-------- Original Message --------
| Subject: |
Fw: [NABOKV-L] advantage to write in a foreign language?- |
| Date: |
Wed, 06 Sep 2006 13:39:00 -0300 |
| From: |
jansymello <jansy@aetern.us> |
|
|
Sent: Wednesday, September 06, 2006 1:32 PM
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] advantage to write in a foreign
language?- Blunders and Boners!
John Mullan ( brought up by Sandy Klein) wrote on the "advantages
to write in a foreign language". He observed that "Vladimir Nabokov,
who like Conrad had English as a third language, switched from writing
in Russian to writing in English on emigrating to the US. He became one
of the greatest prose stylists of this foreign language, playing with
its words as only a foreigner might."
It seems Nabokov was also, say,
ambidextrous in English. He could employ "bloomers",
"howlers","bloopers" and ... "boners" as well.
At the end of his Lectures on Literature we encounter " L'Envoi" where
he states: ..."But if it may help you, if you have followed my
instructions, to feel the pure satisfaction which an inspired and
precise work of art givers; and this sense of satisfaction in its turn
goes to build up a sense of more genuine mental comfort, the kind of
comfort one feels when one realizes that for all its blunders and
boners the inner texture of life is also a matter of inspiration and
precision."
... " I have tried to teach you to
read books for the sake of their form, their visions, their art. I
have tried to teach you to feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction, to
share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of
its author - the joys and difficulties of creation..."
Also, like Jean Cocteau who wrote that
"la vie est une chute horizontale", when going against common-sense and
almost suggesting again Plato's cave, VN added:" we all are crashing to
our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the
churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the
patterns of the passing wall".
If I repeat VN over and over on the
List this happens because a turning-back often helps us to read old
writings with a new perspective as if confusing a live text and the
empty plate of so many others we come across everyday. I hope our ED
agrees with that?
Jansy