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Re: Preparation H in Pale Fire (VN and linguistics)
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[EDNOTE. Stan Kelly-Bootle recently remarked that VN might have seen
> "words as direct, howbeit 'shadowy,' links to an underpinning
reality."]
>
> I would say, words as direct, strikingly pointed, howbeit 'shadowy'
> links to
> surrounding world, cast with light of VN consciousness. Reality is a
> tricky
> word when applied to VN oeuvre. That's the word that exists only in
> quotes,
> remember? "Shadows" come from reality, not words.
>
> - George Shimanovich
George: I had in mind, inter alia,
"The very word terrace -- how spacious, how cool!"
(KQK, page 41, McGraw-Hill, 1968. VN/DN translation).
Of course, this is the wonderfully jokey Dreyer (quite unGerman
businessman,
nein??) musing to himself via VN's "reportage." Yet, here especially, I
feel
VN's own feelings for word-essence rather than (or in addition to) the
author creating a "character."
Re-Jansy's valid point about "words vs sentences" and the colouring of
various syntactic chunks, it's worth noting that many agglutinative and
polysythetic languages blur the grammatical features familiar to our
list's
Indo-European family of tongues (the same metonymy as lingua and
yarzik!)
For example, Cherokee's nouns are often lenghthy definitions --
"California"
is "Out-there-where-they-have-the-gold!" -- so we must avoid insular
generalizations in matters linguistical. For all I know, the Cherokee
for
"terrace" might be
"out-there-on-the-cool-and-spacious-sipping-iced-tea-grounds" which
would
present DN with an interesting (but surely surmountable) KQK translation
challenge.
Incidentally, Fritz's view of "reality" in KQK changes dramatically in
Chapter 3 after the repair of his "spectables, I mean respectables"
[sheer
translation genius, capturing Fritz's stuttered reaction to Martha's
proximity]:
"The haxe dissolved. The unruly colors of the universe were _confined_
once
more to their official compartments and cells." (ibid. page 45. My
italics.)
Forgive this newcomer to NABOKV-L -- I'm sure my comments must be
vieux-chapeau to seasoned Nabokovians.
My own thesis on Soccer Chants (serialized in the far from scholarly
tabloid
Daily Express!) was titled "The Terrace Muse," (the pun on "Mews" might
not
be obvious to some listers) where the very word "terrace" is so
inherently
crowded, hot and sweaty.
O who will rid us of those damn'ed quotes? Not that weaselly done, dear
comrades. In my computer-scientific domain we are dogged with
distinguishing
identifier names from literal (here we go again) strings. Thus, REALITY
might represent the sought unknown, while "REALITY" is quite other (a
mere
string of seven ASCII characters!). And then we have Tarski, the "Father
of
Truth" with his disquotational semantics. Thus "Nabokov is the auther of
Lolita" iff (pronounced if-and-only-if) Nabokov is the author of Lolita.
You
think you litcrit guys have problems?
skb
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
> "words as direct, howbeit 'shadowy,' links to an underpinning
reality."]
>
> I would say, words as direct, strikingly pointed, howbeit 'shadowy'
> links to
> surrounding world, cast with light of VN consciousness. Reality is a
> tricky
> word when applied to VN oeuvre. That's the word that exists only in
> quotes,
> remember? "Shadows" come from reality, not words.
>
> - George Shimanovich
George: I had in mind, inter alia,
"The very word terrace -- how spacious, how cool!"
(KQK, page 41, McGraw-Hill, 1968. VN/DN translation).
Of course, this is the wonderfully jokey Dreyer (quite unGerman
businessman,
nein??) musing to himself via VN's "reportage." Yet, here especially, I
feel
VN's own feelings for word-essence rather than (or in addition to) the
author creating a "character."
Re-Jansy's valid point about "words vs sentences" and the colouring of
various syntactic chunks, it's worth noting that many agglutinative and
polysythetic languages blur the grammatical features familiar to our
list's
Indo-European family of tongues (the same metonymy as lingua and
yarzik!)
For example, Cherokee's nouns are often lenghthy definitions --
"California"
is "Out-there-where-they-have-the-gold!" -- so we must avoid insular
generalizations in matters linguistical. For all I know, the Cherokee
for
"terrace" might be
"out-there-on-the-cool-and-spacious-sipping-iced-tea-grounds" which
would
present DN with an interesting (but surely surmountable) KQK translation
challenge.
Incidentally, Fritz's view of "reality" in KQK changes dramatically in
Chapter 3 after the repair of his "spectables, I mean respectables"
[sheer
translation genius, capturing Fritz's stuttered reaction to Martha's
proximity]:
"The haxe dissolved. The unruly colors of the universe were _confined_
once
more to their official compartments and cells." (ibid. page 45. My
italics.)
Forgive this newcomer to NABOKV-L -- I'm sure my comments must be
vieux-chapeau to seasoned Nabokovians.
My own thesis on Soccer Chants (serialized in the far from scholarly
tabloid
Daily Express!) was titled "The Terrace Muse," (the pun on "Mews" might
not
be obvious to some listers) where the very word "terrace" is so
inherently
crowded, hot and sweaty.
O who will rid us of those damn'ed quotes? Not that weaselly done, dear
comrades. In my computer-scientific domain we are dogged with
distinguishing
identifier names from literal (here we go again) strings. Thus, REALITY
might represent the sought unknown, while "REALITY" is quite other (a
mere
string of seven ASCII characters!). And then we have Tarski, the "Father
of
Truth" with his disquotational semantics. Thus "Nabokov is the auther of
Lolita" iff (pronounced if-and-only-if) Nabokov is the author of Lolita.
You
think you litcrit guys have problems?
skb
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