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Re: Nabokov's eyes
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Re: [NABOKV-L] Nabokov's eyesStan K-Bootle [to Jansy and all*] "[HH]mentions a Madrigal (now lost) composed to honour the "soot black lashes of her pale-gray vacant eyes." Incidentally, as Victor Fet reminded me when we met recently at a London Prohibition Meeting, that even "Humbert Humbert" is a made-up pseudonym; in this case, one presumes, to protect the guilty? Victor sees a VN in-joke with HH, echoing the many species with duplicate names (e.g., Bison bison.) Entirely without the use of Wiki/Google, I came across this proof that Hazel puns are quite ancient:"Thou wilt quarrel with a man for cracking nuts, having no other reason but because thou hast hazel eyes." [Romeo and Julliet, III 1 (22) ]
JM: There's a recording of Dmitri singing madrigals, I wonder if we'll find among them a lady's "soot black lashes" (no backlashes...).
Let's not quarrel over a few spilled aments, ammends and ammendments. Fet's hypothesis reporting on special duplicate names is intriguing.
I've been recently toiling over an interesting novel that was lent to me as "a sample of a Japanese Lolita.." We can find lots of information available on the internet linking Tanizaki and Nabokov but, in my unlicked unsooty eyes, there's no ground for such a comparison.* This original book in Japanese ( now available in French, Portuguese or English versions) made me think about an issue which might fit in the Nab-List, related to translation. The differences between French, Spanish or English translations of Russian, Italian or Japanese authors strikes my amateurish ears as being inevitably bound to hidden linguistic cultural codes which, depending on the vehicle of their transposition, strikes different chords in the reader and promotes wide misunderstandings or sympathies.
Take the "nutcracker" from the famous Tchaikovsky's ballet suite. In French it became "Casse-noisettes" (hazelnut-cracker) whereas it was inspired by a German cracker ( which appears in one of ETA Hoffman's eerie tales),whereas the entire piece, as it impresses on us, has a Russian grand atmosphere (even when we get it animated by Disney). What kind of a nutcracker did Nabokov have in mind when he let it drop over an antique blue bowl ("Pnin") or when he mentions it in "Speak,Memory" ( his family, if recollection serves me right now, was nicknamed after it). Pnin's certainly is a metal affair with two leggy handles. The ballet image offers the open maws of a soldier. I'm curious about what kind of a nutcracker was employed in Nabokov's childhood.. The experience of reading Chekov in Portuguese is very different from reading him in English.
Would you all disagree with me that Russian Nabokov, too, would affect the French readers unlike it does reach the English ones?
James Twiggs (to Matt and alii):..."I'm of the opinion that VN leaves this an open question and that here, as in so many places in the novel, Ambiguity (and not Charles the Beloved) reigns supreme--flanked, it should go without saying, by Irony on the one hand and Pity on the other, with the court jester, Comedy, dancing wildly in the foreground//Forgive me, please, the fancy metaphor. It's worth adding that Nabokovian ambiguity, at least in Pale Fire, is both deeper and wider than the ambiguity of The Turn of the Screw, in which the possibilities are limited. In Pale Fire, thanks to the proliferation of clues, allusions, and apparent storylines, we can never be certain of anything--not even of whether our uncertainty is justified or not. I think I'm agreeing with Gary Lipon on this, but we need to remember that the uncertainty interpretation of Pale Fire goes back a long way."
JM: I agree with Twiggs' emphasis over Nabokov's "unlimited" ambiguities and parodic intent when representing Kinbote. I'm not as sure about it in relation to Hazel.
What strikes me is how Shade works over the life and death of his daughter in his poem, contrasted to Kinbote's commentaries. Tthe latter seems to be more realistically compassionate than the father, although what traces in common there are between Hazel and the commentator to ellicit his pity remains a mistery to me.
btw: Nabokov was also ambiguous about his belief of poltergeists and ESP phenomena...
..................................................
* -`Naomi ' by Tanizaki Junichiro is a Japanese classical novel , which has long been unknown to the western reader . Originally published in 1925,it told a story which could have happened in the society of Japan riven between traditional values and westernization trends .Certain analogy can be traced with `Pygmalion ' by Bernard Shaw or Lolita ' by Nabokov , however , `Naomi ' remains a deeply Japanese book . First and foremost this relates to the theme and moralistic content. Relations between a young sexually active girl and an older man demonstrate contrast between traditionalism and modernism ... Naomi ' in a way continues a tradition of medieval Japanese romantic novel , filled with sensuality and hidden lust . `Naomi ' is written from the first person , and this makes the book intimate and meditative . Sentences are short and laconic...`Naomi ' is a rather empiric description of flow of events , gradually resulting in each other . Being a book about transition period in Japanese society `Naomi ' is a ``transition ' book itself . It stands in the centre between classical and literature of Japan and modern one ..Together with such masters as Yukio Mishima Tanizaki Junichiro is a guide inside Japanese mentality .www.mightystudents.com/.../Naomi.Tanizaki.Junichiro.68201
....................
