Jerome Katsell: I don't believe "kafka" means raven in Czech. The usual for raven is "hravan,"

and "vrána" is used for crow. There's also "hravan polní," which means rook, the bird. The other rook, the chess rook/castle is "vĕž". (sent off List).

 

JM: Thank you very much, Jerome. Translations are tricky, indeed. The book I'm reading is a direct translation from the Japanese into Portuguese: the word the translator chose is 'corvo', ie, the generic 'crow'.

Poe's poem is usually translated as "O Corvo". The chess piece, 'rook' in Portuguese, is "torre" ( 'tower'). Pawn is  “peão” (not really the same image as in English, also with the designation ‘knight’).  Chess pieces, in various languages, must have distinct names, unlike the English indicators ( as in “Sebastian Knight”, or Rook/Castle in Portuguese) and I wonder if this point was also explored by Nabokov.

 

Anyway, from what I understood from one or two garbled sentences from the google/Norquist text, Nabokov denies that he’s employed chess-moves to structure his plots. It seems that he also gives great importance to the plot (even in poetry) and this is at variance with his statements in LEL and in ‘Gogol.’ (cannot remember the quotes).* ?And what about the lines about “elephants”???

 

 

………………………………

·        I didn’t search for the quote Jim Twiggs asked from SB (I’m sure others will help, if not SB himself) because I had to finish the Murakami book first…
A hunch: would the indicated word by Nabokov have been “imagination”?
btw: Is there any article comparing Nabokov’s theory about “imagination” (memory/time) and P.B.Shelley’s?  

 

 

 

Steve Norquist: This is probably going to look funny to those who are fluent in both Russian and English, but here is google's translation of the submitted text into English…

JM: I tried to read the automatic translation, but it was a torture. One word stood out, at first, related to chess.  “Rook”.

I had just asked the list about “raven” (apparently, a translation from the Czech ”kafka”). Ravens and rooks are both “corvus”

The Common Raven (Corvus corax), also known as the Northern Raven, is a large, all-black passerine bird in the crow family;

The Rook (Corvus frugilegus) is a member of the Corvidae family in the passerine order of birds. Named by Carl Linnaeus in 1758,^[2] the species name frugilegus is Latin for "food-gathering".

Can anyone inform me if “kafka” indicates the raven or the rook in czech? ( still trusting novelist Murakami’s information).

A second question ( related to the original in Russian in the translation provided by Google/Norquist): what does “elephant” mean in the poem? (cf. the lines reproduced below)

"But lingers still dwarf.

    And then pushed nail color of iodine

    figure. Yes! He donates elephant

    magic checkmate in four moves.

    II

    Movement of rhymes and dancers cruise

    is a chess problem. Show...

 

Crows, ravens, rooks and elephants…?  

A third item: TOOL’s “Philidor Savage” (certainly not a dwarf!)  could his name indicate something related to a chess move?
 

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