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[NABOKOV-L] [THOUGHTS] refrain quatrain in CK notes
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Stan Kelly-Bootle on Monday, March 10, 2008 in [THOUGHTS] "refrain quatrain in CK notes" answered about a query on: 2. CK Line 957: Night Rote[ ...]I remember one little poem from Night Rote (meaning "the nocturnal sound of the sea") that happened to be my first contact with the American poet Shade....
SK-B: ...what's hard for any writer to fathom [!] is whether the reader is as familiar as the writer with a word's range of meanings. In the case of "rote," I can assure you that without CK's gloss, I and most "native" Anglophones would not have associated "rote" with the "sound of the sea." [...] A dozen arcane meanings for "rote" have also been noted here, rarely found in everyday discourse.But, here's the key point: _without_ CK's en passant definition, few, if any Anglophones would rush to look up "rote" in the dictionary! It's the very fact of CK's parenthetical detour that has us bothered. But not for long! Good Nabokovian re-readers will be moved to check whether CK is teasing us or not [ WHAT IF, a draft of Shade's "Night Rote" turns up on a damp card? ...By ocean lip the waters lap;/An ancient violin is heard /By rote repeating endless crap ...]...We each acquire our stock of words in diverse, uncharted ways.
He added: ...the "standard" meaning, and it makes reasonable sense in the context of a _poem_ titled "Night Rote."...ponder plausibly, poetically about nights spent "by rote," that is, habitually and mechanically, uncreatively and so on.
Jansy Mello: The more subjective our response to art, the less it may be shared with other people. VN seems capable to ellicit descrepant reactions and interpretations from his variegated readers (this often engenders in me a feeling of "loneliness" that is not at all unpleasurable to experiment). Just like the transformation undergone by Shaw's "Pygmalion" (the play) in "My Fair Lady" (the musical) we move from your observation ( "that meaning seems to be from a rather localized dialect..." ) to those found in various other dictionaries, even those in Brazilian-Portuguese and Portuguese-Portuguese. In "My Fair Lady" there is a line that goes like "there even are places where English completely disappears: in America they haven't spoken it for years").
In a Brazilian, French and Spanish rendering of "rote" we reached similar options: "ressaca, ressac, resaca".
Probably another translation, made in Portugal, would favor a different word for it.
In the Pale Fire translation that was printed in Brazil, CK's parenthetical explanation was omitted from the notes (!) since "ressaca" is immediately understandable by any reader. Other alterations ensued. For example, the bacchic "damp carnival" lost its carnal tone when the lines were translated as:
"Foi Golfo em sombras meu primeiro livro/
(versos livres); a ele se seguiram/
A ressaca noturna e A taça de Hebe,/
Último carro no úmido desfile,/
because "carnival" was translated as "a parade" (but not as a "paegeant") while CK's manipulatory commentary lost some of its fleshy damp refrain.
( it is always a pleasure to read your messages, SK-B, and I hope that the interrogation ( 1929 - ?) indicates many more years of fruitful exchanges for all of us...)
It would be very interesting if any Nabokov scholar should compare a selection of special words as they appear in a VN's original writing and in its various translations into either English,Russian, French, Spanish or Portuguese. I'm sure the results would be very surprising indeed...
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SK-B: ...what's hard for any writer to fathom [!] is whether the reader is as familiar as the writer with a word's range of meanings. In the case of "rote," I can assure you that without CK's gloss, I and most "native" Anglophones would not have associated "rote" with the "sound of the sea." [...] A dozen arcane meanings for "rote" have also been noted here, rarely found in everyday discourse.But, here's the key point: _without_ CK's en passant definition, few, if any Anglophones would rush to look up "rote" in the dictionary! It's the very fact of CK's parenthetical detour that has us bothered. But not for long! Good Nabokovian re-readers will be moved to check whether CK is teasing us or not [ WHAT IF, a draft of Shade's "Night Rote" turns up on a damp card? ...By ocean lip the waters lap;/An ancient violin is heard /By rote repeating endless crap ...]...We each acquire our stock of words in diverse, uncharted ways.
He added: ...the "standard" meaning, and it makes reasonable sense in the context of a _poem_ titled "Night Rote."...ponder plausibly, poetically about nights spent "by rote," that is, habitually and mechanically, uncreatively and so on.
Jansy Mello: The more subjective our response to art, the less it may be shared with other people. VN seems capable to ellicit descrepant reactions and interpretations from his variegated readers (this often engenders in me a feeling of "loneliness" that is not at all unpleasurable to experiment). Just like the transformation undergone by Shaw's "Pygmalion" (the play) in "My Fair Lady" (the musical) we move from your observation ( "that meaning seems to be from a rather localized dialect..." ) to those found in various other dictionaries, even those in Brazilian-Portuguese and Portuguese-Portuguese. In "My Fair Lady" there is a line that goes like "there even are places where English completely disappears: in America they haven't spoken it for years").
In a Brazilian, French and Spanish rendering of "rote" we reached similar options: "ressaca, ressac, resaca".
Probably another translation, made in Portugal, would favor a different word for it.
In the Pale Fire translation that was printed in Brazil, CK's parenthetical explanation was omitted from the notes (!) since "ressaca" is immediately understandable by any reader. Other alterations ensued. For example, the bacchic "damp carnival" lost its carnal tone when the lines were translated as:
"Foi Golfo em sombras meu primeiro livro/
(versos livres); a ele se seguiram/
A ressaca noturna e A taça de Hebe,/
Último carro no úmido desfile,/
because "carnival" was translated as "a parade" (but not as a "paegeant") while CK's manipulatory commentary lost some of its fleshy damp refrain.
( it is always a pleasure to read your messages, SK-B, and I hope that the interrogation ( 1929 - ?) indicates many more years of fruitful exchanges for all of us...)
It would be very interesting if any Nabokov scholar should compare a selection of special words as they appear in a VN's original writing and in its various translations into either English,Russian, French, Spanish or Portuguese. I'm sure the results would be very surprising indeed...
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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