PS: I didn’t add Ada’s initial reference to similarities and differences because VN’s intention was to criticize translators. On second thoughts, I added it because a careful comparison between the original words and the translators’ “transfigurations” satirized by Nabokov also serve to suggest false similarities produced by hasty and “more or less” vague generalizations:
‘All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,’ says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880). ADA, I, ch. 1 ("All happy families are like one another, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way") SO 123: "The opening sentences of Ada inaugurate a series of blasts directed throughout the book at translators of unprotected masterpieces who betray their authors by 'transfigurations' based on ignorance and self-assertiveness.” Cf. B.Boyd Ada Online 3.01-08: "All happy families . . . 1858):
Here are two others: “Demon secretly wondered if the rather banal resemblance of that Edenic girl to a young actress, whom his visitor had no doubt seen on the stage in ‘Eugene and Lara’ or ‘Lenore Raven’ (both painfully panned by a ‘disgustingly incorruptible’ young critic), should be, or would be, commented upon. It was not: such nymphs were really very much alike because of their elemental limpidity since the similarities of young bodies of water are but murmurs of natural innocence and double-talk mirrors, that’s my hat, his is older, but we have the same London hatter.” Ada, I,2.
“There were those who maintained that the discrepancies and ‘false overlappings’ between the two worlds were too numerous, and too deeply woven into the skein of successive events, not to taint with trite fancy the theory of essential sameness; and there were those who retorted that the dissimilarities only confirmed the live organic reality pertaining to the other world; that a perfect likeness would rather suggest a specular, and hence speculatory, phenomenon; and that two chess games with identical openings and identical end moves might ramify in an infinite number of variations, on one board and in two brains, at any middle stage of their irrevocably converging development.” Ch,I,3 More in B.Boyd Ada Online
18.30-19.07: There were those . . . . irrevocably converging development: MOTIF: relation.