November 10: UCLA, 10-11; 1:00-3:00, Hershey Hall: Odyssey?
or
The Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures, in cooperation
with the Center for European and Eurasian Studies,
the Departments of
Comparative Literature and Communication Studies and the Graduate Student
Association
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Lecture # 1: "Nabokov, Or What Could
Be Verse"
Thursday, November 10, 2005
10:00 a.m.
1648 Hershey
Hall
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Abstract: Nabokov is famous, even
notorious, for his robust rejection of rhymed translations of rhymed verse
during and after his monumental translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.
But for many years he translated verse into rhyme in various directions, from
English, French and German (Shakespeare, Baudelaire and Goethe, for example)
into Russian, and from Russian (all the way from Lomonosov to Okudzhava)
into English and French. Many of these translations have never been published,
and the one collection, with less than half his output, has been out of print
for almost half a century. With UCLA PhD student in Slavic, Stanislav
Shvabrin, I have collected all Nabokov's verse translations, and his
essays on translation, to be published by Harcourt in 2006 as Verses and
Versions.
I will consider Nabokov's changing theory and practice of verse
translation, and the problems of any attempt to offer access to a foreign
poetic tradition. Much of the interest of the volume derives from the
breadth of Nabokov's translation of Russian poetry over two centuries. Much of
it derives also from his particular concentration on the greatest and least
translatable of Russian poets, Pushkin, of whom Flaubert famously said to
his friend Turgenev: "He is flat, your poet." I will focus especially on the
example of one of Pushkin's most famous short lyrics, "Ya vas lyubil" ("I
loved you once"), which Nabokov attempted three times to translate. I think a
non-Russian reader can be made to enjoy Pushkin's genius-but did Nabokov himself
succeed?
Talk #2: "Evolution and Fiction: The Odyssey"
Thursday,
November 10, 2005
1 pm
1648 Hershey Hall
Reception to follow
lecture
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Abstract: Can evolution help explain why we
tell invented stories, how we tell them, what we tell them about? I argue that
it can, and that the special place of sharing attention with others in our
ultrasocial species lies at the root of art, including the art of
fiction.??Criticism often focuses primarily on meaning, but works of art
need to attract and hold audiences before they "mean." Every detail of a work
will have an effect on the kind and quality of attention it receives, but not
necessarily on meaning. To be able to attract and hold attention, in a world of
competing demands on the limited capacity of human working memory, an author
needs to be a prodigiously inventive intuitive psychologist. Yet criticism has
tended to underplay the "mere" ability to attract attention and evoke response.
How has the Odyssey managed to earn the attention and admiration of audiences
and readers for nearly three thousand years, in cultures with radically
different assumptions, technologies and arts? Aristotle singled out Homer's
unity of action as exemplary, and Joyce thought Odysseus the most many-sided
character in literature. How can an evolutionary perspective on literature
explain the importance of character and plot, and the decisions Homer makes
about them in The Odyssey? And beyond its singular hero and stirring story, how
has the Odyssey been shaped in detail to win the attention of Homer's original
audience and audiences down the millennia, and to engage both those encountering
it for the first time and those ready for repeat encounters???To focus on
attention does not require that we ignore meaning, only that we do not overlook
what makes us interested enough and moved enough to linger, sometimes, over
meanings. An evolutionary perspective can also explain the breadth and depth of
literary meaning. I will show how the Odyssey throws light on the evolution of
human intelligence and the evolution
of?cooperation.