In his 1969 foreword to Poems and
Problems Nabokov considered his most recent problems to
be "excellent corollaries" to his latest poems. In a different way,
I've been enjoying hints of VN novels in his early (
& translated) verses. The 1917 "The
Rain Has Flown" made me travel from Vyra to PF and Zembla ("Golden orioles whistle, the rowan is in bloom/ the catkins on
sallows are white") and also to TRLSK* : "Downward a leaf inclines its tip/and drops from its tip a
pearl." His poem about Lilith suggested to my impressionable ears the
name "Lolita"...
Concerning translations, Alberto Manguel wrote: "Vladimir Nabokov, criticized by his friend
Edmund Wilson for producing a translation of Eugene Onegin "with warts and all",
responded that the translator's business was not to improve or comment on the
original [...]
Nabokov apparently believed (though I find it hard to imagine
that the master craftsman meant this) that languages are "equivalent" in both
sense and sound, and that what is imagined in one language can be reimagined in
another..."
Here comes a part
that might be of interest for the "skoramis" and, even, the
"Lolita" censorship issue: "...classic Greek and Roman texts were
recommended for the moral education of women only when purified in
translation[...]" Reverend J.W.Burgon, 1884, "preached against allowing
women into the university where they would have to study the texts in the
original."
...................................
TRLSK:..."she left
husband and child as suddenly as a raindrop starts to slide tipwards down a
syringa leaf. That upward jerk of the forsaken leaf, which had been heavy
with its bright burden, must have caused my father fierce pain;