----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, March 14, 2005 8:51 AM
Subject: Fw: Mlle O/French text at the end of ...
I sent this yesterday, just checking if you got
it.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, March 13, 2005 7:00 PM
Subject: Mlle O/French text at the end of ...
After I got a VN posting with SERGEI KARPUKHIN´s "mea culpa" in answer to
Dmitri´s message, I went on to read a little about the
French article on "VN and Mlle O" that came at the end of his mailing.
What is written there as VN´s is not exactly what VN wrote in SM
(Vintage, page 110).
In a rough translation from the French - corrections are
welcome: " The writer, in search for truth, tries to recover the world as
he perceived it when still a child. With a tenderness that resembles
Proust´s own for his characters, Nabokov built the unforgettable portrait
of the one that was for him much more than a simple governess: " I imagine
paradise as an endless book which she continuously read by the light of an
eternal candle"
The original:
L'écrivain, en
quête de vérité, tente de ressaisir le monde qu'enfant, il
percevait. Avec
une tendresse proche de celle de Proust pour ses
personnages, Nabokov dresse
le portrait inoubliable de celle qui fut bien
plus qu'une simple institutrice
: «Je m'imagine le paradis comme un livre
interminable qu'elle lirait sans se
lasser à la lumière d'une bougie
éternelle.»
http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=281604
Roman. Vladimir Nabokov /Mademoiselle O Par
Hélène PERRAUDEAU vendredi 11 mars 2005
VN wrote: " I am in acute distress, desperately
trying to coax sleep, opening my eyes every few seconds to check the faded
gleam, and imagining paradise as a place where a sleepless neighbor reads an
endless book by the light of an eternal candle" .
Here we find the slivers of light and tinkling
bottles that constantly emerge in Ada and elsewhere: " those inexorable steps,
plodding along the passage and causing some fragile glass object, which had been
secretly sharing my vigil, to vibrate in dismay on its shelf"... And here
we find a small boy in pajamas, plagued by regular night terrors
while he hopes that Mademoiselle could linger a littile longer before
putting out the lights. There is not special tenderness for her, Mlle O, in this
particular example. In French, her warm companionship is suggested and paradise
and eternity a place linked to her! .