Dear Miss Tarvi,
I don't claim that I have kept in my
translation 100% of the original (even the author would have failed it), and if
I had really managed to render 81% of all the things that Nabokov has
put in Ada (which I doubt) it would have been a great success and I could have
been proud of my achievement.
Any serious reader who knows Ada (the original, of
course) and who would open one of its Russian translations (only to
shut the book next moment) will at once see that it is all wrong, to put it
mildly. In regard to some translations you mention in your list even the figure
8% would have been a compliment and an exaggeration.
I don't believe that you can properly evaluate my
translation using your method (which no doubt is good having allowed you to
defend the dissertation) and on the example of only four relatively short
fragments.
I am not "elbowing my way up" (I'm not so
eager to publish my translation - which I know will be published and acclaimed
one day - as you believe me to be), I just tried to explain why I preferred to
publish my paper on Ada in English.
>Good
luck to you in finding a translator for your essay.
Thank you
for wishing me that!
>And
let's hope that the resulting translation will not be "awful and having
nothing to do with the original". Sometimes it
happens.
It won't happen in the case of my
article, I can assure you.
best wishes,
Alexey
Sklyarenko