Dear List
For some mysterious reason I took it upon myself to develop the themes that are brought up at the VN-L by using the rich resources offered by the internet (I don’t have a vast non-virtual access to VN works or scholia) to distribute its fanning “texture” to the Nablers while I get inspiration about what I want to order from abroad. Today I investigated links related to Nabokov and PF’s “korona-vorona-korova” references (after A.S’s posting). Quite a trip! Enjoy. Jansy
Brodsky Translating Brodsky: Poetry in Self-Translation
https://books.google.com.br/books?isbn... - Alexandra Berlina - 2014 - Literary Criticism
“One of Brodsky’s favorite devices, paronomasia is a game played with at least two meanings. The word “knightmare,” for instance, creates a nightmarish combination of knight and mare, human and horse – in short, puns are centaurs. Research on wordplay in translation usually proceeds from the source text, dealing with the possible methods of recreation [ ] to preserve the effect of a pun or neologism, part of the semantics must be changed or left out [ ]unless a pun is based on shared names/roots [ ]or unless the translator happens to be very lucky, as Nabokov claimed two be [snip]. “What effect do puns have in translation?” This question is especially interesting in terms of reader response, for it can produce opposite reactions [ ] If one comes across puns in a text one know to be a translation, one is much more aware of its translativity; each recognized pun begs the question: “What did the original say?”[ ]wordplay in translation throws a new light on the old issue of domesticating/covert vs foreignizing/overt translation. Paradoxically, overtness can be achieved through domestication. In Russian the “Centaurs” cycle is already rich in wordplay, and it grows still more playful in translation. This phenomenon is rare (but not unique: Nabokov’s and Romain Gary’s self-translations exhibit the same tendency),120,21.
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Reverse Tradition: Postmodern Fictions and the Nineteenth Century Novel
Por Robert Kiely
Reverse Tradition: Postmodern Fictions and the Nineteenth ...
https://books.google.com.br/books?isbn... -
Robert Kiely - 1993 - Literary Criticism
Always on the look for trivia, Kinbote recalls a linguistic exception to the “rule” of the untranslatability of misprints: “A newspaper account of a Russian tsar’s coronation… the Russian korona-vorona-korova series is something that would have, I am sure, enraptured my poet”(PF, p.260).// Whether “enraptured” is the word for Shade is doubtful, but he does seem to reconcile himself to giving up trying to prove “Life Everlasting – based on a misprint!” (PF,p.62) […]Shade commits himself to a comfortable limbo in which a satisfied indeterminacy banishes both despair and faith, anguish and rapture. Yet, as the proximity of Kinbote’s “enraptured” notes makes clear, to rest in indeterminacy is a contradiction whose semblance of balance can be easily upset [ ] From the point of view of Shade’s relaxed indeterminacy, Kinbote’s commentaries are a symptom of what Nabokov calls elsewhere “referential manial” [ …] To introduce Freud into Shade’s and Kinbote’s texts is to participate critically in the dynamic of the uneasy relationship between coincidence and premeditated design […]] Kinbote tells the korona-vorona-korova anecdote as an aside [ ] a certain (one hesitates to say “unmistakable”) resemblance to an anecdote in Freud’s second lecture on the psychology of errors: “A stubborn error…is said to have crept into a Social-Democratic newspaper, where, in the account of a festivity, the following words were printed: ‘Among those present was His Highness, the Clown Prince’. The next day a correction was attempted. The paper apologized and said: “The sentence should of course have read, “The Crow Prince.’ ?”” “” (p.132/133)
Btw: Freud’s anecdote as quoted is itself a translation from the German: “Kronprinz/Kornprinz/Knorprinz” *
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Victims, Textual Strategies in Recent American Fiction
Por Paul Bruss
p.33 “Nabokov’s English fiction is generally characterized by the bewildering complexity of its narrative strategies. Given the careful attention of the modernists to the matter of viewpoint, of course, it is not surprising that Nabokov should have explored the curious nexus between the two primary sources of all texts, memory and the imagination, or that he should have made the nexus between memory and the imagination the touchstone for all his narratives – whether fictional or autobiographical.
[ ]Nabokov invested his efforts as a writer into the difficult task of recovering for his readers the peculiar, fluid status of all texts, both literary and nonliterary [ ]Pnin, in which the problem of textual insufficiency possesses a distinctly extraliterary significance…the rance of Nabokov’s interest in the problem of texts and, more specifically, distinctions between text and texture and between an authorial and an editorial relationship to texts…”
[ ]Kinbote obviously pits his art against Shade’s. That he does so is even more apparent in his note on the misprint of “fountain” for “mountain,” which had figured so prominently in Shade’s larger appreciation of an art of texture.[ ]What is sstriking about this correlation between the two series, crown-crow-cow and korona-vorona-korova, is that it enables Kinbote to surpass Shade, who had cited only the double coincidence of fountain-mountain…” (p.77/78)
Btw: Comparing Freud’s results in German and their translations in several languages invites us to ponder if it was Shade, Kinbote or Nabokov who surpassed Freud.
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* I checked into James Strachey’s classic translation of Freud’s lecture on Parapraxes. He didn’t try to translate the wordgames, so the choice of a “Clownprince” must have been another translator’s idea! (it was indicated by Robert Kiely, but I couldn’t access note 28). Here is Freud, translated by J.Strachey: “As is well known, the same thing can happen with misprints, which are to be regarded as the parapraxes of the compositor. An obstinate misprint of this kind, so it is said, once slipped into a social-democrat newspaper. Its report of some ceremonial included the words: ‘Among those present was to be noticed His Highness the Kornprinz.’ The next day an attempt was made at a correction. The paper apologized and said: “We should of course have said ‘The Knorprinz.’ People speak in such cases of a ‘demon of misprints’ or a ‘type-setting fiend’ – terms which at least go beyond any psycho-physiological theory of misprints.”
Translator’s note: “What was intended was the ‘Kronprinz (Crown Prince)’. ‘Korn’ means ‘corn’ and ‘Knorr’ protuberance.”
S. Freud, Standard Edition, vol. XV, p.30/31 Translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud,assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. London, the Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis,1971.
John Shade’s “mountain/fountain” can be rendered in Portuguese as “monte/fonte.” Nevertheless, Jorio Dauster didn’t translate the Korona,Vorona,Korova succession of misprints. He informed me that he tried his hand elsewhere, with the word-golf records (which are actually closely related to the misprints mentioned, or created, by C.Kinbote).
Cf. Line 819: Playing a game of worlds -… Some of my records are: hate-love in three, lass-male in four, and live-dead in five (with "lend" in the middle). (VN original)
Translator’s rendering:
Jorio Dauster: Conto entre minhas proezas: vida-luto em quatro (lida-lido-ludo) e bardo-coroa também em quatro. (Portuguese-Brazil)
Telma Costa: Alguns dos meus records são: amor-ódio em três, donzela-macho em quatro e morto-nascido em cinco (passando por “mastro” no meio).
Telma Costa must have enjoyed the coincidence of “crow” in CK’s note 803, because the word for “misprint” is also “gralha” i.e. “crow”! (Portuguese-Portugal) but she ignored the letter count.