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Re: SKB on Stein-Stone
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Alexey Sklyarenko: "Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R. G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880 (Ada: 1.1)" ..."R. G. Stonelower" blends George Steiner with Robert Lowell...(Ada,1968/9)
Don Johnson: ....R. G. Stonelower might be an allusion/anagram to George Steiner.Make of it what you will
Stan Kelly-Bootle: R. G. Stonelower ... merging G Steiner and R Lowell...doubles the allusional excitement, and offers the pseudo-anagrammatical advantage of incorporating the L and W not found in George Steiner alone! This scores high points in the creative word-mangling game. One is tempted to rope in the ONE STONE = Einstein, oft found and dismissed ('cast aside lightly?') in VN's works. No doubt VN recalled from reading Finnegans Wake: Eins within a space and a wearywide space it wast ere wohned a Mookse. ...
Vladimir Nabokov: BBC-2 Interview September 1969: "You say you are not interested in what critics say, yet you got very angry with Edmund Wilson once for commenting on you, and let off some heavy field guns at him, not to say multiple rockets. You must have cared"// " I never retaliate when my works of art are concerned. There the arrows of adverse criticism cannot scratch, let alone pierce, the shield of what disappointed archers call my "self-assurance." But I do reach for my heaviest dictionary when my scholarship is questioned, as was the case with my old friend Edmund Wilson..."
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JM: Steiner has only words of praise for Nabokov (at first, in the late sixties). Why would he become so significant that he is introduced in "Ada" together with Lowell? The latter also takes part in another satire about the Cabot and the Lowells. and other items already brought to the Nab-L*
Where else does Nabokov criticize G.Steiner? (I must check the end of the collection of interviews in S.O, which I couldn't now reach through the internet, but I got to Steiner's own strong opinions**). I think that one might still have fun exploring other parodies related to Stonelower (such as Stan's Einstein ie One Stone...)
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*- From the Nabokv-L Archives :Wed, 28 Jul 2010
"In a collection of poems, with the title 'Homage to Eros' (selected and introduced by Dannie Abse, Robson books, 2005,p.111) Abse mentions that Lowell "was born into an old aristocratic Boston family - the Lowells, it was said, talked only to the Cabots and the Cabots talked only to God.
I couldn't fail to remember Van Veen's words in "Ada" "The Veens speak only to Tobaks/ But Tobaks speak only to dogs." In a Nab-L posting, mentioning these lines, Alexey added that when "translated back to Russian, the language in which Van addresses his former mistress, as the rhyme seems to suggest, these lines go as follows: "Viny govoryat lish' s Tobakami, / A Tobaki govoryat lish' s sobakami." listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi.../wa?...
...A direct reference to Lowell is made by Darkbloom in his note 16 An indirect one, apparently, is his creation of "Lowden." ... (Lowell's mother's name was Ada).
VN: "The couplets that Mr. Lowell refers to are not at the end but at the beginning of Pale Fire. This is exactly the kind of lousy ignorance that one might expect from the mutilator of his betters -- Mandelstam, Rimbaud, and others."[Nabokov/Bruccoli, 385]" /.../ VN. then improved upon this four days later in a substitute reply: To the Editor: I do not mind Mr. Lowell's disliking my books, but I wish he would stop mutilating his betters -- Mandelstam, Rimbaud, and others. I regret not having entitled my article "Rhyme and Punishment" [Nabokov/Bruccoli, 386] E. had tried to spare Lowell just such attacks five years earlier, when she suggested revisions to Imitations, his collection of free translations: "I don't think you should lay yourself open to charges of carelessness or ignorance or willful perversity..." [Travisano/Hamilton, 356]. (Cf. elizabethbishopcentenary.blogspot.com/.../wednesday-wonder-question-ii-bishop-and.html )
** - The Telegraph Stephen Bayley - 12:01AM GMT 01 Dec 2003 ..."But how odd that to be called "opinionated" is to be insulted...[Once] someone said [ to me]: "That's just your opinion," as if to undermine my credibility... The academic and literary critic George Steiner is also a man of strong opinions. Explaining why he knew his subject better than others, Steiner wrote a bravura sentence designed to lose him what few friends he might have had among the legions of limp, multicultural relativists who inhabit Britain's universities: "The difference between the judgment of a great critic and that of a semi-literate censorious fool lies in its range of inferred or cited reference, in the lucidity and rhetorical strength of articulation or in the accidental addendum which is that of a critic who is a creator in his own right." Steiner, a Jew, also cheerfully trod in the dangerous territory between fact and opinion when he once pointed out that no worthwhile mathematical discovery has been made by a native of sub-Saharan Africa. He thus made the direct link between opinions and outrage all too clear for the faint-hearted. But the truth is that opinions require knowledge and a quest for knowledge is a defining characteristic of civilisation. Yet total knowledge, let alone complete understanding, always escapes us; it is an elusive destination."
