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Recent articles on TOOL: Open letter to DN
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[EDNOTE. Dave Haan sends notice of Amelia Glaser's open letter to
Dmitri Nabokov. -- SES]
One that escaped Sandy's wide net (also, family picture at link):
http://openlettersmonthly.com/issue/may08-proposal-to-nabokov
An Earnest Proposal for Dmitri Nabokov
Amelia Glaser
The damage, I fear, has been done. Dmitri Nabokov, after years of
teasing his father’s readers, has announced the imminent publication of
Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished last manuscript, The Original of Laura,
which has been sitting, we are told, in a Swiss safety deposit box,
hostage to filial indecision. Early this year it seemed that Dmitri was
close to carrying out Vladimir Nabokov’s deathbed wishes, thus spiting
the maxim uttered by Mikhail Bulgakov’s devilish Woland in Master and
Margarita that “manuscripts don’t burn.” The suspense story, as it has
been narrated by bloggers, scholars and journalists for the past couple
of months, continued to shift the devil from the shoulder inclined to
burn the text to the shoulder inclined to capitalize on it.
Those who have weighed in on Laura have gleefully changed their minds
time and again. Vladimir Nabokov’s biographer Brian Boyd, who has seen
the novel and initially advised burning, publicly changed his mind. He
recently told The Times reporter Stephanie Marsh, “It is very
fragmentary, people shouldn’t expect to be swept away. He is doing some
very brilliant things with the prose, the story just flashes by, the
characters are rather unappealing. It seems a technical tour de force,
just as Shakespeare’s later works where he is extending his own
technique in very, very concentrated ways.” A more skeptical Vladimir
Meskin, docent at the Moscow State Pedagogical University told Viktor
Borzenko of Novye Izvestiia on April 28: “Once the author made his
request, that meant that the publication of the text would ruin the
overall system of his life’s work.” The Swiss safe, Meskin concludes, is
the best possible place for the unfinished work.
Ron Rosenbaum, writing for The New York Observer and Slate, has provided
periodic updates on the fate of Laura. Rosenbaum, who once congratulated
himself for convincing Dmitri to save the novel, more recently pleaded
with him to make a decision, even if that meant “tell[ing] us that you
intend to preserve the mystery forever by destroying Laura.” In a recent
installment in Slate, he wrote,
Shouldn’t the father have the right to expect that his son would carry
out his wishes? And yet Dmitri has himself fueled our desire to possess
Laura with some of his comments, as when he called it the “most
concentrated distillation of [my father’s] creativity” and a “totally
radical book.”
Making Laura widely available will mean subjecting Nabokov to a new wave
of imperfect criticism. Dmitri hinted at a certain apprehension about
Nabokov critics in an interview with Suellen Stringer-Hye for the
Nabokov Online Journal, “Of course, one of the most offensive critical
cracks was that of certain dour post-Soviet pundits affirming that
Lolita and other writings of Nabokov’s suggest a malignant contempt for
America and all things American. Nothing could be further from the
truth.”
One is apt to be reminded of the final scene in Pale Fire, in which the
critic and madman Kinbote snatches John Shade’s manuscript, and the
latter is shot down, leaving the fate of his last masterpiece in
imperfect hands. “My commentary to this poem,” Kinbote writes, “now in
the hands of my readers, represents an attempt to sort out those echoes
and wavelets of fire, and pale phosphorescent hints, and all the many
subliminal debts to me.” The text that remains might be the work of a
maniac, a genius, or some collaboration between the two, John Shades’
ghost (or the ghost of his child) reappearing to dictate changes to the
text. Nabokov’s ghost, or the shadow of it, has also conversed with
Dmitri. Both Rosenbaum and Boyd took part in a February 15 installment
of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Book Talk,” during which
the host, Ramona Koval, cited an apparent change of heart:
To wit, and quite independently of any words anyone might have wanted to
put in my mouth or thoughts into my brain, I have decided that my
father, with a wry and fond smile, might well have contradicted himself
upon seeing me in my present situation and said, “Well, why don’t you
mix the useful with the pleasurable? That is, say or do what you like
but why not make some money on the damn thing?”
