In "A Speck of Coal Dust: Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin and the Possibility of Translation" Stephen Casmier (The Nabokovian, 2004) writes that it is "fairly common knowledge that Vladimir Nabokov hatched the idea for the novel that became Pnin (1957) while teaching Don Quixote to students at Harvard in 1951. In his Lectures on Don Quixote (posthumously published in 1983), Nabokov puzzles over questions concerning the fidelity of the author to his creations and the translation and appropriation of these creations over time by the reading public. Something about Don Quixote and its eponymous character, Nabokov observes, remains irreducible and immutable as they withstand centuries of translation and uncountable "multiplications." In Don Quixote, he says, we "are confronted by an interesting phenomenon: a literary hero losing gradually contact with the book that bore him; leaving his fatherland, leaving his creator's desk and roaming space after roaming Spain. In result, Don Quixote is greater today than he was in Cervantes's womb. He has ridden for three hundred and fifty years through the jungles and tundras of human thought—and he has gained in vitality and stature" muse.jhu.edu/demo/nabokov.../8.1casmier.html

James Twiggs recently sent news about David Bellos' new book on translation, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, that "contains a few pages on Nabokov. You can read them by searching the book at Amazon. The book itself is reviewed here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/books/review/is-that-a-fish-in-your-ear-translation-and-the-meaning-of-everything-by-david-bellos-book-review.html?_r=1&ref=books " Following his indication, I saw that Adam Thirwell's review of Bellos's latest book also refers indirectly to an elegiac Nabokov's "monism."* D.Bello writes that the "theory of translation is very rarely...comical. Its mode is elegy, and severe admonishment. In the 20th century, its great figures were Vladimir Nabokov, in exile from Soviet Russia, attacking libertines like Robert Lowell for their infidelities to the literal sense; or Walter Benjamin, Jewish in a proto-Nazi Berlin, describing the Task of the Translator as an impossible ideal of exegesis. You can never, so runs the elegiac argument, precisely reproduce a line of poetry in another language [...] Ever since St. Jerome translated the Bible into Latin, discussion of translation has dissolved into the ineffable — the famous idea that each language creates an essentially different mental world, and so all translations are doomed to philosophical inadequacy. In Bellos’s new proposal, translation instead “presupposes . . . the irrelevance of the ineffable to acts of communication.” [...]It’s often said, for instance, that a translation can’t ever be an adequate substitute for the original. But a translation, Bellos writes, isn’t trying to be the same as the original, but to be like it...In literature, there’s a related subset of this anxiety: the idea that style — since it establishes such an intricate relationship between form and content — makes a work of art untranslatable. But again, this melancholy is melodramatic. It will always be possible in a translation to find new relationships between sound and sense that are equivalently interesting, if not phonetically identical. Style, like a joke, just needs the talented discovery of equivalents." I just received another link ( http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/10/google_translate_will_google_s_computers_understand_languages_be.html) about machine-translations and an overview of Bello's conjectures.