CHW wrote:Perhaps I wasn’t making myself plain enough. Hamlet’s sea of troubles include:The possibility that his father has been murdered by his uncle Claudius;The usurpation of the throne (perhaps his by right) by Claudius;His replacement, as he sees it, in his mother’s affections by that same Claudius;His desire for revenge, and how it is to be accomplished;His sense of frustration in his dealings with Ophelia: has she rejected his advances?;The fact that members of the Court are spying on him, testing him, humouring him;His sense of political impotence;His inability to resolve these matters by taking action...
 
Jansy  quotes VN ( 1963 Introduction) to Bend Sinister: Ember, for instance, in Chapter Seven, gives his friend a sample of the three first lines of Hamlet's soliloquy ( Act III, Scene I) translated into the vernacular ( with pseudo-scholarly interpretation of the first phrase taken to refer to the contemplated killing of Claudius, i.e, 'is the murder to be or not to be?'). He follows this up with a Russian version of part of the Queen's speech...( also not without a built-in scholium) and a splendid Russian rendering of the prose passage in...
 
Perhaps our discussions on the issue of translation, interpretation, meaning in VN could include passages from his different novels?
 

Search the Nabokv-L archive at UCSB

Contact the Editors

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.

Visit Zembla

View Nabokv-L Policies