other words, almost a decade before implicitly claiming that poem as his own in a fictitious non-fiction, he actually had penned it-in English," ...aso*) and the postman's delivery of Naiman's book [Ch.2: "Art as Afterglow (Bend Sinister)p.46-], describing the padograph ("a typewriter made to reproduce with repellent perfection...") and Ember's efforts to translate Shakespeare's Hamlet, observed by Krug (BS 119-20): "Nature had once produced an Englishman whose domed head had been a hive of words (...) Three centuries later, another man, in another countray, was trying to render these rythms and metaphors in a different tongue. This process entailed a prodigious amount of labour, for the necessity of which no real reason could be given. 9...0 From a practical point of view, such a waste of time and meterial (...) was almost criminally absurd, since the greatest masterpice of imitation presupposed a voluntary limitation of thought, in submission to another man's genius. Could this suicidal lmitation and submission be compensated by the miracle of adaptive tactivs, by the thousand devices of shadography (...) an exaggerated and spiritualized replica of Paduk's writing machine?" Naiman notes how just "before the arrest, as Ember is discussing his translation's fine points, Krug notices something strange by looking out the window. Naiman quotes (BS 121): " Some of his puns -" said Krug. "Hullo, that's queer." He had become aware of the yard [...[ "Never in my life, said Krug, have I seen two organ grinders in the same back yard at the same time [...[ I wonder what has happened? They look most uncomfortable, and they do not, or cannot play" [...] There is something familiar about the whole thing, something I cannot quite disentangle - a certain line of thought."
For Naiman " 'the line of thought' is the tangle of the novel itself, entwined with multiple references to homosexuality." (p.53). For me, in a puzzled superficial glance, Krug's "the line of thought" is mainly applicable to translation and the challenge of "submission/appropriation."
Of course, we can always conjecture about what the process of translating entails (hmmm) with its double transpositions and aping, in connection to some kind of obsessive, homosexual, dynamics. I haven't read Naiman's whole chapter (and I've been enjoying it more than its predecessor, on Lolita, whose emphasis on bawdiness and puns I found, on the whole, a bit reductive).
This monkey business may turn into an interesting hypothesis (and extension) into BS's references to translation and clues to homosexuality, but it rests on finding many more other instances, which I doubt can be as easily discovered as this accidental find.Perhaps they're already mentioned in Naiman's future chapters... My "precocious" connection is merely motivated by the permanent thrill I get from coincidences ( the Zholkovsky/Naiman parallel emergence in my life).
.................................................................................................................................
* Quoting Zholkovsky: "The affinities of Nabokov's "first poem" with Khodasevich's "Monkey" ...with the intention "to reconstruct the summer of 1914" ...The setting of Khodasevich's poem is a dacha near Moscow, that of Nabokov's "first poem," one near St. Petersburg. Thus the time and, in a sense, the place coincide, as does the monkey-cum-barrel-organ motif...Further parallels are, however, not traceable, since Nabokov's poem appears to have stayed "unwritten.
The link from the Nabokovian (Poem, Problem, Prank By Alexander Zholkovsky from the Nabokovian 47, Fall 2001. www.hunter.cuny.edu/classics/russian/russianlinks/ - ) offers a curious conclusion, which had struck me before, in its application to Nabokov's conundrums: "...After all, they are not age-old enigmas wrapped in mysteries of artistic creation, but rather, to continue paraphrasing the Churchillian description of Russia, hoaxes surrounded with riddles inside puzzles. Well-made, but man-made." It stresses Nabokov's intention to "taunt the reader" and the latter's habitual "lack of discernment." And yet, the matter he's been discussing is mainly for slavic language and literature scholars and not something a common reader, like me, can grasp. I stick to my own ideal "analogic incrustations," with no hoax-husked manipulations.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/