The Japanese Lolita - Jun Ichiro Tanizaki -10 Apr 2010 ... www.epinions.com/...Tanizaki/content_61030174340 BY Stephen_Murray (excerpts) Tanizaki's breakthrough novel, A Fool's Love (Naomi is the English title), was originally serialized in 1924-25. The serialization was interrupted by Japanese Imperial censors. What concerned them about the story is not what most American readers now will find unsettling. They were concerned about the portrayal of western-style (cheek-to-cheek) dancing. What will make many American readers queasy about the book now is the quasi-incestuousness of the primary relationship portrayed [...] From the fascination with the nymphet's name onward, there are many similarities to Nabokov's Lolita, written more than three decades later. Especially given the recurrence in later Tanizaki work of the masochism and foot-fetishism (and attempts to mold younger, poorer women, most notably in Some Prefer Nettles, as well as his earlier story "The Tattoo Artist" and slightly later story "Professor Rado" from A Cat, a Man, and Two Women), I am less sure that Tanizaki's intent was comic/satiric than I am that Nabokov's was. Naomi is older when she catches Joji's eye than Lolita is when she catches Humbert Humbert's, and Joji is younger than Humbert. Moreover, fifteen was not as young in Japan between the World Wars as it is in post-WWII American conception. (Lolita was twelve on the page, 15-16 in the film versions.) Naomi had a job in the floating world when she was discovered; she was not a school girl...Intercourse with Lolita and Naomi seems less important than ownership and connoisseurship for Humbert and Joji. Both men fail miserably at owning their young beloveds, and both appear ridiculous in the excess of their fascination with the young women. Lolita and Naomi have simpler pleasures and do not take Humbert and Joji nearly as seriously as the men take themselves and their passion. In the current climate of panic about "child abuse," some will be eager to cast Lolita and Naomi as victims, which is an unfortunate mistake. Suspicion about the reliability of the older male narrators is certainly justified, but Nabokov and Tanizaki portray the male lovers as more innocent than what appear to be healthier (as well as younger) "partners" with simpler tastes, including sexual partners nearer their own age. Naomi is certainly "spoiled" as a conventional Japanese housewife and mother, but being one was not in her pre-Joji fate. She does not seem to me to have been harmed by the perverse devotions of the man who more or less bought her, and there is no doubt that she ends up dominating him; only his total surrender keeps her around at all. Joji certainly does not destroy Naomi. It might be argued that she does not destroy him, either, but his pampering and ogling her destroys his career, burns through his inheritance, and destroys his self-esteem...The text is leanly written, though it provokes wondering about the reliability of its narrator. The style is not at all florid, even if the subject matter is (de) flowering! Tanizaki was a great prose master. For those able to suspend moralistic judgements of masochistic males who worship women and unfamiliar with Tanizaki's work, I would recommend starting with Seven Japanese Tales and then moving on to Naomi and The Key...Stephen O. Murray, 2002.
............................
""Unhealthy" is an apt word to describe the fictional world of Jun'ichiro Tanizaki....(his) early work was better known for its aesthetic obsessions and outre subject matter - a typical Tanizaki story would concern something like stealing a girl's used handkerchief and licking it, or the joys of prostitution in China (John Updike memorably called him 'the most masculine writer of the 20th century'). Compared to Mishima, who dealt with characters at least as fucked up, Tanizaki's protagonists are far less self-conscious, less guilty or conflicted - where a Mishima character would analyze their neuroses in a dense psychological monologue, a Tanizaki protagonist is usually enjoying himself too much to be at all reflective.
Junichiro Tanizaki - Seven Japanese Tales -25 Dec 2006 ... As you can see, with this story Tanizaki establishes a direct lineage ... This is almost reminiscent of Nabokov in its subtle convolutions, ...
swiftywriting.blogspot.com/.../junichiro-tanizaki-seven-japanese.html -
............................................
