1. I never believed that swooners was meant to be a cognate for any particular item of clothing, it was simply another of Humbert’s elisions of passion and cultural confusion. People who are pretty good at language make up terms like this all the time.
2. Jansy’s “playful good hearted trap for translators” comes kind of close to my meaning, but I do not believe in trying to catch Nabokov peeking through the text all the time. If any one is a playful trap-setter, it is Humbert. We must never confuse an author’s voice with the voices of protagonists or other characters. Never.
3. However dicey Lolita’s history may have been it would have made no difference whatsoever to the word choices this most professional of authors made in his works. I don’t think Nabokov had anachronistic expectations. He knew that his choice of the word swooners was the right choice for Humbert to make. The artist’s decision is the law, and you don’t look back. I doubt that Nabokov sucked the tip of his Ticonderoga very often, thinking either of ways to trick translators, or how he would look to posterity, of of how much money he would make. Nabokov created art, and when artists do that they do it completely, so that the characters they create can live. Humbert is NOT Nabokov.
4. The word for howler is not blooper. Blooper is a term derived strictly from television and it is approximately 30 to 45 years old. It was first used when legitimate actors in television shows fluffed or flubbed, or “blew” their lines. This last term has fallen out of favor in North America, for reasons that may be obvious to some of us. This howler-bloomer controversy should be recognized as international and not merely colloquial.  I have heard an Australian man refer to a howler as a clanger. The main difference between howlers, bloomers, and clangers is that they are all, to an extent “intellectual” solecisms. Today, bloopers has degenerated to audience-supplied video tapes of such hilarious scenes as granny falling out of the pickup truck while it travels at 60 mph on the gravel road, or granddad's pants falling down at his brother’s funeral, or dancing couples falling into a vat of hot chicken gravy.
   

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

Dear Jansy,

Aren't you giving Nabokov rather anachronistic expectations?  Lolita's early history was quite dicey, and her very survival was doubtful. Nabokov had no way to foresee Lolita's eventual gale-force success.

Not until after that unexpected phenomenon could he conceive of laying traps for translators, surely?

Carolyn

p.s. I think you are still a little confused about these bloomers - - the word for howler is blooper.



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