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Re: American writing; translation parrots; BS
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On 12/12/06 15:33, "Chaswe@AOL.COM" <Chaswe@AOL.COM> wrote:
He sounds as at his most "foreign" in BS…..
VN’s intro starts: “Bend Sinister was the first novel I wrote in America, and that was half a dozen years after she and I adopted each other.” Since Bend Sinister is set in what seems to be some kind of soviet or fascist police-state, your ‘foreign’ is remarkably well-chosen.
I agree with many other listers that applying national tags to artists is useful only in limited situations — and only when you clarify which of the many meanings of, say, Russian and English is being applied AND FOR WHAT REASON. Place of birth is just one obvious starting criterion (cf Leonardo DA VINCI!), yet even here many exceptions appear (an Indian Kipling? an African William Boyd?). Citizenship/Passport changes play their role, but artists can flit globally, adopting and identifying closely with different cultures at different times WITHOUT necessarily switching legal ‘nationalities.’ Then the NATIVE language[s] and/or any other languages acquired later by a writer provide plausible labels if used carefully. I suggest (with no claim for originality!) that VN, several years (hard to be precise) after his last penned-in-Russian novel could no longer be be classed as a ‘Russian novelist’ using the LINGUISTIC criterion. You never really lose a native language, but in exile you tend to lose touch with evolving nuances and idioms. The longer he lived in America and CREATED more-or-less exclusively in English (using Russian mainly to translate his own English works), the less useful that “Russian” predicate applies as a writer. Brian Boyd covers what VN calls his ‘private tragedy’ in abandoning ‘my natural [Russian] idiom ... for a second-rate brand of English” (The American Years, pp 490-1) Considering this comes from the afterword to the English LOLITA, one cries at the certain irony of VN-the-joker’s “second-rate.”
Elsewhere, we detect VN’s strong reluctance to play the LitCrit INFLUENCES game. And quite right, too. The topmost artists (almost by definition!) DO the influencing, not vice versa — VN prefers the sly Nabokovian notion of SELF-PLAGIARIZING! In the intro to Invitation to a Beheading, we meet his oft-quoted rejection of the reviewers’ verdict of “Kafkaesque” at a time when he had not read any Kafka in any language:
“Spiritual affinities have no place in my concept of literary criticism ... One author, however, has never been mentioned in this connection — the only author whom I must gratefully recognize as an influence upon me at the time of writing this book; namely the melancholy, extravagent, wise, witty, magical, and altogther delightful Pierre Delalande, whom I invented.”
Stan Kelly-Bootle.
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He sounds as at his most "foreign" in BS…..
VN’s intro starts: “Bend Sinister was the first novel I wrote in America, and that was half a dozen years after she and I adopted each other.” Since Bend Sinister is set in what seems to be some kind of soviet or fascist police-state, your ‘foreign’ is remarkably well-chosen.
I agree with many other listers that applying national tags to artists is useful only in limited situations — and only when you clarify which of the many meanings of, say, Russian and English is being applied AND FOR WHAT REASON. Place of birth is just one obvious starting criterion (cf Leonardo DA VINCI!), yet even here many exceptions appear (an Indian Kipling? an African William Boyd?). Citizenship/Passport changes play their role, but artists can flit globally, adopting and identifying closely with different cultures at different times WITHOUT necessarily switching legal ‘nationalities.’ Then the NATIVE language[s] and/or any other languages acquired later by a writer provide plausible labels if used carefully. I suggest (with no claim for originality!) that VN, several years (hard to be precise) after his last penned-in-Russian novel could no longer be be classed as a ‘Russian novelist’ using the LINGUISTIC criterion. You never really lose a native language, but in exile you tend to lose touch with evolving nuances and idioms. The longer he lived in America and CREATED more-or-less exclusively in English (using Russian mainly to translate his own English works), the less useful that “Russian” predicate applies as a writer. Brian Boyd covers what VN calls his ‘private tragedy’ in abandoning ‘my natural [Russian] idiom ... for a second-rate brand of English” (The American Years, pp 490-1) Considering this comes from the afterword to the English LOLITA, one cries at the certain irony of VN-the-joker’s “second-rate.”
Elsewhere, we detect VN’s strong reluctance to play the LitCrit INFLUENCES game. And quite right, too. The topmost artists (almost by definition!) DO the influencing, not vice versa — VN prefers the sly Nabokovian notion of SELF-PLAGIARIZING! In the intro to Invitation to a Beheading, we meet his oft-quoted rejection of the reviewers’ verdict of “Kafkaesque” at a time when he had not read any Kafka in any language:
“Spiritual affinities have no place in my concept of literary criticism ... One author, however, has never been mentioned in this connection — the only author whom I must gratefully recognize as an influence upon me at the time of writing this book; namely the melancholy, extravagent, wise, witty, magical, and altogther delightful Pierre Delalande, whom I invented.”
Stan Kelly-Bootle.
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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