From an essay about Tanisaki and his 1924 novel "Naomi" (extracts from Tanizaki - Speaking-Japanese.com - Exploring Japanese Literature ) "Entering Tokyo Imperial University as a Japanese literature student at the age of twenty-two, Tanizaki was instrumental in establishing the literary journal Shinshichô, the third issue of which featured his short story "The Tattooer." The tale of a tattoo artist who decorates the back of a young girl with a spider that enables her to dominate the opposite sex, it featured the luxuriant prose, rich descriptive detail, and risqué subject matter that were to characterize the writer throughout his career. Tanizaki was taking a deliberate stand against the literalness of the Naturalists and, according to Gessel, his influences at this time were Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Baudelaire, and Krafft-Ebbing's studies in sexual pathology......He married Chiyo Ishikawa in 1915, but soon started living with her younger sister, Seiko, instead. Tanizaki was so besotted with all things modern and Western at this stage that he moved to the foreign district of Yokohama in the early 1920s, and with her occidental looks and movie star ambitions, Seiko dovetailed more neatly with this obsession than her placid sister. Seiko is even thought to be the model for the promiscuous female protagonist of Naomi, Tanizaki's 1924 novel about Taisho Era decadence. [...]After the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, Tanizaki moved his family to Western Japan. This was originally intended as no more than a temporary expedient, but, accustomed as Tanizaki was to the relentless modernization of Tokyo, the traditional atmosphere of Kansai (the Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe area) seemed dreamlike and exotic by comparison and he was to spend the rest of his life there... In 1930, Tanizaki shunted his wife Chiyo off onto a poet friend of his, and in 1931 he was briefly married to a student little more than half his age, before wedding Matsuko Morita, the ex-wife of a wealthy Osaka merchant, in 1935. Tanizaki's books from this period-The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, The Reed Cutter, A Portrait of Shunkin-though set in the Japan of several centuries ago tend to deal with the modern theme of sexual obsession. This enthusiasm for the past found its logical culmination in Tanizaki's rendering of the eleventh-century The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese, a massive undertaking that took several years. [...]During the war, Tanizaki worked on his masterpiece, The Makioka Sisters, a psychological study of three sisters from a declining Osaka merchant family...Respectability did nothing to affect his choice of subjects, and later works such as The Diary of a Mad Old Man and The Key address the paradox of unfading sexual desire in impotent old age. Tanizaki died in 1965.
"An obsessive concern with 'lust, cleptomania, sadomasochism, homosexuality, foot-fetishism, coprophilia and Eisenbahnkrankheit (railroad phobia)' does not constitute a focus upon the concerns of the average citizen" drily observes Tanizaki biographer Gessel. Sexual deviancy may be Tanizaki's best known, but it is very far from being his only subject. Aside from an artificiality worthy of Flaubert or Oscar Wilde, at different times of his career his works display an insight into female psychology worthy of Henry James, a playfulness worthy of Nabokov, and a historical knowledge worthy of Victor Hugo. Perhaps Tanizaki's overriding characteristic as a writer is his uninhibited and innocent zest for life in all its aspects."
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JM: There's a recording of Dmitri singing madrigals, I wonder if we'll find among them a lady's "soot black lashes" (no backlashes...).
Let's not quarrel over a few spilled aments, ammends and ammendments. Fet's hypothesis reporting on special duplicate names is intriguing.
I've been recently toiling over an interesting novel that was lent to me as "a sample of a Japanese Lolita.." We can find lots of information available on the internet linking Tanizaki and Nabokov but, in my unlicked unsooty eyes, there's no ground for such a comparison.* This original book in Japanese ( now available in French, Portuguese or English versions) made me think about an issue which might fit in the Nab-List, related to translation. The differences between French, Spanish or English translations of Russian, Italian or Japanese authors strikes my amateurish ears as being inevitably bound to hidden linguistic cultural codes which, depending on the vehicle of their transposition, strikes different chords in the reader and promotes wide misunderstandings or sympathies.
Take the "nutcracker" from the famous Tchaikovsky's ballet suite. In French it became "Casse-noisettes" (hazelnut-cracker) whereas it was inspired by a German cracker ( which appears in one of ETA Hoffman's eerie tales),whereas the entire piece, as it impresses on us, has a Russian grand atmosphere (even when we get it animated by Disney). What kind of a nutcracker did Nabokov have in mind when he let it drop over an antique blue bowl ("Pnin") or when he mentions it in "Speak,Memory" ( his family, if recollection serves me right now, was nicknamed after it). Pnin's certainly is a metal affair with two leggy handles. The ballet image offers the open maws of a soldier. I'm curious about what kind of a nutcracker was employed in Nabokov's childhood.. The experience of reading Chekov in Portuguese is very different from reading him in English.
Would you all disagree with me that Russian Nabokov, too, would affect the French readers unlike it does reach the English ones?
