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Fw: [NABOKV-L] Naiman re: Mello on "Could a mockery...
'bloomers' ?"
'bloomers' ?"
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Dear List,
Eric Naiman wrote about ' "bloomers" as a substitute for "howlers", a favorite word of VN in his criticism of translations. Howlers is a gendered image, "schoolboy howlers" ...the type of behavior stereotypically associated with English boarding schools --another case where interpretation and sexuality run together ( bad translation and bad performance are sexualized...). By transforming howlers into bloomers Nabokov is both feminizing the immediate connotation of a translation mistake and also aestheticizing such mistakes -- as if they were something to be culled and put in a bouquet.'
Unfortunately I'm not familiar with equivalent expressions for "bloomers" in the sense VN used ( nor did I find any of these in my Concise Oxford Dictionary with that meaning). Even after consulting books like Richard Lederer's hilarious "Anguished English" and researching other colloquial expressions, for the non-English speaking, "howler" as a "gendered image" becomes difficult to understand.
Besides, I only found the word "howler" twice in "Ada" joining together "ursine howlers" or monkey hoots (emphasizing the noise) and "transmongrelizers" where, again, the noise of applause comes together with sexual innuendo and the suggestion of a "howlering blunder"( as Naiman illustrated in his quote of the "the violent dance called kurva or 'ribbon boule' in the hilarious program whose howlers almost caused Veen(...) to fall from his seat.").
Therefore, I think that my hypothesis still holds in that, when writing about "swooners" in "Lolita", Nabokov was mainly setting a playful, good-hearted trap for his translators. Usually many, sometimes even contradictory, senses may become agglutinated when we interpret VN either unconsciously as in a "general reader's idiosyncratic way" or as precise as the "good readers' ".
(As an amusing reminder, keeping in mind VN's monkey/ursine howler we have his own poem "On Translating Eugene Onegin": What is a translation? On a platter/ A poet's pale and glaring head,/ A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter, And profanation of the dead" ...)
Favoring Naiman's "gendered image" illustration, I can tell about something that happend in the process of translating "Ada" into Portuguese. The synonyms for "marsh marigold" offered by Ada (mollyblob,marybud,maybubble) easily suggest Joyce's Molly Bloom - besides allowing ample space for the reader's grasp about "fertility feasts". In Portuguese the joycean blooming association was lost in translation and yet, "marsh marigold" in Portuguese is not only "malmequer" but also "picão-da-praia". One of the slang words for "penis" is "pica" (and its ending with "ão" in "picão" might playfully suggest its exagerated size), but the term is more familiar as a common household-word since ichteric babies are bathed in the very effective "picão-tea". The translator's choice of keeping close to the "literal & botanical" meaning helped him to maintain the eroticized meaning only by accident. At the same time, he had to sacrifice the other, richer, allusions to James Joyce.
In "After Babel", George Steiner refers to Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin and concludes: " Taken together with the Commentary, Nabokov's production is a masterpiece of baroque wit and learning... a 'Midrashic' reanimation and exploration of the original text so massive and ingenious as to become, consciously or not, its rival" (page 332,note). When Steiner describes the postulate of "untranslatability" he explains "that there can be no symmetry, no adequate mirroring, between two different semantic systems" ... "because all human speech consists of arbitraily selected but intensely conventionalized signals, meaning can never be wholly separated from expressive form". ( Oxford University Press, 1998, page 252). And Nabokov is quoted side by side Samuel Johnson at least twice by Steiner in that cont ext. Begining with Rilke's contention "that each word in a poem is semantically unique" he extends this "drastic apartness withing a language" to translation, to inform us that "the argument is implicit in Dr. Johnson's Preface to the 1755 Dictionary " and that it "is put once again by Nabokov, precisely two centuries later when he declares, with reference to English versions of Pushkin, that in the translation of verse anything but the 'clumsiest literalism' is a fraud." He returns to this on page 264: "The argument from perfection which, essentially, is that of Du Bellay, Dr.Johnson, Nabokov, and so many others, is facile".
While trying to compare the duality of RLS's characters, Dr.Jekyl and Mr.Hyde, with VN's Kinbote and Shade, after following Steiner's arguments, I came to reconsider if these two pairs can be placed side by side. In RLS's novel they are both an expression of the same individual ( in varios gradations and superpositions) whereas Shade and Kinbote are never the same, even when we depart from the fact that both were created by a single author, VN. We may notice the same gradations, overlappings and miscigenations but they remain separate, Shade like a Pope scholar ( Samuel Johnson wrote a biography of Pope) and Kinbote as a narcisistic and ridiculous annotator ( like Boswell), as separate as "two different semantic systems". These two characters might now serve to illustrate VN's own views on translation - beside all other interpretations - who knows?
