Georg Steiner is often as hard to follow as Stan-Kelly's exchanges
with BBoyd on JJ.
Steiner mentions Lolita, Ada, Speak,Memory besides his main
intererst, VN's translation of Pushkin. No Pale Fire and CK's
uncle Conmal?
According to him Nabokov belongs neither to the language mystics nor to the
monadic crew, but suffers by being a perfectionist, like Dr. Johnson,
although, in the long run, he didn't believe that a real
translation is impossible. In "After Babel" (1975) on p.253/54 we find
that Nabokov "declares, with reference to English versions of
Pushkin, that in the translation of verse anything but the 'clumsiest literalism' is a fraud," but here he was
exclusively dealing with the translation of verse - which runs the risk of
being 'begrimed or beslimed by
rhyme' (Steiner doesn't mention that, for Nabokov, only males
could translate male poets when he is arguing about
the "perfect"translator's project to inhabit the original
text and its world...).
Although Steiner could admit that "Nabokov's memoir, ironic and full
of traps for the unwary" was "deeply instructive, of how he rendered
Onegin into English," later on he would detail VN's
achievement as a curio, an artifact. He even places "English language"
inside quotes when he writes about "the permanent strangeness and
marginality of an artifact such as Nabokov's 'English-language'
Onegin." Apparently, he agrees with Alexander Gerschenkron's
judgement: that 'Nabokov's translation...despite all the cleverness
and occasional brilliance...cannot be read' . Nabokov once admitted
that his "real passport is his art" and I
hope readers may sometimes qualify as "artists" in their own right.
Returning to Dan, the "Red Veen". I wonder if the allusions to
black and red are used to indicate only chess pieces, or if
they include playing-cards. Not only Van's wet nurse (Ruby Black)
became mad but also, for his mad aunt/mother Aqua, "mental panic and physical pain joined black-ruby
hands" and soon "panic and pain, like a pair
of children in a boisterous game, emitted one last shriek of laughter and ran
away to manipulate each other behind a bush as in Count Tolstoy’s Anna
Karenin, a novel, and again, for a while, a little while, all was quiet in
the house, and their mother had the same first name as hers had."
Like her brother-in-law, Aqua
suffers all sorts of mental torments, from which Marina and Demon, probably Ada
and Van, were immune.
Red and black are casually (or not as
casually) mentioned in other novels, as in KQKn. I chanced to find them in Transparent Things,
when Hugh "plucked a black hair out
of a red nostril."