Ever-anxious to maintain the proper VN-centricity, I can add to Jansy’s Shakespearean examples one that appears in (dominates?) Bend Sinister involving a line possibly more famous than the conclusive climax of Dante’s Paradiso (how many exclamations am I allowed?)
“To be or not to be” is not simply a ‘question’ in the modern sense of FAQ/FUQ (computerese for Frequently Asked/Unanswered Questions). Rather, to all but the basest (unversed!!) of groundlings, the audience would take in the wider semantic drift of the Latin ‘quaestio’ -- inquiry, investigation, examination by TORTURE! (For all we know, some Elizabethan Hamlets may have delivered the word as ‘qu-eye-sti-on’ with optional winks to aye ‘rub’ it in, as it were.) This is only a challenge to the discerning translator who is aware of the original flavours AND who also decides to render them in the target language. For many Latinate languages it may be possible just to retain the nearest word to ‘question/quaestio’ and leave the foreign crowd (no problem for them clever Frogs) with the same interpretive challenge facing us native Brits.
Russophones are invited to comment on whether the usual ‘vopros’ (if I remember correctly) carries any
helpful (or distracting) resonances. I would guess that under Lenin/Stalin the whole notion of ‘being Invited to a Questioning (recall ‘quaestio’ as ‘examination by torture’) would send us in the fearful direction of Cincinnatus? The German Frage also sends shivers — especially in the plural! And especially the Drei Fragen in Wagner’s Ring — answer or DIE!
I’m currently knee-deep into VN’s lecture on Joyce’s Ulysses. Reluctantly entranced by his invasion into MY territory ;=) More anon on whether VN’s view that Ulysses is OVER-allusive influences in any remote way our debate on Pale Fire??
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 8/11/06 16:17, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
Stan Kelly-Bootle wrote to Sergei:" it's certainly a challenge to understand any art forms from distant cultures. We do our best with Homer, Virgil and even Shakespeare. The latter possibly trickier in many ways since we ASSUME we know what those ENGLISH words mean!"
I'd planned to retrieve from Lacan's 1958/59 Seminars on Hamlet, one of his examples, the first on the shift in the meaning df a word from the Elizabethan to modern times.
According to Lacan, "O, cursed spite" (1601), held "spite" hovering between the subjective and the objective worlds. It came as an expression of revolt against scheming Gods but, also, against the actual order of the world. In our days, says Lacan, this external reference has disappeared and "spite" merely came to convey a person's own subjective experience, without heeding the menace of external deities.
Two other interesting item threw me back, from SKB's note, onto Nabokov's track.
One came from another Elizabethan word selected by Lacan, also in Hamlet: "foil".
He quotes: "I'll be your foil, Laertes: mine in ignorance/ Your skill shall, like a star in the darkest night/ Stick fiery off indeed".
In one of its translations into French, Lacan found the cutting edge of a stilleto (as Kinbote found in Shade's choice of the word "stillicide"), but Hamlet' s frequent puns and word-play had lost, thereby, their "leafy jewel-case sheath" and were metamorphosed into a "flowerlet".
The French translation went as follows: " Laerte, mon fleuret ne sera que fleurette auprès du vôtre" ( "Laertes, my foil shall become a 'flowerlet' in comparison to thine" - Conmal could have rendered it better than I did...).
Lacan understood that the choice of "fleuret" for "foil" turns the leaf ( foil/feuille) into a flower ( fleur), whereas "foil" as "feuille" in old French also indicates a sheath or a precious jewel-case.
Cf. Shade's lines 520-524: ..."oblivion thrives/ Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives,/And our best yesterdays are now foul piles/ Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files./ I'm ready to become a flowerlet/ Or a fat fly, but never, to forget.../
The second, a very big surprise. While I still leafed thru my foxed files, I recovered Freud's initial elaborations about what would become his theory about the "Oedipus Complex", in one of his letters to W. Fliess. Then I proceeded to 1900, in a text not longer than what fits in a couple of pages in "The Interpretation of Dreams" ( Part One, vol.IV, Standard Edition, Hogarth Press, page 265). At that time, Freud had other bussiness to attend to concerning his project.
In this very early presentation of Oedipus, after describing Sophocles trilogy, Freud proceeded to Hamlet and he wrote ( I underlined it): " The distaste for sexuality expressed by Hamlet in his conversations with Ophelia...was destined to take possession of the poet's mind more and more during the years that followed, and which reached its extreme expression in Timon of Athens. For it can of couse only be the poet's own mind which confronts us in Hamlet..."
The same railing again "Oedipus" that we'd already encountered in "Pnin"( concerning the Wind couple and their educational projects applied to their child, Victor), shall reappear in a more humoristic vein in "Pale Fire", thanks to Kinbote who saved one of Shade's drafts ( see note to line 57: "the future patient of the future quack/ May find, all set for him, the Primal Scene."). VN's passionate opposition to Freud would not have allowed him to skip over this fundamental work by the Viennese, nor the small paragraph introducing Oedipus. And trust Lacan to discover that tiny reference to Timon of Athens and bring it to light in his seminar on "the tragedy of desire"...
There is still more to add, but I don't want to make this information too long. We only have to reach "Ada", while she discusses perhaps the same "date palm" that we find in the Shakesperean alley in Wordsmith - and follow part of her play between Marvell's ( the Garden) English original and her own rendering of it in French ( Vintage edition, pages 65..and others).