But wait, Dmitri Vladimirovich – before you dash our hopes for Laura by
publishing her, consider a proposal that would both adhere to the letter
of your father’s request, and give his readers a taste of the last
moments of his creativity. My solution, I believe, allows for both,
throwing in a bit of healthy rebellion to boot. I say, translate the
text (into whatever language you please). That is, change every word of
the original without burning its content. Let translation save Laura and
its mystery, not so much from the furnace, as from the kind of criticism
that plagued your father at the end of his life. Precisely the
uncertainty of translation – its invitation to doubt accuracy and
meaning – would offer a glimpse of Nabokov’s poetic narrative, and an
excuse for the failings of an unfinished plot.
Dmitri Nabokov, upon graduating cum laude from Harvard, became an opera
singer. His musical career did not eliminate his responsibility to a
close-knit literary family, which included working with his father on a
series of Russian-English translations – both his father’s works and
samples from the Russian literary canon. “Nabokov naturally preferred
his son to any other translator,” Boyd tells us in The American Years.
“Dmitri accepted his father’s principle of literality and knew that
an undulating or knobby Russian phrase should not be flattened into
plain English. Where other translators often felt Nabokov’s exacting
corrections and innumerable rephrasings a threat to their professional
competence, Dmitri could simply welcome the improvements.” Four years
ago, at an auction in Geneva, Dmitri, the last heir to Vladimir
Nabokov’s estate and legacy, was forced to sell his family’s library.
According to a May 4, 2004 New York Times article, among these was a
copy of Despair, !
inscribed: “For Dmitri. From translator to translator. With love.
Vladimir Nabokov. Papa. Montreux. 1966.”’
Ironically, it seems to have been translation, in part, that kept
Vladimir Nabokov from finishing Laura. Boyd tells us,
Early in October, Nabokov began translating for the last volume of his
Russian stories, Details of a Sunset. Dmitri had prepared draft
translations of some stories, while his father tackled others on his
own. But the chief task facing him for the winter was the remainder of
the harrowing French Ada. He knew he had to rid himself of all his
translation before settling down to the new novel “that keeps adding
nightly a couple of hours to my habitual insomnias.”
The burden of translation indeed weighed heavy in Nabokov’s life,
absorbing, delaying, but perhaps, at times, accounting for, the author’s
genius. Walter Benjamin, who, in his 1923 “The Task of the Translator”
set the tone for theories of translation that would dominate the past
century, suggests that a translation adds to our understanding of the
concept behind the original text, issuing out of a work’s afterlife:
For a translation comes later than the original, and since the important
works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the
time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued
life.
Which returns me to my plea: If it has been so painful to give Laura
life, why not go straight for an afterlife? Lose the text in
translation. Or rather, let us find it there. After all, as Boyd informs
us, a provisional title for the novel was The Original of Laura: Dying
is Fun.
Solomonic wisdom? The Modern Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik has
famously compared reading a translation to kissing a bride through her
veil. Generations of readers would never know how thick the fabric is
through which they are kissing Laura. But speculation would also force
those critics who, driven by referential mania, have attempted to blend
Nabokov’s past with his fiction, to take a step back, to consider the
possibility of a translator’s faulty wording. Students of Nabokov would
wonder whether Dmitri (or whoever has done the deed) has missed
something, added something of his own, tricked them. Mystics would enjoy
the possibility that Nabokov, appearing in dreams, dictated the
translation himself. Hungry fans would read this book differently from
the others, humbled by their obscured view. Granted, the translator may
be left with nightmares of inadequacy, haunted by Nabokov’s compendium
of criticism of his fellow translators. (Found in his posthumous
Selected Letters !
1940-77: “I can do nothing with Constance Garnett’s dry shit.”
“Paraphrases are related to the original text as dreams are to
reality, and Miss Deutsche’s version is little more than a nightmare.”)
But in compensation for a daunting translator’s task, this rendition
will never be compared to an original. To relieve the burden of
responsibility, why not commission two translations, or three, or
seventy-two?
Once this is done, Dmitri Vladimirovich, burn Laura in good faith. Or
tell us you did.