James Twiggs (to Matt and alii):..."I'm of the opinion that VN leaves this an open question and that here, as in so many places in the novel, Ambiguity (and not Charles the Beloved) reigns supreme--flanked, it should go without saying, by Irony on the one hand and Pity on the other, with the court jester, Comedy, dancing wildly in the foreground//Forgive me, please, the fancy metaphor. It's worth adding that Nabokovian ambiguity, at least in Pale Fire, is both deeper and wider than the ambiguity of The Turn of the Screw, in which the possibilities are limited. In Pale Fire, thanks to the proliferation of clues, allusions, and apparent storylines, we can never be certain of anything--not even of whether our uncertainty is justified or not. I think I'm agreeing with Gary Lipon on this, but we need to remember that the uncertainty interpretation of Pale Fire goes back a long way."
JM: I agree with Twiggs' emphasis over Nabokov's "unlimited" ambiguities and parodic intent when representing Kinbote. I'm not as sure about it in relation to Hazel.
What strikes me is how Shade works over the life and death of his daughter in his poem, contrasted to Kinbote's commentaries. Tthe latter seems to be more realistically compassionate than the father, although what traces in common there are between Hazel and the commentator to ellicit his pity remains a mistery to me.
btw: Nabokov was also ambiguous about his belief of poltergeists and ESP phenomena...
..................................................
* -`Naomi ' by Tanizaki Junichiro is a Japanese classical novel , which has long been unknown to the western reader . Originally published in 1925,it told a story which could have happened in the society of Japan riven between traditional values and westernization trends .Certain analogy can be traced with `Pygmalion ' by Bernard Shaw or Lolita ' by Nabokov , however , `Naomi ' remains a deeply Japanese book . First and foremost this relates to the theme and moralistic content. Relations between a young sexually active girl and an older man demonstrate contrast between traditionalism and modernism ... Naomi ' in a way continues a tradition of medieval Japanese romantic novel , filled with sensuality and hidden lust . `Naomi ' is written from the first person , and this makes the book intimate and meditative . Sentences are short and laconic...`Naomi ' is a rather empiric description of flow of events , gradually resulting in each other . Being a book about transition period in Japanese society `Naomi ' is a ``transition ' book itself . It stands in the centre between classical and literature of Japan and modern one ..Together with such masters as Yukio Mishima Tanizaki Junichiro is a guide inside Japanese mentality .www.mightystudents.com/.../Naomi.Tanizaki.Junichiro.68201
....................
The Japanese Lolita - Jun Ichiro Tanizaki -10 Apr 2010 ... www.epinions.com/...Tanizaki/content_61030174340 BY Stephen_Murray (excerpts) Tanizaki's breakthrough novel, A Fool's Love (Naomi is the English title), was originally serialized in 1924-25. The serialization was interrupted by Japanese Imperial censors. What concerned them about the story is not what most American readers now will find unsettling. They were concerned about the portrayal of western-style (cheek-to-cheek) dancing. What will make many American readers queasy about the book now is the quasi-incestuousness of the primary relationship portrayed [...] From the fascination with the nymphet's name onward, there are many similarities to Nabokov's Lolita, written more than three decades later. Especially given the recurrence in later Tanizaki work of the masochism and foot-fetishism (and attempts to mold younger, poorer women, most notably in Some Prefer Nettles, as well as his earlier story "The Tattoo Artist" and slightly later story "Professor Rado" from A Cat, a Man, and Two Women), I am less sure that Tanizaki's intent was comic/satiric than I am that Nabokov's was. Naomi is older when she catches Joji's eye than Lolita is when she catches Humbert Humbert's, and Joji is younger than Humbert. Moreover, fifteen was not as young in Japan between the World Wars as it is in post-WWII American conception. (Lolita was twelve on the page, 15-16 in the film versions.) Naomi had a job in the floating world when she was discovered; she was not a school girl...Intercourse with Lolita and Naomi seems less important than ownership and connoisseurship for Humbert and Joji. Both men fail miserably at owning their young beloveds, and both appear ridiculous in the excess of their fascination with the young women. Lolita and Naomi have simpler pleasures and do not take Humbert and Joji nearly as seriously as the men take themselves and their passion. In the current climate of panic about "child abuse," some will be eager to cast Lolita and Naomi as victims, which is an unfortunate mistake. Suspicion about the reliability of the older male narrators is certainly justified, but Nabokov and Tanizaki portray the male lovers as more innocent than what appear to be healthier (as well as younger) "partners" with simpler tastes, including sexual partners nearer their own age. Naomi is certainly "spoiled" as a conventional Japanese housewife and mother, but being one was not in her pre-Joji fate. She does not seem to me to have been harmed by the perverse devotions of the man who more or less bought her, and there is no doubt that she ends up dominating him; only his total surrender keeps her around at all. Joji certainly does not destroy Naomi. It might be argued that she does not destroy him, either, but his pampering and ogling her destroys his career, burns through his inheritance, and destroys his self-esteem...The text is leanly written, though it provokes wondering about the reliability of its narrator. The style is not at all florid, even if the subject matter is (de) flowering! Tanizaki was a great prose master. For those able to suspend moralistic judgements of masochistic males who worship women and unfamiliar with Tanizaki's work, I would recommend starting with Seven Japanese Tales and then moving on to Naomi and The Key...Stephen O. Murray, 2002.
