C.Kunin: ..."I recall the
first time I was confronted with translating "bread" into "du pain" - clearly
that is the translation, but what on earth do a baguette and wonder bread (the
bread of that time) have in common?Translating water into wine is nothing in
comparison (just add grapes and a little time). Now that recalls to mind the day
I realized that the French don't have a word comparable to the English word
"food." Il y a bien sur "de la nouriture" but it's not the same thing. You
do not eat de la nouriture..."
Jansy Mello: I had a
similar experience with French, equally related to nourishment,
to baguettes and even to Marie Antoinette's doubly misquoted
"brioches" rising as "cakes". In Brazil tall buildings with regular openings for the windows are
called "espigões" (big corn-cobs) and a tall girl may be seen
as "espigada" (straight like a corn plant). I tried my best to
find the term for the infrastructure that holds the French "mais,"
perhaps also wheat but, so it seems, they lack the word
"cob."
Nabokov, in his letters, puzzled about the
rendering of "mead" in Russian and explored the anedocte with humor.
Wouldn't he have subtly inserted in ADA, at least, any comment about
such discrepancies?
In PF it's Kinbote's turn to point
out this sort of translational metonymies related to plants, to narrational
ploys and to abstractions (moving from "potato/peut-être/if/
yew/God/Death") and an additional indication of the Zemblan for
the weeping willow and the yew.
It follows the thread of Shade's verses
[Line 493: She took her poor young life] but these notes are a curious
addition to his antecedent one in which Kinbote writes about Hazel, then drops her out entirely
to discuss his suicidal plans.
Kinbote
indirectly confesses to his fondness for Grimm's grim fondlings,
together with his blind faith in a Divine Embrace, then links this "simple
trust" to what, from the outside, we may consider as his paranoid delusions
( Cf. "Signs and Symbols"?) plus a particular logic fallacy related to
eternal life. He uses John Shade's work as an instrument to write a new kind
of autobiography, right?*
"Translation" for Nabokov must to
belong to a wider series of verbal ideas than those we habitually
associate to this common term.
Line 501: L’if
The yew in French. It is curious that
the Zemblan word for the weeping willow is also "if" (the yew is
tas).
Line 502: The grand
potato
An execrable pun, deliberately placed
in this epigraphic position to stress lack of respect for Death. I remember from
my schoolroom days Rabelais’ soi-disant "last words" among other bright bits in
some French manual: Je m’en vais chercher le grand
peut-être.
............................................................................................................................................................................
* - "... little Christopher’s family is about to migrate to a distant
colony where his father has been assigned to a lifetime post. Little
Christopher...relies completely... on his elders’ arranging all the details of
departure, passage and arrival. He cannot imagine, nor does he try to imagine,
the particular aspects of the new place awaiting him but he is dimly and
comfortably convinced that it will be even better than his homestead, with the
big oak, and the mountain, and his pony, and the park, and the stable, and
Grimm, the old groom, who has a way of fondling him whenever nobody is around.//
Something of this simple trust we too should
have.." [ ] "If I were a poet I would certainly make an ode to the sweet urge to
close one’s eyes and surrender utterly unto the perfect safety of wooed death.
Ecstatically one forefeels the vastness of the Divine Embrace enfolding one’s
liberated spirit, the warm bath of physical dissolution, the universal unknown
engulfing the minuscule unknown that had been the only real part of one’s
temporary personality.// When the soul adores Him Who guides it through mortal life, when it
distinguishes His sign at every turn of the trail, painted on the boulder and
notched in the fir trunk, when every page in the book of one’s personal fate
bears His watermark, how can one doubt that He will also preserve us through all
eternity?"