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Re: Epigraphies and versipel
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Jansy Mello quotes Michaël Wood quoting Nabokov:
"He "had to" give up Russian, it seems, not in order to sell books in English,
but in order to write the English he wanted to write — to shake the shadow of
his Russian. He made a sort of vow to himself. He says in a letter to his wife,
rather oddly, that 'I myself don't fully register all the
grief and bitterness of my situation." "I don't think anyone who hasn't
experienced these feelings can properly appreciate them, the torment, the
tragedy." The implication, clearly, is that a writer cannot have two
languages, ..."
... as a man cannot have two loves.
V quotes Sebastian Knight's Lost Property quoting a love letter to a woman misdirected to a firm of traders (and which never reached its destination because of a plane crash) The anonymous author of the love letter experiences the same grief at leaving his love for another woman as VN at leaving Russian for another language
"I cannot help feeling there is something essentially wrong about love. Friends may quarrel or drift apart, close relations too, but there is not this pang, this pathos, this fatality which clings to love ... Why, what is the matter? What is this mysterious exclusiveness? ... One may have a thousand friends but only one love-mate ... For if I say 'two', I have started to count and there is no end to it. There is only one real number: One. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity." (ch 12)
Love and language.
Besides, in this same novel, Nina Lecerf, the woman who has many men, is closely associated with bad literature (she is a fan of literary prize winning novels and a re-reader of best sellers such as Dr Axel Munthe's San Michele) and language is her undoing.
Laurence Hochard
Date: Sat, 23 Feb 2013 19:08:34 -0300
From: jansy@AETERN.US
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] Epigraphies and versipel
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
... "Versipel" could be the verbal image that renders VN's
qualms towards his partially abandoned mother-tongue,
then disguised into a parody of a country that lies far, far
away. (JM)
Jansy Mello:
In his commentaries about Brian Boyd's "Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years," Michael
Wood indirectly answers part of my interrogations concerning Nabokov's
experience of loss and his qualms in relation to the Russian language (but he
opened many others concerning the role a writer's style could play to
veil his losses) :
"Nabokov had moved from a precarious post teaching Russian at
Wellesley to an established job teaching Russian and European literature at
Cornell[ ] But there was a huge event in Nabokov's apparently quiet
later life. He changed his language[ ] But that wasn't the completed
event.[ ] The completed event was the decision, taken soon after his
arrival in America, to abandon Russian as an instrument of prose fiction [
] He "had to" give up Russian, it seems, not in order to sell books in English,
but in order to write the English he wanted to write — to shake the shadow of
his Russian. He made a sort of vow to himself. He says in a letter to his wife,
rather oddly, that 'I myself don't fully register all the
grief and bitterness of my situation." "I don't think anyone who hasn't
experienced these feelings can properly appreciate them, the torment, the
tragedy." The implication, clearly, is that a writer cannot have two
languages, a view that makes Nabokov quite different, say. from Beckett, and
perhaps from most bilingual writers.[ ] ...there is a passage
in Speak, Memory, quoted by Boyd, that constructs memory and
understanding as a function of loss rather than a redemption of it. Nabokov
wonders whether he had missed something in his French governess, 'something … that I could appreciate only after the things and
beings that I had most loved in the security of my childhood had been turned to
ashes or shot through the heart." Thus it may have been also that Nabokov
could appreciate language itself, appreciate it incomparably as he did, only
after he had lost a language, or made himself lose it, and had found another in
the ashes of his loss.[ ] In fact, we don't learn a whole lot about
Nabokov himself in this book, if we think of "Nabokov" as a psychological entity
rather than as a public face or a series of performances. This is not a failure
on Boyd's part, it is an aspect of his triumph. For surely any psychology that
we could invent for Nabokov would end up suspended in midair, stranded for lack
of evidence. It's not that Nabokov didn't have a psychology, it's that he seems
to have made it disappear into style, even in hi: private life." (for a full
fair reading go to Elusive
Butterfly | New Republic )
www.newrepublic.com/article/.../elusive-butterfl... -
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