A.Sklyarenko to JM: What
adout VN's story "A Slice of Life" (Sluchay iz zhizni)?
Jansy Mello: I
began to re-read "The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov" (published according
to DN's 1995 ordering) and now I followed your tip
to read "A Slice of Life", with its drab
narrator, Maria Vasilevna ( "I had stood, leaning
forlornly against a corner of the dark sideboard, with which seemed to fuse my
diminutive figure in its black dress - yes, I wear mourning, for everybody, for
everything, for my own self, for Russia, for the fetuses scraped out of
me").
"A slice of life" is a wonderful
choice for a short-story because plots (as should also be the
case also for novels which are not structured as games or establish a
dialogue with the reader? ) are artificial divisions of time, slices
of an unknown whole which then create artificial boundaries,
fake beginnings and ends... I'm glad this particular "slice" was marked
by Maria Vasilevna's modest decision.
A correction: In a recent
message to the List I mentioned a book about duels and VN's "An Affair of
Honor". When I referred to a short-story under its title, "Armoles", I
hadn't yet realized that such a strange-sounding word was actually
the Portuguese name for the plant "Orache" ( the story's title
in English). These more technical
designations must present a problem for translators: the equivalence
bt.Lebeda and Or
ache , as pointed out by
VN in SM, is totally absent in Armoles, like the
insinuation about the Ampelis lying behind
Waxwing in PF's original, because it disappears
in its translation since, in Portuguese, the bird is already named Āmpelis
in the poem and it appears in the Index under
A, not in W.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, February 02, 2008 7:28
PM
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] [ NABOKOV-LIST ]
QUERY: Unreliable Narrators
JM: it suddenly occurred to me that there are no
female narrators in Nabokov.
What adout VN's story "A Slice of Life" (Sluchay
iz zhizni)?
Alexey
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