Jerry Friedman [ replies to Jansy
Mello's "Poets don't offer an animal's name keeping in mind
its scientific label[...] how can we know that Machado's englished weasel is not
a ferret or a marten"]: Some do. I feel sure
Nabokov and his created poets didn't use words that meant a species other than
the one they meant[...]By the way, Frost seems to be careful about such things;
on the other hand, Robert Bly refers to a Wilson's warbler as a
"wren". [...] Machado: De entre las peñas salen dos
lindas comadrejas; My literal translation:From between the rocks emerge
two beautiful weasels; Nims: Suddenly two lissome mink glitter from the
rock.
JM: Thanks. My dictionary
offered me a choice for weasel: "comadreja" or "hurón". Now
I see Machado's choice was "comadreja".
Your observations concerning fidelity for
an animal's habitat in translation [ the poem is set high on a dry
mountain, so the habitat is wrong for a mink or a polecat. It seems it
could be a stone marten[...].Another translation open to criticism,
incidentally, as "mourning cuckoo" might bring up an irrelevant slang meaning,
but "mourning dove" is the name of a North American bird--are we in "Russian"
Estoty?] helped me to understand more clearly why VN dismissed
Ezra Pound ( although I remember only his references to Pound as a poet, not in
connection to his translation of "The Seafarer" - in which he followed his
theory on the importance of a poem's sound over meaning -
at least this is what I read in Borges).
JF: [ Jansy quotes
Machado: "Caminante no hay
camino/sino estelas en la mar" translates us back to the
Timon lines [...] "Walker there is no "ready path"/ only stars in the
sea"]: You've been led astray by a /falso amigo/.Estela/ is "wake" [...]; "star"
is estrella...
JM: Estela is a complicated word
in Portuguese since the distinction bt. Latin stela
(pillar) and stella (star) is often lost. "False friends", indeed. Thanks for your straightforward
correction!
Stan K-B: What
matters in allusionology, Jansy, is deciding which of the many pointers lurking
behind every word can be linked to plausibly intended targets[...] In the
SLSK context of finding hidden objects, one immediately thinks of the “Brazil
Nut Effect” [...] The name comes from the fact that in a mixed bag of
peanuts and Brazil nuts, the larger nuts end up on top. VN may have had some
literary analogues in mind? Supporting your playful link via selenium to the
moon, VN might well have read any number of 1950/60s faddish books on
“Supplementary Minerals.” [...] I feel that Nabokov “plays fair.” Cryptic
crosswords vary in their fiendishness, but regular solvers develop an instinct
for the tricks of word-mangling employed by each puzzle setter.
JM: What spurred me on
were references to biology (the enchained complications
for the fertilization of the Brazil-nut plant
and long-tongued bees) and the closeness of selenium to
tellurium , as an inspiring element to its
discoverer for choosing the word selenium. These seemed
to be "plausibly intended targets." Your "Brazil Nut Effect" seems to be
closer to a scouse-tease.
Nabokov plays fair, indeed,
giving compass-directions, season of the year, birds or insects close
to the plants they need to feed on, aso.
In one of my postings (related to weasels) I quoted
Christian Morgenstern. In another poem he dwells on the spots
of a guinea-fowl. The bird is called "Perlhuhn" in German,
so the poet had him "count his pearls". A translator appropriated
the more ample meaning of "riches" to have the English avian count his
"guineas": I wonder if VN would have opposed this choice for a literal
rendering of would get lost in translation* and foot-notes would be a
spoiler.
* Das Perlhuhn zählt: eins, zwei, drei, vier .../ Was zählt
es wohl, das gute Tier,/ dort unter den dunklen Erlen? // Es zählt, von
Wissensdrang gejückt,/
(die es sowohl wie uns entzückt):/ die Anzahl seiner
Perlen.
Cp. with Johannes Beilharz: The guinea fowl
counts: one, two, three, four.../Pray what is all that counting for,/ Out there
among the deep dark pine trees?// The bird, driven by knowledge's itch,/ And
doing so without a glitch,/ Is counting what it's worth in guineas.
NB: The
translator disregarded "Erlen" and "Anzahl", too, or so it seems to me.