A. Bouazza: ...As to Freud's British translator, one should know
the context to decide in which sense Freud used the word
verdichten.
Jansy: Freud's
verdichtung/Strachey's condensation has a very special context: Freud's entire
work, but more easily checked in his "Traumdeutung" ( cf. chapters VI
or VII).
Later, with Lacan, the emphasis bt. the
similarity of Freud's "condensation" and the linguistic understanding
of "metaphor" etches the issue even most elegantly .
Nabokov, in Bend Sinister prefered to
describe "dream producers" as..." usually several, mostly illiterate
and middle-class and pressed by time" , but thankfully his animistic trait which
I've been coming across over and over in the first chapters of this novel drops
down and off in in VN's other novels to become brilliant
metaphors.
He sounds as at his most "foreign" in
BS - and rather close to Sheridan sometimes. Orthopterist,
Amphiphorical or in sentences like: "your words are conundrums to
me...utter misinformation had bedeviled him" ( that's how I must sound to JF's
ears when joking about virgo and virago).
Even an apparent play with nursing a
phone-call is too familiar to be pleasing to my foreign ears: "attend to the
telephone" ( in a romance language familiar to me we say "atender o
telefone" ) or "two polite paletoted dachsunds" where we doubt if dachshunde are
kind pale tot[t]ers or dogs dressed with "farsical
anachronistic" suitjackets ( paletot).
Time is strange,Adam Krug must sign a paper
after midnight and after being taken home wishes his driver "good
evening'...
Certain surprises suggest many
languages intermingling, not simply Russian and American-English.. "Ember
dialled fluently." and 'the torrent was loosed again' ( my old
Penguin edition may be at fault). Lots of expressions must represent "mirok
words" ( Penguin, page 18)...