p.76/77: "It is via Leibniz and J.G.Haman that language mysticism enters the current of modern, rational linguistic study. Both men were in active contact with Kabbalistic and Pietist thought.// Linguistic theory bears decisively on the question whether or not translation, particularly between different languages, is in fact possible. In the philosophy of language two radically opposed points of view can be, and have been asserted. The one declares that the underlying structure of language is universal and common to all men. Dissimilarities between human tongues are essentialy of the surface...Here the universalist position touches closely on the mystical intuition of a lost primal or paradigmatic speech.// The contrary view can be termed 'monadist'. It holds that universal deep structures are either fathomless to logical and psychological investigation or or an order so abstract, so generalized as to be well-nigh trivial...The extreme 'monadist' position - we shall find great poets holding it - leads logically to the belief that real translation is impossible.// Between these two poles of argument, there can be numerous intermediary and qualified attitudes...There are relativist shadings in the universalist grammars of Toger Bacon, and the grammarians of Port Royal, and even the transformational generative grammar of Chomsky. Nabokov, who regards all but the most rudimentary of interlinear translations as a fraud, as a facile evasion of radical impossibilities, is himself a master mover between languages."

p.127: "What records are there of a primary at-homeness in two or move languages mau be found disseminated in the memoirs of poets, novelists, and refugees. They have never been seriously analyseed. Nabokov's Speak, Memory and the material ironized and interwoven in Ada are of the first importance.) //At a time when strict phonological investigations and transformational grammars are, at last, establishing a truly autonomous and professional science of language, it would be absurd, we are told, to go beyond the analysis of the deepd structures of one language or, as it were, of Language itself..."

p.252: " Traduced into French, said Heine, his German poems were 'moonlight stuffed with straw'. Or as Nabokov puts it in his poem 'On translating "Eugene Onegin".' [ quotes "What is translation? On a platter...] Because all human speech consists of arbitrarily selected but intensely conventionalized signals, meaning can never be wholly separated from expressive form..."

p.253/54 "Again, when Rilke writes to Countess Sizzo in March 1922, there is nothing new in his contention that each word in a poem is semantically unique, that it establishes its own completeness of contextual range and tonality. What is interesting is his insistence that this applies to the most banal, grammatically flattened parts of speech, and that it divides a poem from all current usage inside its own vernacular... So drastic an apartness within a language will apply a fortiori to translation. The argument is implicit in Dr. Johnson's Preface to the 1755 Dictionary; it is put once again by Nabokov, precisely two centuries later when he declares, with reference to English versions of Pushkin, that in the translation of verse anything but the 'clumsiest literalism' is a fraud."

p.264 "Deny translation, says Gentile in his polemic against Croce, and you must be consistent and deny all speech.Translation is, and always will be,the mode of thought and understanding...Those who negate translation are themselves interpreters.// The argument from perfection which, essentially, is that of Du Bellay, Dr. Johnson, Nabokov, and so many others, is facile. No human product can be perfect. No duplication, even of materials which are conventionally labelled as identical, will turn out a total facsimile..."

p.288/89 "It is only recently, and this is a revolution in the subject, that the 'anatomy' and raw materials of translation are becoming accessible to methodical scrutiny. We have Pound's letters to W.H.Rouse on translating Homer, Rober Fitzgerald's post-script to his Odyssey, trying to record specific motions of choice and discard; Nabokov's memoir, ironic and full of traps for the unwary and yet deeply instructive, of how he rendered Onegin into English; Pierre Leyris brief buyt acute remarks...."

p. 314/15 "The translator invades, extracts, brings home...The import, of meaning and of form, the embodiment, is not made in or into a vacuum. The native semantic field is already extant and crowded. There are innumerable shading of assimilation and placement of the newly-acquired, ranging from a complete domestication, an at-homeness at the core of the kind which cultural history ascribes to, say, Luther's Bible or North's Plutarch, all the way to the permanent strangeness and marginality of an artifact such as Nabokov's 'English-language' Onegin. But whatever the degree of 'naturalization,' the act of importation can potentially dislocate or relocate the whole of the native structure."

p 328 "Presumably, it is the awkward heavily Latin fabric of the seventh and eighth lines or the endeavour to preserve the original word-order through clumsy enjambement which Dryden found unacceptable. Nevertheless, Jonson's Horace is by no means a word-for-word interlinear. For one thing the Ars poetica runs to only 476 lines whereas Jonson's recasting requires 679. For another, it is, Nabokov would say, 'begrimed or beslimed by rhyme' , and the structure of the Latin sentence is often sacrificed to the needs of English."

p.331 "Like Nabokov's actual translation of Eugene Onegin - 'In fact, to my ideal of literalism I have sacrificed everything (elegance, euphony, clarity, good taste, modern usage and even grammar) that the dainty mimic prizes higher than truth' - Browning's experiment remains a curio *... But literalism of this lucid, almost desperate kind, has within it a creative pathology of language. Intent on submerging himself totally in the original, prepared not to incorporate his appropriations fully into his own speech and culture, the translator hangs back at the frontier. More or less deliberately, he produces an 'interlingua', a centaur-idiom in which the grammar, the customary cadence, the phrasing, even the word-structure of his own tongue are subjected to the vocaqbulary, syntax,, phonetic patterns of the text he is translating or, more exactly, seeking to inhabit and only to transcribe. [
[ * "I stress 'actual translation'. Taken together with the Commentary, Nabokov's production is a masterpiece of baroque wit and learning. According to the hermeneutic model I have put forward, Nabokov's 'Pushkin' represents a case of 'over-compensation', of 'restitution in excess'. It is a 'Midrashic' reanimation and exploration of the original text so massive and ingenius to become, consciously or not, its rival. Such 'rival servitude' is probably central to Nabokov's attitude to the Russian language which he, in part, deserted, and to his own eminent but also ambivalent location in the Russian literary tradition. But all this, though it may be fascinating in itself and instructive for the student of translation, does not refute Alexander Gerschenkron's judgement: 'Nabokov's translation, can and indeed should be studied, but despite all the cleverness and occasional brilliance it cannot be read' ( 'A Magnificent Monument', Modern Philology, LXIII, 1966,p.340).".