Dear List,
Trying to recover a sentence about Conrad,
I'd just read, in a new context, I found curious items in the internet
(see*). The sentence I'd been looking
for is: "Nabokov's first writings were in Russian, but he came to his
greatest distinction in the English language. For this achievement, he has been
compared with Joseph Conrad; yet Nabokov viewed this as a dubious comparison, as
Conrad composed in French and English."**
After reading Sklyarenko's copious links bt. ADA
and LATH to Russian authors (plus fenomenal poetical and political
allusions), which only those who are studious of Russian Lit.(up to the
XXth Century) might identify, I felt very uneasy.
I believe in Nabokov's assertion that Art
is his passport. However now I see we must also take into account what
it means to be described as one of the greatest "American writers and
stylists," when we learn that "Speak,Memory/Conclusive Evidence" is an
(original) "English version", with inaccessible passages for those who
only speak English - no Russian.
I remember another puzzling sentence about
English as his "second native tongue," when it is now clear that he
never abandoned the plexed "organic form" (Coleridge?) of the Russian.
Perhaps ( quite probably!) I got this all wrong.
My concept about "languages", right now, is totally bouleversé*** by the
Nabokovian Wonderland.
Jansy
................................................................................................
* 1.
LOL - Literatures in Other Languages - A blog by Isagani
R. Cruz. Dedicated to Old King Cole, who first suggested a blog devoted to
literary works written or read in languages other than the mother tongue/s of
the author/s.(04 January 2009)
Shipwrights & Conrad-Nabokov
Prize If you write in English as a second language and you live in
a "non-Anglophone" territory, you can compete for the Conrad-Nabokov Prize,
offered by Shipwrights magazine. This is how the magazine describes itself:
"Shipwrights is the online magazine of de-centered English: a review of new
writing from beyond the Anglosphere. The magazine’s goal is to publish the best
new short fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction coming out of the global
second- and foreign-language English writing communities."
2.Asher Z.
Milbauer TRANSCENDING EXILE :Conrad Nabokov I.B. Singer
University
Presses of Florida
Questia Media America, Inc.
www.questia.com
** - Wiki: Of its fifteen Berlin years,
Dieter Zimmer wrote: "He never became fond of Berlin and at the end
intensely disliked it. He lived within the lively Russian community of Berlin
that was more or less self-sufficient, staying on after it had disintegrated
because he had nowhere else to go to. He had little German. He knew few Germans
except for landladies, shopkeepers, the petty immigration officials at the
police headquarters."...Nabokov's first writings were in Russian, but he came to
his greatest distinction in the English language. For this achievement, he has
been compared with Joseph Conrad; yet Nabokov viewed this as a dubious
comparison, as Conrad composed in French and English. Nabokov disdained the
comparison for aethetic reasons, lamenting to the critic Edmund Wilson, "I am
too old to change Conradically" — which John Updike later called, "itself a jest
of genius." [ This lament came in 1941, with Nabokov an apprentice American
for less than one year...Later in the Wilson letters, Nabokov offers a solid,
non-comic appraisal: "Conrad knew how to handle readymade English better than I;
but I know better the other kind. He never sinks to the depths of my solecisms,
but neither does he scale my verbal peaks." This is in November 1950, p.
282.]
***. Cf. ADA: "the violent dance called kurva
or ‘ribbon boule’ in the hilarious program whose howlers almost caused Veen
(tingling, and light-loined, and with Prince N.’s rose-red banknote in his
pocket) to fall from his seat.", later taken up with other words in the
Mascodagama act (and the intriguing project of "turning a metaphor
upsidown"!!!).