Subject
Re: goodbye, Nabokov
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Date
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I share John/Jack Liesveld’s shock/sorrow at Alexey Sklyarenko’s decision.
He may have stopped reading VN-list postings. If so, I’ll try direct
emailing to discuss the affair. In the past I’ve had email-access problems
with his skylark MAIL.RU address but somewhere I may have an alt. address
that worked. We were able to debate non-specific VN topics such as Zenit
club football.
In the meantime, I hope our esteemed Editors will consider my reactions to
be of interest to all VN-listers.
It’s difficult, nay impossible, for ‘outsiders’ to judge the wisdom of AS’s
drastic decision. I think I can understand his intense HOWL of chagrin and
disappointment, yet, at the same time, I can’t avoid feeling that his
‘suicide-note’ is an over-reaction, and long-term counter-productive for all
Russian readers.
Surely, in these digitized days (pronounced ‘daze’), there are legal ways to
RE-‘kindle’ the flame of ‘free-speech/write.’ Borrowing from Alexey’s
hallmarked Nabokovian-inspired word-smithery:
PLAY IT AGAIN SAM* (сам) ... PUBLISH (изда́т) or BE DAMNED.
* Precisionists** may object to this mis-quotation ... Nobody actually says
it in the movie Casablanca. However, widely anacronymed as PIAS, and
AS-anagrammable as PAIS = Peace, there IS an eponymous play/film by Woody
Allen, as well as a song and popular Computer game.
** Making up for AS’s allusive-connectional absence, I note the Ginsberg
connection between Alan’s HOWL and Carlo’s The Cheese & The Worms: The
Cosmos of a Sixteenth-century Miller. A recent LRB (London Review of Books)
reviewing Carlo Ginsberg’s latest anthology of essays, comparing ing his
intensely precisionist nano-histories with those by
novelists/autobiographers famed for their obsessive attention to arcane,
minute detail. We find Flaubert, of course, but most striking is the
unforgivable ABSENCE of any mention of Nabokov.
I haven’t been following this thread, so I may have missed an explanation
for Alexey’s strange use of ‘MR ILYIN’ as the name of the rival Ada
translator. A quick google confirmed the presence of the fictional
translator A. Ilyin in VN’s short-story Lips to Lips. The pseudonymous
translator, S. Ilyin, also crops up So do we have an Alexey in-joke, a
coincidence or a real Ilyin with an unkown first name/patronymic? Calling
him MR may strike some Brits as a tad rude (unless he’s a UK surgeon).
Criticizing an unseen translation hardly helps Alexey’s cause; nor do
threats-in-advance to sue for plagiarism.
Looking no further than VN’s own strong opinions and broken friendships, we
see that Translators are notoriously prickly and biased when judging rivals!
Ada does seem to be a major translational challenge, being itself devoted to
multilingual transformations. I quote from Juliette Taylor’s essay at
http://www.lans-tts.be/img/NS4/Taylor.PDF
(I’ve retained the ‘random’ pdf auto-hyphenations which often produce
unexpectedly significant word splits. Compare seman-tic, pro-vided and
supple-mented with my favourites: leg-end, male-diction, mans-laughter, and
the reflexive hyp-hen!)
Multilingualism is central to Nabokov’s oeuvre: a translator and
self-transla- tor as well as writer, his decision, half-way through his
career, to abandon his “untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian
tongue” in favour of what he rather artfully describes as “a second-rate
brand of English” (Nabokov 2000a: 316-317) leads him to make increasing use
of multilingual forms of defamiliarisation in his fiction. Such thematic and
stylistic concern with interlingual contact reaches its apotheosis in the
notoriously difficult Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, a novel that has
itself been described as “a gigan- tic translation” (Cancogni 1985: 251) ...