............................
""Unhealthy" is an apt word to describe the fictional world of Jun'ichiro Tanizaki....(his) early work was better known for its aesthetic obsessions and outre subject matter - a typical Tanizaki story would concern something like stealing a girl's used handkerchief and licking it, or the joys of prostitution in China (John Updike memorably called him 'the most masculine writer of the 20th century'). Compared to Mishima, who dealt with characters at least as fucked up, Tanizaki's protagonists are far less self-conscious, less guilty or conflicted - where a Mishima character would analyze their neuroses in a dense psychological monologue, a Tanizaki protagonist is usually enjoying himself too much to be at all reflective.
Junichiro Tanizaki - Seven Japanese Tales -25 Dec 2006 ... As you can see, with this story Tanizaki establishes a direct lineage ... This is almost reminiscent of Nabokov in its subtle convolutions, ...
swiftywriting.blogspot.com/.../junichiro-tanizaki-seven-japanese.html -
............................................
From an essay about Tanisaki and his 1924 novel "Naomi" (extracts from Tanizaki - Speaking-Japanese.com - Exploring Japanese Literature ) "Entering Tokyo Imperial University as a Japanese literature student at the age of twenty-two, Tanizaki was instrumental in establishing the literary journal Shinshichô, the third issue of which featured his short story "The Tattooer." The tale of a tattoo artist who decorates the back of a young girl with a spider that enables her to dominate the opposite sex, it featured the luxuriant prose, rich descriptive detail, and risqué subject matter that were to characterize the writer throughout his career. Tanizaki was taking a deliberate stand against the literalness of the Naturalists and, according to Gessel, his influences at this time were Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Baudelaire, and Krafft-Ebbing's studies in sexual pathology......He married Chiyo Ishikawa in 1915, but soon started living with her younger sister, Seiko, instead. Tanizaki was so besotted with all things modern and Western at this stage that he moved to the foreign district of Yokohama in the early 1920s, and with her occidental looks and movie star ambitions, Seiko dovetailed more neatly with this obsession than her placid sister. Seiko is even thought to be the model for the promiscuous female protagonist of Naomi, Tanizaki's 1924 novel about Taisho Era decadence. [...]After the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, Tanizaki moved his family to Western Japan. This was originally intended as no more than a temporary expedient, but, accustomed as Tanizaki was to the relentless modernization of Tokyo, the traditional atmosphere of Kansai (the Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe area) seemed dreamlike and exotic by comparison and he was to spend the rest of his life there... In 1930, Tanizaki shunted his wife Chiyo off onto a poet friend of his, and in 1931 he was briefly married to a student little more than half his age, before wedding Matsuko Morita, the ex-wife of a wealthy Osaka merchant, in 1935. Tanizaki's books from this period-The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi, The Reed Cutter, A Portrait of Shunkin-though set in the Japan of several centuries ago tend to deal with the modern theme of sexual obsession. This enthusiasm for the past found its logical culmination in Tanizaki's rendering of the eleventh-century The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese, a massive undertaking that took several years. [...]During the war, Tanizaki worked on his masterpiece, The Makioka Sisters, a psychological study of three sisters from a declining Osaka merchant family...Respectability did nothing to affect his choice of subjects, and later works such as The Diary of a Mad Old Man and The Key address the paradox of unfading sexual desire in impotent old age. Tanizaki died in 1965.
"An obsessive concern with 'lust, cleptomania, sadomasochism, homosexuality, foot-fetishism, coprophilia and Eisenbahnkrankheit (railroad phobia)' does not constitute a focus upon the concerns of the average citizen" drily observes Tanizaki biographer Gessel. Sexual deviancy may be Tanizaki's best known, but it is very far from being his only subject. Aside from an artificiality worthy of Flaubert or Oscar Wilde, at different times of his career his works display an insight into female psychology worthy of Henry James, a playfulness worthy of Nabokov, and a historical knowledge worthy of Victor Hugo. Perhaps Tanizaki's overriding characteristic as a writer is his uninhibited and innocent zest for life in all its aspects."
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