Stan Kelly Bootle: "Agreed! Add 'iconicity' to the long list of things that
can be 'lost in translation,'... The poor translator (doomed, unrecognized, and
underpaid!) faces the extra challenge of deciding which "shapes" (iconic
resonances?) are really intended by the author, and which may be happy accidents
or simply fanciful constructions by the reader [...] Are you making too much of
the 'dangers' in translating the English noun string for 999 into the
unavoidably 'denser' German equivalent, neunhundertneunundneunzig? To my Brit
ears/eyes, CK's 'nine hundred ninety-nine lines' already provides a mild shock
that may be missed by non-Brits[...]
The relevance to Jansy's iconicity theme
is that most American readers would simply not notice the missing AND, because
this is how Americans usually 'spell out' 999[ ...]What's missing and sorely
missed is that elusive 1000th line [...In mathematical modulo terms, however, we
still lack the line 0, since 0 and 1000 = 1000(mod 1000) but 1000 = 1(mod 999)]
(Recall, in passing, the list's discussion of '1001 Nights' and how English,
Persian and Arabic conventions vary allowing the dramatic 'One Thousand Nights
and One Night?') [...]Nor is it fair to see a reprehensible fat worm-like shape
in neunhundertneunundneunzig. Those brought up with agglutinating languages (and
German is relatively mild in this respect) consider such amalgamations as
perfectly normal, readable, and, indeed eminently sensible and green (saved-spaces equal conserved-energy
equals saved rainforests in Jansy's Brasil!)
JM: Si parva
licet I'll start with those
sovereign "saved-spaces", in the way they
were explained by Ellery Queen's
1958 "The Finishing Stroke". The
Queens apparently antecipated the artsy trend of abundant
literary references inserted in trivial detective novels. Here they
departed with a mixture of Shakespeare and the
twelfth zodiac nights, passing on
to Australian Henry Handel Richardson's 1929 novel "Ultima
Thule" (no Poe, no Longfellows and no Nabokov!) to implicate the
proof-reader who, quite unconsciously, spaced the letters he placed in
his threatening cards instead of boldly underlining them. There's even
a sophisticated tenacious British artist and type-designer implicated
in a "finishing stroke", Mr. Eric Gill.Well, then. I
grew attached to rampant worms and hidden butterflies. I shall
only give them up after shown line 1000 or line 1001 ('cause of
mathematical modulo terms?).
Kinbote's American-English didn't
agglutinate words nor add the Brit's "and". Nevertheless he chose
to write "lines" after the "nines", not "verses" and this seemed
quite catterpillary to my overinterpretative
taste...
Returning to Nabokov's "Natasha" to add my praise
to yours for Dmitri's expert translation: what a find the word
"formication"!!!
I forgot to add another sentence related to these
"ants". The Baron and Natasha sit at an empty table in a deserted café
and "pretend that they were
eating and drinking and an orchestra was
playing". Natasha's solitary "formication" , when accompanied by the
idyllic Baron is hinted by "An
ant...We've been sitting on ants."
The narrator endowed the B. Wolfe with an old
man's gait and gesture ( "laboriously ascending", "large
shaved head", "pale blue head","his shaved head", "light-blue head like a
bull", "seating himself by the bed and slapping his knees", "made a popping
sound with his lips", "recount an incident from his past","ponderously loped
after her", "taciturn and grimaced at the ferocious noise of the
automobile horns") and also Natasha
behaves very childlishly but ...is she so young? There is a mysterious image of
her "walking along the very edge of the water, so that
the child-size waves of the lake plashed up to her feet". Child-size
waves of a lake?