Nabokov’s own translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin reflects this
sensitivity to interlingual distortion: the uncompromising pursuit of seman-
tic fidelity leads him to sacrifice “everything (elegance, euphony, clarity,
good taste, modern usage, and even grammar) that the dainty mimic prizes
higher than truth” (Pushkin 1964: viii). The text of the translation, itself
intended as no more than “a crib, a pony” (Nabokov 1990: 38), is supple-
mented by footnotes describing all the historical, linguistic and stylistic
aspects of the text that the translation is unable to include. Though
Nabokov curbs his own translational creativity, the translation itself seems
to have pro- vided some form of creative catalyst: Pale Fire bears a direct
formal relation to Nabokov’s Onegin, and can even be read as a by-product of
that transla- tion
Stan Kelly-Bootle
Author: The Computer Contra-dictionary, MIT Press, 1995
On 02/08/2012 07:46, "John Liesveld" <liesveld@ME.COM> wrote:
> WHAT A LOSS!!! I'm stunned and am losing my favorite of all the contributors.
> Stunned!
>
> Sincerely, Jack Liesveld
>
> Envoyé de mon iPad
>
> Le 2 août 2012 à 03:24, Alexey Sklyarenko <skylark1970@MAIL.RU> a écrit :
>
>> I just learned that, with the approval of the Nabokov estate, Mr. Ilyin's
>> revised "translation" of Ada will soon be published by Azbuka. Because Azbuka
>> holds the exclusive publishing rights to Nabokov's English novels in Russia,
>> my translation (which I regard "the work of my life") is unlikely ever to
>> appear.
>>
>> To protest against this publication I decided to leave the Nabokov studies.
>> This is my last posting to the List. It was fun to write to the forum but now
>> it's time to say goodbye. I apologize if my messages (on and off List) were
>> sometimes rude and offensive. I never wished to hurt anybody.
>>
>> If I manage to live on (by saying goodbye to Nabokov I sort of commit
>> suicide), happen to open Mr. Ilyin's version and notice in it but one oborot
>> (locution) of mine, I will sue the Nabokov estate (about ten years ago I had
>> the naïveté to mail DN the typoscript of my - then imperfect - translation).
>>
>> Alexey Sklyarenko
>>
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/
He may have stopped reading VN-list postings. If so, I’ll try direct
emailing to discuss the affair. In the past I’ve had email-access problems
with his skylark MAIL.RU address but somewhere I may have an alt. address
that worked. We were able to debate non-specific VN topics such as Zenit
club football.
In the meantime, I hope our esteemed Editors will consider my reactions to
be of interest to all VN-listers.
It’s difficult, nay impossible, for ‘outsiders’ to judge the wisdom of AS’s
drastic decision. I think I can understand his intense HOWL of chagrin and
disappointment, yet, at the same time, I can’t avoid feeling that his
‘suicide-note’ is an over-reaction, and long-term counter-productive for all
Russian readers.
Surely, in these digitized days (pronounced ‘daze’), there are legal ways to
RE-‘kindle’ the flame of ‘free-speech/write.’ Borrowing from Alexey’s
hallmarked Nabokovian-inspired word-smithery:
PLAY IT AGAIN SAM* (сам) ... PUBLISH (изда́т) or BE DAMNED.
* Precisionists** may object to this mis-quotation ... Nobody actually says
it in the movie Casablanca. However, widely anacronymed as PIAS, and
AS-anagrammable as PAIS = Peace, there IS an eponymous play/film by Woody
Allen, as well as a song and popular Computer game.
** Making up for AS’s allusive-connectional absence, I note the Ginsberg
connection between Alan’s HOWL and Carlo’s The Cheese & The Worms: The
Cosmos of a Sixteenth-century Miller. A recent LRB (London Review of Books)
reviewing Carlo Ginsberg’s latest anthology of essays, comparing ing his
intensely precisionist nano-histories with those by
novelists/autobiographers famed for their obsessive attention to arcane,
minute detail. We find Flaubert, of course, but most striking is the
unforgivable ABSENCE of any mention of Nabokov.
