"...It already felt like a good day’s work. The gentlemen had become the
lads, and The Government Inspector stopped being a Russian classic and became
something that I was going to write. I had the plot and now, I thought, I had my
language, the language of the lads.
MAYOR Gentlemen – lads. I have some
shocking news.
I was sitting in the kitchen at about half past six the
morning after I started my version, reading Vladimir Nabokov’s book on Gogol,
when I turned to page 38 and met this: “None but an Irishman should ever try
tackling Gogol.” I calmed down later but – then, there – I made it my own
religious moment: Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was talking to me.
Nabokov
was criticising the rigidity of English translations of The Government Inspector
. “The English is dry and flat, and always unbearably demure.” The English
we speak in Ireland might occasionally be flat or dry, even damp, but it’s never
fucking demure, and Nabokov was giving me licence to use it. The extra elbows we
give the grammar, the way we pull open the words and hide things in them, the
way a phrase like “Ah now” can fit a thousand occasions from tasting tea to
murder; I was going to use all this. I’d make the play more Russian by
translating it into Irish! Or something like that."
Roddy Doyle, 2011