Hi, Rodney
You helped me traverse electronicl
disabilities and offered Nabokov in a click. It was the first time I
watched VN's face as he spoke or heard this classic Pivot
interview. Thank you very much.
It was also useful to learn that one can find the
words in English through Boyd's biography. You complained the French was
impossible to understand and for me lots of sentences were garbled. One
statement, though, came out loud and clear:"I don't regret my American
metamorphosis"...
So that's how VN described his passages from one language
to another, one country to another. Something like this is described in the
Cinderella tale.
Like VN's insistence of mixing a real thing among
artificial ones ( like a living rose in a bunch of silk roses, in Ada, or
as a line in one of Yeats' poems on wedding beds and "real images" & here
not in the sense of Optics) is a constant reminder of the break in the
conventions that must be accepted in a work of fiction, or when
Coleride's "suspension of disbelief" is put to the test.
Cinderella's shoe didn't become a pumpkin or a
mouse again after the clock struck twelve...Everything returned to its initial
shape, but the shoe.
John Shade, while his world "duplicates from the inside,
too" ( in the first lines of his poems he is still "outside", shattered by
reflections on the windowpane) - this time while having a dream that he is
outside in the garden - Shade also leaves a brown shoe on the grass that he
can see and touch the next day.
There is always a Nabokov-shoe which is changed into something marvelous and
doesn't return to its more prosaic state. Like the waxwing flying on in the
reflected sky... what would this shoe represent?
Jansy
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I found three online video clips of Nabokov, speaking on some kind of French television program about "Lolita," translation and "Ada." I've heard Nabokov's readings before, but this is the first I've ever seen the great man move and speak -- albeit in a language I don't understand.
For anyone interested, I posted all three clips are on my blog:
http://www.rodneywelch.blogspot.com
If that doesn't work, go to YouTube.com and type "Nabokov" in the search engine.
Rodney Welch
Columbia, SC