I haven’t been following this thread, so I may have missed an explanation
for Alexey’s strange use of ‘MR ILYIN’ as the name of the rival Ada
translator. A quick google confirmed the presence of the fictional
translator A. Ilyin in VN’s short-story Lips to Lips. The pseudonymous
translator, S. Ilyin, also crops up So do we have an Alexey in-joke, a
coincidence or a real Ilyin with an unkown first name/patronymic? Calling
him MR may strike some Brits as a tad rude (unless he’s a UK surgeon).
Criticizing an unseen translation hardly helps Alexey’s cause; nor do
threats-in-advance to sue for plagiarism.
Looking no further than VN’s own strong opinions and broken friendships, we
see that Translators are notoriously prickly and biased when judging rivals!
Ada does seem to be a major translational challenge, being itself devoted to
multilingual transformations. I quote from Juliette Taylor’s essay at
http://www.lans-tts.be/img/NS4/Taylor.PDF
(I’ve retained the ‘random’ pdf auto-hyphenations which often produce
unexpectedly significant word splits. Compare seman-tic, pro-vided and
supple-mented with my favourites: leg-end, male-diction, mans-laughter, and
the reflexive hyp-hen!)
Multilingualism is central to Nabokov’s oeuvre: a translator and
self-transla- tor as well as writer, his decision, half-way through his
career, to abandon his “untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian
tongue” in favour of what he rather artfully describes as “a second-rate
brand of English” (Nabokov 2000a: 316-317) leads him to make increasing use
of multilingual forms of defamiliarisation in his fiction. Such thematic and
stylistic concern with interlingual contact reaches its apotheosis in the
notoriously difficult Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, a novel that has
itself been described as “a gigan- tic translation” (Cancogni 1985: 251) ...
Nabokov’s own translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin reflects this
sensitivity to interlingual distortion: the uncompromising pursuit of seman-
tic fidelity leads him to sacrifice “everything (elegance, euphony, clarity,
good taste, modern usage, and even grammar) that the dainty mimic prizes
higher than truth” (Pushkin 1964: viii). The text of the translation, itself
intended as no more than “a crib, a pony” (Nabokov 1990: 38), is supple-
mented by footnotes describing all the historical, linguistic and stylistic
aspects of the text that the translation is unable to include. Though
Nabokov curbs his own translational creativity, the translation itself seems
to have pro- vided some form of creative catalyst: Pale Fire bears a direct
formal relation to Nabokov’s Onegin, and can even be read as a by-product of
that transla- tion
Stan Kelly-Bootle
Author: The Computer Contra-dictionary, MIT Press, 1995
On 02/08/2012 07:46, "John Liesveld" <liesveld@ME.COM> wrote:
> WHAT A LOSS!!! I'm stunned and am losing my favorite of all the contributors.
> Stunned!
>
> Sincerely, Jack Liesveld
>
> Envoyé de mon iPad
>
> Le 2 août 2012 à 03:24, Alexey Sklyarenko <skylark1970@MAIL.RU> a écrit :
>
>> I just learned that, with the approval of the Nabokov estate, Mr. Ilyin's
>> revised "translation" of Ada will soon be published by Azbuka. Because Azbuka
>> holds the exclusive publishing rights to Nabokov's English novels in Russia,
>> my translation (which I regard "the work of my life") is unlikely ever to
>> appear.
>>
>> To protest against this publication I decided to leave the Nabokov studies.
>> This is my last posting to the List. It was fun to write to the forum but now
>> it's time to say goodbye. I apologize if my messages (on and off List) were
>> sometimes rude and offensive. I never wished to hurt anybody.
>>
>> If I manage to live on (by saying goodbye to Nabokov I sort of commit
>> suicide), happen to open Mr. Ilyin's version and notice in it but one oborot
>> (locution) of mine, I will sue the Nabokov estate (about ten years ago I had
>> the naïveté to mail DN the typoscript of my - then imperfect - translation).
>>
>> Alexey Sklyarenko
>>
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/