Dear Matt.
Thanks very much for your comments on my PF comments. It
always has been quite discouraging that during fifty years of work on VN as a
translator, commentator, editor etc. most of it has been virtually invisible to
the non-German reader.
Now your comments focus on a question that has been a
persistent one for me ever since in 1988 I began editing Nabokov's Collected
Works in German (20 volumes so far). I am exaggerating, but your comments may
lead the innocent reader to suspect that there is a Great Train
Robbery going on, that I have been cheating my fellow commentators of due
credit or withholding their names. That's why I would like to explain a few
basics, hoping that they may offer some help in finding an answer to the
very serious question you pose: what comments should be referenced?
First of all I have to explain that the German
"Werkausgabe" (Collected Works) that Rowohlt has been faithfully producing since
1989, keeping all the volumes available at all times, is NOT a scholarly
("kritische") edition but one meant for the general reading public. Many of
its hardcover volumes have been reprinted as mass paperbacks. In a few cases the
PB edition has preceded the HC one. It is the only Nabokov edition in
Germany. Non-scholarly books in this country don't adhere to any strict
citation codex. Many omit references altogether. I don't -- though my
publisher at first considered my penchant for credit-giving
superfluous and even ridiculous, fearing that I may be putting off the general
reader.
Still it was completely out of the question
to reference each of the thousands of notes I have written in the
course of twenty years, if only for the simple reason that I did not know who
had been the first to come up with a particular observation. Even where
I thought that I myself had found something genuinely new, I could
never be sure. And even where I credited A there was no way to be sure
that I had not wronged unknown B who, perhaps without A's knowledge, really
had been the first on the deck.
To make my choices, I have been following a rule of thumb
that rather safely took me through more than 90 per cent of the cases. The rule
is this: ideas are referenced, facts are not. By facts I mean things anybody
could have looked up in dictionaries, encyclopaedias, reference works or
increasingly the Internet, unless it took an unusual amount of acumen
and research to find them. So I surely would have credited the person who
found the Pear Peacock Moth from 'Ada' in the Palazzo Vecchio though it was
nothing but a "fact" rather than idea, for it took a hint from an
Italian four volume monography on the building, a trip to Florence and an
inspection of the premises to uncover it. As for reasons of
space and because of consideration for the target public I have to
keep the comments as matter-of-fact as possible, there is a large preponderance
of "facts", and they all go without references. On the other hand, I try to
reference all "ideas", but I can only point to them, for there simply is no
space to reproduce the full arguments. The reader must be content to be
referred to the bibliography of works cited or mentioned that is at the end of
the heavily annotated volumes.
In between these two kinds of notes, there remain a number
of doubtful cases, and it is quite possible that in some of them I have made the
wrong decision. The most frequent predicament is when I have found out something
on my own and then discover that somebody else had found the same
thing before me. In such cases I try to weigh the importance of the find,
and if I feel that our independent discoveries may not have been quite as
important as both of us may have wished, I tend to leave the note
unreferenced.
I will give you an example that by chance struck very
close to you but fortunately did not explode. As I had missed Don's interesting
seminal remark, I became aware only through Nabokv-L that "Edsel Ford" was
not a joke but a real poet. From various opacs and dedicated pages on the
Internet I pieced together a bibliography of his publications, determined
in which of them the poem in question might have been, and as none of them
seemed to be available in European libraries I ordered the two most likely ones
from the U.S. through one of the used books portals. Heureka, in one of them
there was the poem we both were looking for, and I would have gladly
broadcast my discovery to the List if postal service from the U.S. to Europe
wouldn't sometimes be so slow. Actually I received the book two or three days
after I had seen your submission in this List. So there was no question
that the find belonged to you, and I gave you all the credit for
it. But what would I have done if postal service had been faster? I doubt
that I would have submitted the thing to the List right away, being much too
busy at the time getting on with my appendix to PF. I would have
written the corresponding note right after I had seen the poem,
unreferenced because I would have thought that I was the one who had found it.
Would I later have inserted the reference to your posting? I hope and
believe I would have.
I am sorry you think I have parodied your theory, for
usually I try to be brief but correct. However, in view of the fact that you
have undergone the torture of reading everything via Google Translator, I am
astonished and grateful you don't think I have parodied everybody
and everything.
Dieter Zimmer, Berlin