Stan K-Bootle [PS]: Carolyn, in Anti-Terra there’s an Anti-Nabokov chat list that
you might enjoy ;=)
Carolyn Kunin: I can't comment on Verses and Versions at all, nor did I mean
to [...] In my clumsy way I wished to point out that Nabokov in spite of his
many great achievements is still open to criticism. My own enormous
disappointment with his translation of Evgeniy Onegin [...] is at the root of it... he wrote that
if you weren't able to read Pushkin in his original language it was like going
your whole life without ever hearing the music of Mozart [...] Pushkin
simply cannot be appreciated in any other language. But there was one person who
could have given the non-Russian speaker a taste of Pushkin's verse...It doesn't
make much difference to me, but I weep for you.
JM: You may weep for me - for all
you care. Nevertheless I'm not such a great fan of Mozart. Nor do I agree with Schopenhauer ("The Art of Writing"), in
his opposition to translations ( Homer has to be read in Greek, Virgil
in Latin, Khayyam in Persian ...).
I can still access directly other important works
- one mustn't be too greedy?
I'm aware that I'm going against the
prevailing opinion but, for me, there is a spirit of the text (
or a mystery concerning signifiers) that may survive inspite of
the translator's
verbal infelicities.