Message

It is not clear to me if Mr Dorman encapsulates my suggestions for improving the Ada paragraphs in his reference to "all the presented translations and commentaries" (italics mine). If he considers my proposal for translating "It is incredible that a young boy should control his father's liquor intake" catastrophically awful and offers "UKAZYVAL OTCU [sic] SKOL'KO PIT'" as an example of clear Russian, let us try the old trick of retranslating into English. We get "INDICATED TO HIS FATHER HOW MUCH TO DRINK", which is not at all what Nabokov wrote. My suggestion "ukazyval otsu, skol'ko tot vprave vypit' " is just as simple, but by the addition of "vprave" tries to render the nuance of "intake", i.e., the father's official allotment (rather than striving for a totally literal version which might indeed be "unacceptable" and "mock the original"). That much said, I must mention that my late mother and I, having carefully pondered the matter, came to the conclusion that Ada was almost untranslatable in the true sense of the word for reasons that include those cited by Mr Dorman. While bitterly regretting that VN himself had been denied sufficient time by the censorship of death, we did hope against hope that, in one part of the world or another, some genius translator up to the task would magically materialize. What I tried to do with my comments was simply to suggest improvements to the best translations I had seen. By the way, are words like MREYAT', ISPOD so peculiar and inapropriate that they turn the author of the original into a "vulgar buffoon"? I'm not familiar with Nikolay Liubimov's Proust, but would like to see it, even though French is not English and Proust is not Nabokov.