Earl Sampson [ on JM's question
about Arnor’s poem.: "a dream king in the sandy wastes of time would give three
hundred camels and three fountains" - "On sagaren werem tremkin tri stana/
Verbalala wod gev ut tri phantana]: "verbalala" corresponds to "camel".
"Three hundred camels" in Zemblan would be "tri stana verbalala", and in
Russian: "trista verblyudov."
JM: Because I know no Russian I was
confused by the closeness of "tri stana/ tri phantana",
and equally unable to see "verbalala/verblyudov/camel".
The predominant sound, for me, suggests "sadness" (
"triste") and, as I see it now, such "sadness" is not at all part of VN's
intended aura of meanings. Probably not even should he have
considered a of PF into French, Portuguese, Spanish... I wonder
what is the Zemblan for "a dream king"?
Borges wrote, on Joyce, "Plenitude and indigence
coexist in Joyce. Lacking the capacity to construct[...], he enjoyed a gift for
words, a felicitous verbal omnipotence[...] for Joyce every day was in some
secret way the irreparable Day of Judgement; every place, Hell or
Purgatory.".
He also wrote: "Joyce is less a man of letters
than a literature." (Ed.Weinberger's Penguin p.221).
I don't think Nabokov's talent with words lands him in
"a felicitous verbal omnipotence", his multi-lingual literary skills are of an
entirely different order...
In the Fall 2008 n.61 issue of "The
Nabokovian" Matthew Walker published "A note on the translation of
Nabokov's 'Slava'.", right after Anna Morlan's "Christian Symbolism and
Nabokov's Artistic Philosophy.". M.W asks: "how can one speak with
certainty about embodiment or readers in a poem whose 'secret' seems to render
the body, the reader, and even its own proper name, 'slava', an 'empty
dream'?" thereby inviting "a larger reapprasial of the question of
Nabokov and metaphysics vis-à-vis his valorization of writing." His
note ends with: "does a translation that disappropriates the very language
of those who would need it to understand the original, that makes that language
other, or 'something else', still, stricly speaking, communicate?...But if this
is not so, and these Dutch ghosts are accidental, then 'Slava" and "Fame'
present us with a strange case in which language, the medium of reflection in
both poems, reveals a power to randomly generate spirits all on its own. In this
sense, the author who says "I spoke" or "I have spoken" turns in translation
into the most uncanny thing of all."