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Don Johnson: ....R. G. Stonelower might be an allusion/anagram to George Steiner.Make of it what you will
Stan Kelly-Bootle: R. G. Stonelower ... merging G Steiner and R Lowell...doubles the allusional excitement, and offers the pseudo-anagrammatical advantage of incorporating the L and W not found in George Steiner alone! This scores high points in the creative word-mangling game. One is tempted to rope in the ONE STONE = Einstein, oft found and dismissed ('cast aside lightly?') in VN's works. No doubt VN recalled from reading Finnegans Wake: Eins within a space and a wearywide space it wast ere wohned a Mookse. ...
Vladimir Nabokov: BBC-2 Interview September 1969: "You say you are not interested in what critics say, yet you got very angry with Edmund Wilson once for commenting on you, and let off some heavy field guns at him, not to say multiple rockets. You must have cared"// " I never retaliate when my works of art are concerned. There the arrows of adverse criticism cannot scratch, let alone pierce, the shield of what disappointed archers call my "self-assurance." But I do reach for my heaviest dictionary when my scholarship is questioned, as was the case with my old friend Edmund Wilson..."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
JM: Steiner has only words of praise for Nabokov (at first, in the late sixties). Why would he become so significant that he is introduced in "Ada" together with Lowell? The latter also takes part in another satire about the Cabot and the Lowells. and other items already brought to the Nab-L*
Where else does Nabokov criticize G.Steiner? (I must check the end of the collection of interviews in S.O, which I couldn't now reach through the internet, but I got to Steiner's own strong opinions**). I think that one might still have fun exploring other parodies related to Stonelower (such as Stan's Einstein ie One Stone...)
.........................................................................................................................................
*- From the Nabokv-L Archives :Wed, 28 Jul 2010
"In a collection of poems, with the title 'Homage to Eros' (selected and introduced by Dannie Abse, Robson books, 2005,p.111) Abse mentions that Lowell "was born into an old aristocratic Boston family - the Lowells, it was said, talked only to the Cabots and the Cabots talked only to God.
I couldn't fail to remember Van Veen's words in "Ada" "The Veens speak only to Tobaks/ But Tobaks speak only to dogs." In a Nab-L posting, mentioning these lines, Alexey added that when "translated back to Russian, the language in which Van addresses his former mistress, as the rhyme seems to suggest, these lines go as follows: "Viny govoryat lish' s Tobakami, / A Tobaki govoryat lish' s sobakami." listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi.../wa?...
...A direct reference to Lowell is made by Darkbloom in his note 16 An indirect one, apparently, is his creation of "Lowden." ... (Lowell's mother's name was Ada).
VN: "The couplets that Mr. Lowell refers to are not at the end but at the beginning of Pale Fire. This is exactly the kind of lousy ignorance that one might expect from the mutilator of his betters -- Mandelstam, Rimbaud, and others."[Nabokov/Bruccoli, 385]" /.../ VN. then improved upon this four days later in a substitute reply: To the Editor: I do not mind Mr. Lowell's disliking my books, but I wish he would stop mutilating his betters -- Mandelstam, Rimbaud, and others. I regret not having entitled my article "Rhyme and Punishment" [Nabokov/Bruccoli, 386] E. had tried to spare Lowell just such attacks five years earlier, when she suggested revisions to Imitations, his collection of free translations: "I don't think you should lay yourself open to charges of carelessness or ignorance or willful perversity..." [Travisano/Hamilton, 356]. (Cf. elizabethbishopcentenary.blogspot.com/.../wednesday-wonder-question-ii-bishop-and.html )
** - The Telegraph Stephen Bayley - 12:01AM GMT 01 Dec 2003 ..."But how odd that to be called "opinionated" is to be insulted...[Once] someone said [ to me]: "That's just your opinion," as if to undermine my credibility... The academic and literary critic George Steiner is also a man of strong opinions. Explaining why he knew his subject better than others, Steiner wrote a bravura sentence designed to lose him what few friends he might have had among the legions of limp, multicultural relativists who inhabit Britain's universities: "The difference between the judgment of a great critic and that of a semi-literate censorious fool lies in its range of inferred or cited reference, in the lucidity and rhetorical strength of articulation or in the accidental addendum which is that of a critic who is a creator in his own right." Steiner, a Jew, also cheerfully trod in the dangerous territory between fact and opinion when he once pointed out that no worthwhile mathematical discovery has been made by a native of sub-Saharan Africa. He thus made the direct link between opinions and outrage all too clear for the faint-hearted. But the truth is that opinions require knowledge and a quest for knowledge is a defining characteristic of civilisation. Yet total knowledge, let alone complete understanding, always escapes us; it is an elusive destination."
Search archive with Google:
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Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
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Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/