Subject
[NABOKOV-L] [SIGHTING] Best Last Lines.. and a que ry on nagol'nïy tulup
From
Date
Body
100 Best Last Lines from Novels PDF/Adobe Acrobat -
americanbookreview.org/.../100_Best_Last_Lines_from_Novels.pdf -
The editor's 2008 choice was (n.12) " I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. -Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)"
Certainly an epigraph doesn't count as offering a novel's first lines but, in this kind of competition, we find that John Ray Jr's "Foreword" is never considered as an important artifice which belongs integrally to the novel. The so called first lines when "Lolita" is chosen, usually are: "Lolita, light of my life, etc."
When Imre Kertész in 2005 "Liquidation" opened his novel by quoting Beckett (Molloy), I rushed to locate the sentence in Beckett. As a first line I could be set side by side to Nabokov's in "The Original of Laura" ( "Her husband, she answered, was a writer, too - at least, after a fashion."). However (what fun and this is how I happened on the Nabokovian "sighting") Beckett's are among the 100 Best Last Lines from Novels... He wrote: "Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining."
A query: In "Ada" Nabokov mentions a variation on the sheepskin coat his parent's coachman wore (SM), an inversion that is similar to Longfellow's Hyawatha glove. There are a few words in Russian and I'd like to know if the translation that was appended is correct, or if there remain innuendos that only an ear attuned to Russian would identify.
I quote: "...or some ludicrous blunder in the current column of Elsie de Nord, a vulgar literary demimondaine who thought that Lyovin went about Moscow in a nagol'nïy tulup, 'a muzhik's sheepskin coat, bare side out, bloom side in,' as defined in a dictionary our commentator produced like a conjurer, never to be procurable by Elsies." "
Bloom side in" certainly indicates Joyce's "Ulysses", since the discussion is about "Paul Bourget's 'monologue intérieur' borrowed from old Leo..." and I remember that Nabokov vindicates the priority for this specific literary flow of free-associations to Leo Tolstoy, and not to Joyce. I wish I could know the exact (literal) translation of nagol'nïy tulup ...
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/
americanbookreview.org/.../100_Best_Last_Lines_from_Novels.pdf -
The editor's 2008 choice was (n.12) " I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. -Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)"
Certainly an epigraph doesn't count as offering a novel's first lines but, in this kind of competition, we find that John Ray Jr's "Foreword" is never considered as an important artifice which belongs integrally to the novel. The so called first lines when "Lolita" is chosen, usually are: "Lolita, light of my life, etc."
When Imre Kertész in 2005 "Liquidation" opened his novel by quoting Beckett (Molloy), I rushed to locate the sentence in Beckett. As a first line I could be set side by side to Nabokov's in "The Original of Laura" ( "Her husband, she answered, was a writer, too - at least, after a fashion."). However (what fun and this is how I happened on the Nabokovian "sighting") Beckett's are among the 100 Best Last Lines from Novels... He wrote: "Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining."
A query: In "Ada" Nabokov mentions a variation on the sheepskin coat his parent's coachman wore (SM), an inversion that is similar to Longfellow's Hyawatha glove. There are a few words in Russian and I'd like to know if the translation that was appended is correct, or if there remain innuendos that only an ear attuned to Russian would identify.
I quote: "...or some ludicrous blunder in the current column of Elsie de Nord, a vulgar literary demimondaine who thought that Lyovin went about Moscow in a nagol'nïy tulup, 'a muzhik's sheepskin coat, bare side out, bloom side in,' as defined in a dictionary our commentator produced like a conjurer, never to be procurable by Elsies." "
Bloom side in" certainly indicates Joyce's "Ulysses", since the discussion is about "Paul Bourget's 'monologue intérieur' borrowed from old Leo..." and I remember that Nabokov vindicates the priority for this specific literary flow of free-associations to Leo Tolstoy, and not to Joyce. I wish I could know the exact (literal) translation of nagol'nïy tulup ...
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/