Jansy
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Eric Naiman wrote about ' "bloomers" as a substitute for "howlers", a favorite word of VN in his criticism of translations. Howlers is a gendered image, "schoolboy howlers" ...the type of behavior stereotypically associated with English boarding schools --another case where interpretation and sexuality run together ( bad translation and bad performance are sexualized...). By transforming howlers into bloomers Nabokov is both feminizing the immediate connotation of a translation mistake and also aestheticizing such mistakes -- as if they were something to be culled and put in a bouquet.'
Unfortunately I'm not familiar with equivalent expressions for "bloomers" in the sense VN used ( nor did I find any of these in my Concise Oxford Dictionary with that meaning). Even after consulting books like Richard Lederer's hilarious "Anguished English" and researching other colloquial expressions, for the non-English speaking, "howler" as a "gendered image" becomes difficult to understand.
Besides, I only found the word "howler" twice in "Ada" joining together "ursine howlers" or monkey hoots (emphasizing the noise) and "transmongrelizers" where, again, the noise of applause comes together with sexual innuendo and the suggestion of a "howlering blunder"( as Naiman illustrated in his quote of the "the violent dance called kurva or 'ribbon boule' in the hilarious program whose howlers almost caused Veen(...) to fall from his seat.").
Therefore, I think that my hypothesis still holds in that, when writing about "swooners" in "Lolita", Nabokov was mainly setting a playful, good-hearted trap for his translators. Usually many, sometimes even contradictory, senses may become agglutinated when we interpret VN either unconsciously as in a "general reader's idiosyncratic way" or as precise as the "good readers' ".
(As an amusing reminder, keeping in mind VN's monkey/ursine howler we have his own poem "On Translating Eugene Onegin": What is a translation? On a platter/ A poet's pale and glaring head,/ A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter, And profanation of the dead" ...)
Favoring Naiman's "gendered image" illustration, I can tell about something that happend in the process of translating "Ada" into Portuguese. The synonyms for "marsh marigold" offered by Ada (mollyblob,marybud,maybubble) easily suggest Joyce's Molly Bloom - besides allowing ample space for the reader's grasp about "fertility feasts". In Portuguese the joycean blooming association was lost in translation and yet, "marsh marigold" in Portuguese is not only "malmequer" but also "picão-da-praia". One of the slang words for "penis" is "pica" (and its ending with "ão" in "picão" might playfully suggest its exagerated size), but the term is more familiar as a common household-word since ichteric babies are bathed in the very effective "picão-tea". The translator's choice of keeping close to the "literal & botanical" meaning helped him to maintain the eroticized meaning only by accident. At the same time, he had to sacrifice the other, richer, allusions to James Joyce.
In "After Babel", George Steiner refers to Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin and concludes: " Taken together with the Commentary, Nabokov's production is a masterpiece of baroque wit and learning... a 'Midrashic' reanimation and exploration of the original text so massive and ingenious as to become, consciously or not, its rival" (page 332,note). When Steiner describes the postulate of "untranslatability" he explains "that there can be no symmetry, no adequate mirroring, between two different semantic systems" ... "because all human speech consists of arbitraily selected but intensely conventionalized signals, meaning can never be wholly separated from expressive form". ( Oxford University Press, 1998, page 252). And Nabokov is quoted side by side Samuel Johnson at least twice by Steiner in that cont ext. Begining with Rilke's contention "that each word in a poem is semantically unique" he extends this "drastic apartness withing a language" to translation, to inform us that "the argument is implicit in Dr. Johnson's Preface to the 1755 Dictionary " and that it "is put once again by Nabokov, precisely two centuries later when he declares, with reference to English versions of Pushkin, that in the translation of verse anything but the 'clumsiest literalism' is a fraud." He returns to this on page 264: "The argument from perfection which, essentially, is that of Du Bellay, Dr.Johnson, Nabokov, and so many others, is facile".
While trying to compare the duality of RLS's characters, Dr.Jekyl and Mr.Hyde, with VN's Kinbote and Shade, after following Steiner's arguments, I came to reconsider if these two pairs can be placed side by side. In RLS's novel they are both an expression of the same individual ( in varios gradations and superpositions) whereas Shade and Kinbote are never the same, even when we depart from the fact that both were created by a single author, VN. We may notice the same gradations, overlappings and miscigenations but they remain separate, Shade like a Pope scholar ( Samuel Johnson wrote a biography of Pope) and Kinbote as a narcisistic and ridiculous annotator ( like Boswell), as separate as "two different semantic systems". These two characters might now serve to illustrate VN's own views on translation - beside all other interpretations - who knows?
Jansy
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