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Fw: TT Foreword -- DN's translation
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MessageEDNOTE. Below is Dmitri Nabokov's translation from his own Introduction to his Italian translation of TRANSPARENT THINGS. He (and the editor of NABOKV-L ) would like to thank Peter Hayes and Carolyn Kunin for their useful versions.
----- Original Message -----
From: Dmitri Nabokov
To: 'D. Barton Johnson'
Sent: Sunday, July 25, 2004 1:40 PM
Subject: TT Foreword -- DN's translation
Translator's Foreword
Like certain particles or certain stars, this volume may seem thin but is, in reality, highly concentrated.
The transparency of objects, the ambiguity of space-time, pervade its every theme to the point of becoming the underlying theme itself. This sometimes results in apparent syntactic inconsistencies (scrambled verb tenses, Hugh's words that hover in limbo among what is spoken, what is thought, what is perceived by the omniscient narrator) that, in transit from one language to another perhaps demanding greater discipline, may momentarily perplex the reader.
Equally problematic is the task of rendering in plausible Italian the English of a German writer who fumbles an idiom, the French of a Russian lady who is translating from her mother tongue, or the complex, polyglot wordplay of the author.
I have sought throughout a maximum fidelity to the original, even at the cost of occasionally incurring a slightly clumsy or complicated locution, categorically avoiding gratuitous stylistic embellishment, and altering or omitting (with the author's consent) only certain details that would have been meaningless to a reader with no English. The word "shift," for instance, can have two senses: a switch of frequency (as in Doppler Shift) or a woman's nightdress (in whose place I have the false Julia wear a "Doppler Doll").
The title "Tralatitions" remains unchanged for obvious reasons.
When reading this tralatition (tralation, translation, but not, in this case, metaphor), one is advised to proceed without haste, paying appropriate attention to little things like a rock traversed by certain small creatures, a very transparent pencil, the dancing vegetables, the flames that flicker here and there -- and also to dedicate a thought in passing to Julia Moore, to Mr. R., and to Adam von Librikov.
Dmitri Nabokov
----- Original Message -----
From: Dmitri Nabokov
To: 'D. Barton Johnson'
Sent: Sunday, July 25, 2004 1:40 PM
Subject: TT Foreword -- DN's translation
Translator's Foreword
Like certain particles or certain stars, this volume may seem thin but is, in reality, highly concentrated.
The transparency of objects, the ambiguity of space-time, pervade its every theme to the point of becoming the underlying theme itself. This sometimes results in apparent syntactic inconsistencies (scrambled verb tenses, Hugh's words that hover in limbo among what is spoken, what is thought, what is perceived by the omniscient narrator) that, in transit from one language to another perhaps demanding greater discipline, may momentarily perplex the reader.
Equally problematic is the task of rendering in plausible Italian the English of a German writer who fumbles an idiom, the French of a Russian lady who is translating from her mother tongue, or the complex, polyglot wordplay of the author.
I have sought throughout a maximum fidelity to the original, even at the cost of occasionally incurring a slightly clumsy or complicated locution, categorically avoiding gratuitous stylistic embellishment, and altering or omitting (with the author's consent) only certain details that would have been meaningless to a reader with no English. The word "shift," for instance, can have two senses: a switch of frequency (as in Doppler Shift) or a woman's nightdress (in whose place I have the false Julia wear a "Doppler Doll").
The title "Tralatitions" remains unchanged for obvious reasons.
When reading this tralatition (tralation, translation, but not, in this case, metaphor), one is advised to proceed without haste, paying appropriate attention to little things like a rock traversed by certain small creatures, a very transparent pencil, the dancing vegetables, the flames that flicker here and there -- and also to dedicate a thought in passing to Julia Moore, to Mr. R., and to Adam von Librikov.
Dmitri Nabokov