I was privileged to receive a copy of Eric
Naiman's "Nabokov, Perversely" (Cornell University Press, 2010), which I
soon expect to read.
The reviews are enthusiastic and
challenging (Eliot Borenstein, New York University "a well-reasoned and
brilliant attempt to revolutionize Nabokov studies"; Caryl Emergon, Princeton
University "mind bending inquiry into Nabokov's strategies for harnessing unruly
bodies...in a tour de force that will not only change the way we think about how
we read but also compel anew our wonder at the intrincacy and toughness of
fictional worlds"; Alexander Etkind, Cambridge University:" Wise or bawdy but
invariably original, this book liberates Nabokov from the Nabokovians...").
There's only a link I want to add, due to
the coincidence that brought together Zholkovsky's article, with its reference
to organ-grinders and monkeys ("Just two years after his death and
one year into Nabokov's American avatar, Nabokov published translations of
several poems by Khodasevich, “The Monkey” among them! In other words, almost a
decade before implicitly claiming that poem as his own in a fictitious
non-fiction, he actually had penned it—in English," ...aso*) and the
postman's delivery of Naiman's book [Ch.2: "Art as Afterglow (Bend
Sinister)p.46-], describing the padograph ("a
typewriter made to reproduce with repellent perfection...") and Ember's
efforts to translate Shakespeare's Hamlet, observed by Krug (BS 119-20):
"Nature had once produced an Englishman whose domed head had
been a hive of words (...) Three centuries later, another man, in another
countray, was trying to render these rythms and metaphors in a different
tongue. This process entailed a prodigious amount of labour, for the
necessity of which no real reason could be given. 9...0 From a practical point
of view, such a waste of time and meterial (...) was almost criminally absurd,
since the greatest masterpice of imitation presupposed a voluntary limitation of
thought, in submission to another man's genius. Could this suicidal lmitation
and submission be compensated by the miracle of adaptive tactivs, by the
thousand devices of shadography (...) an exaggerated and spiritualized replica
of Paduk's writing machine?" Naiman notes how just "before the
arrest, as Ember is discussing his translation's fine points, Krug notices
something strange by looking out the window. Naiman quotes (BS 121): " Some of his puns -" said Krug. "Hullo, that's queer." He had
become aware of the yard [...[ "Never in my life, said Krug, have I seen two
organ grinders in the same back yard at the same time [...[ I wonder what
has happened? They look most uncomfortable, and they do not, or cannot play"
[...] There is something familiar about the whole thing, something I cannot
quite disentangle - a certain line of thought."
For Naiman " 'the line of thought' is the
tangle of the novel itself, entwined with multiple references to
homosexuality." (p.53). For me, in a puzzled superficial glance,
Krug's "the line of thought" is mainly
applicable to translation and the challenge
of "submission/appropriation."
Of course, we can always conjecture about what
the process of translating entails (hmmm) with its double transpositions
and aping, in connection to some kind of obsessive, homosexual, dynamics. I
haven't read Naiman's whole chapter (and I've been enjoying it more than
its predecessor, on Lolita, whose emphasis on bawdiness and puns I found,
on the whole, a bit reductive).
This monkey business may turn into an
interesting hypothesis (and extension) into BS's references to translation
and clues to homosexuality, but it rests on finding many more other
instances, which I doubt can be as easily discovered as this
accidental find.Perhaps they're already mentioned in Naiman's future chapters...
My "precocious" connection is merely motivated by the permanent thrill I get
from coincidences ( the Zholkovsky/Naiman parallel emergence in my
life).
.................................................................................................................................
* Quoting Zholkovsky: "The affinities of
Nabokov's “first poem” with Khodasevich's “Monkey” ...with the intention “to
reconstruct the summer of 1914” ...The setting of Khodasevich’s poem is a dacha
near Moscow, that of Nabokov’s “first poem,” one near St. Petersburg. Thus the
time and, in a sense, the place coincide, as does the monkey-cum-barrel-organ
motif...Further parallels are, however, not traceable, since Nabokov’s poem
appears to have stayed “unwritten.
The link from the
Nabokovian (Poem, Problem,
Prank By Alexander Zholkovsky from the Nabokovian 47, Fall
2001. www.hunter.cuny.edu/classics/russian/russianlinks/
- ) offers a curious conclusion, which had struck me before,
in its application to Nabokov's conundrums: "...After all, they
are not age-old enigmas wrapped in mysteries of artistic creation, but rather,
to continue paraphrasing the Churchillian description of Russia, hoaxes
surrounded with riddles inside puzzles. Well-made, but
man-made." It stresses Nabokov's intention
to "taunt the reader" and the latter's habitual "lack of
discernment." And yet, the matter he's been discussing is mainly
for slavic language and literature scholars and not something a common
reader, like me, can grasp. I stick to my own ideal "analogic
incrustations," with no hoax-husked manipulations.