____
Amelia Glaser is an Assistant Professor of Russian Literature at the
University of California, San Diego.
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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
Dmitri Nabokov. -- SES]
One that escaped Sandy's wide net (also, family picture at link):
http://openlettersmonthly.com/issue/may08-proposal-to-nabokov
An Earnest Proposal for Dmitri Nabokov
Amelia Glaser
The damage, I fear, has been done. Dmitri Nabokov, after years of
teasing his father’s readers, has announced the imminent publication of
Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished last manuscript, The Original of Laura,
which has been sitting, we are told, in a Swiss safety deposit box,
hostage to filial indecision. Early this year it seemed that Dmitri was
close to carrying out Vladimir Nabokov’s deathbed wishes, thus spiting
the maxim uttered by Mikhail Bulgakov’s devilish Woland in Master and
Margarita that “manuscripts don’t burn.” The suspense story, as it has
been narrated by bloggers, scholars and journalists for the past couple
of months, continued to shift the devil from the shoulder inclined to
burn the text to the shoulder inclined to capitalize on it.
Those who have weighed in on Laura have gleefully changed their minds
time and again. Vladimir Nabokov’s biographer Brian Boyd, who has seen
the novel and initially advised burning, publicly changed his mind. He
recently told The Times reporter Stephanie Marsh, “It is very
fragmentary, people shouldn’t expect to be swept away. He is doing some
very brilliant things with the prose, the story just flashes by, the
characters are rather unappealing. It seems a technical tour de force,
just as Shakespeare’s later works where he is extending his own
technique in very, very concentrated ways.” A more skeptical Vladimir
Meskin, docent at the Moscow State Pedagogical University told Viktor
Borzenko of Novye Izvestiia on April 28: “Once the author made his
request, that meant that the publication of the text would ruin the
overall system of his life’s work.” The Swiss safe, Meskin concludes, is
the best possible place for the unfinished work.
Ron Rosenbaum, writing for The New York Observer and Slate, has provided
periodic updates on the fate of Laura. Rosenbaum, who once congratulated
himself for convincing Dmitri to save the novel, more recently pleaded
with him to make a decision, even if that meant “tell[ing] us that you
intend to preserve the mystery forever by destroying Laura.” In a recent
installment in Slate, he wrote,
Shouldn’t the father have the right to expect that his son would carry
out his wishes? And yet Dmitri has himself fueled our desire to possess
Laura with some of his comments, as when he called it the “most
concentrated distillation of [my father’s] creativity” and a “totally
radical book.”
Making Laura widely available will mean subjecting Nabokov to a new wave
of imperfect criticism. Dmitri hinted at a certain apprehension about
Nabokov critics in an interview with Suellen Stringer-Hye for the
Nabokov Online Journal, “Of course, one of the most offensive critical
cracks was that of certain dour post-Soviet pundits affirming that
Lolita and other writings of Nabokov’s suggest a malignant contempt for
America and all things American. Nothing could be further from the
truth.”
One is apt to be reminded of the final scene in Pale Fire, in which the
critic and madman Kinbote snatches John Shade’s manuscript, and the
latter is shot down, leaving the fate of his last masterpiece in
imperfect hands. “My commentary to this poem,” Kinbote writes, “now in
the hands of my readers, represents an attempt to sort out those echoes
and wavelets of fire, and pale phosphorescent hints, and all the many
subliminal debts to me.” The text that remains might be the work of a
maniac, a genius, or some collaboration between the two, John Shades’
ghost (or the ghost of his child) reappearing to dictate changes to the
text. Nabokov’s ghost, or the shadow of it, has also conversed with
Dmitri. Both Rosenbaum and Boyd took part in a February 15 installment
of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Book Talk,” during which
the host, Ramona Koval, cited an apparent change of heart:
To wit, and quite independently of any words anyone might have wanted to
put in my mouth or thoughts into my brain, I have decided that my
father, with a wry and fond smile, might well have contradicted himself
upon seeing me in my present situation and said, “Well, why don’t you
mix the useful with the pleasurable? That is, say or do what you like
but why not make some money on the damn thing?”
But wait, Dmitri Vladimirovich – before you dash our hopes for Laura by
publishing her, consider a proposal that would both adhere to the letter
of your father’s request, and give his readers a taste of the last
moments of his creativity. My solution, I believe, allows for both,
throwing in a bit of healthy rebellion to boot. I say, translate the
text (into whatever language you please). That is, change every word of
the original without burning its content. Let translation save Laura and
its mystery, not so much from the furnace, as from the kind of criticism
that plagued your father at the end of his life. Precisely the
uncertainty of translation – its invitation to doubt accuracy and
meaning – would offer a glimpse of Nabokov’s poetic narrative, and an
excuse for the failings of an unfinished plot.
Dmitri Nabokov, upon graduating cum laude from Harvard, became an opera
singer. His musical career did not eliminate his responsibility to a
close-knit literary family, which included working with his father on a
series of Russian-English translations – both his father’s works and
samples from the Russian literary canon. “Nabokov naturally preferred
his son to any other translator,” Boyd tells us in The American Years.
“Dmitri accepted his father’s principle of literality and knew that
an undulating or knobby Russian phrase should not be flattened into
plain English. Where other translators often felt Nabokov’s exacting
corrections and innumerable rephrasings a threat to their professional
competence, Dmitri could simply welcome the improvements.” Four years
ago, at an auction in Geneva, Dmitri, the last heir to Vladimir
Nabokov’s estate and legacy, was forced to sell his family’s library.
According to a May 4, 2004 New York Times article, among these was a
copy of Despair, !
inscribed: “For Dmitri. From translator to translator. With love.
Vladimir Nabokov. Papa. Montreux. 1966.”’
Ironically, it seems to have been translation, in part, that kept
Vladimir Nabokov from finishing Laura. Boyd tells us,
Early in October, Nabokov began translating for the last volume of his
Russian stories, Details of a Sunset. Dmitri had prepared draft
translations of some stories, while his father tackled others on his
own. But the chief task facing him for the winter was the remainder of
the harrowing French Ada. He knew he had to rid himself of all his
translation before settling down to the new novel “that keeps adding
nightly a couple of hours to my habitual insomnias.”
The burden of translation indeed weighed heavy in Nabokov’s life,
absorbing, delaying, but perhaps, at times, accounting for, the author’s
genius. Walter Benjamin, who, in his 1923 “The Task of the Translator”
set the tone for theories of translation that would dominate the past
century, suggests that a translation adds to our understanding of the
concept behind the original text, issuing out of a work’s afterlife:
For a translation comes later than the original, and since the important
works of world literature never find their chosen translators at the
time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued
life.
Which returns me to my plea: If it has been so painful to give Laura
life, why not go straight for an afterlife? Lose the text in
translation. Or rather, let us find it there. After all, as Boyd informs
us, a provisional title for the novel was The Original of Laura: Dying
is Fun.
Solomonic wisdom? The Modern Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik has
famously compared reading a translation to kissing a bride through her
veil. Generations of readers would never know how thick the fabric is
through which they are kissing Laura. But speculation would also force
those critics who, driven by referential mania, have attempted to blend
Nabokov’s past with his fiction, to take a step back, to consider the
possibility of a translator’s faulty wording. Students of Nabokov would
wonder whether Dmitri (or whoever has done the deed) has missed
something, added something of his own, tricked them. Mystics would enjoy
the possibility that Nabokov, appearing in dreams, dictated the
translation himself. Hungry fans would read this book differently from
the others, humbled by their obscured view. Granted, the translator may
be left with nightmares of inadequacy, haunted by Nabokov’s compendium
of criticism of his fellow translators. (Found in his posthumous
Selected Letters !
1940-77: “I can do nothing with Constance Garnett’s dry shit.”
“Paraphrases are related to the original text as dreams are to
reality, and Miss Deutsche’s version is little more than a nightmare.”)
But in compensation for a daunting translator’s task, this rendition
will never be compared to an original. To relieve the burden of
responsibility, why not commission two translations, or three, or
seventy-two?
Once this is done, Dmitri Vladimirovich, burn Laura in good faith. Or
tell us you did.
____
Amelia Glaser is an Assistant Professor of Russian Literature at the
University of California, San Diego.
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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