Former posting: “In fact, there are no stridencies, fibrillations nor tremolos in his prose, are there? (my memory distorts his sentences now by its whimsical evocations). I wish I knew anything related to “prosody” to mentally explore V.Nabokov’s incantatory powers, his magic kind of “chant” that is soundproofed to human din…”
Present posting: New Uploaded articles and translations : Thomas Karshan (University of East Anglia, School of Literature and Creative Writing) Nabokov on Play: Breitenstrater - Paolino *
“Everything Plays” Thomas Karshan
..."in his first major work, The Tragedy of Mister Morn, the protagonist, Morn, talks about a fist fight with expert attention to specific punches: a hook is a "comma", a jab a "full stop".
…”Breitensträter – Paolino” is a very literary and verbal account of boxing – the author’s red ink seeping across a skein of metaphor into the blood on the referee’s vest – and is punctuated according to the varying rythms and geometries of the sporot: its quick flurries, its wary circlings, its dueling antitheses. In our translation we have tried to do justice to Nabokov’s dashes, staccato or metaphysical, his commas, apprehensive or explosive, and his inversions, abstract or gutsy, all so important in a piece devoted to testing how far at can go in formalizing even those parts of life that might seem most resistant – even boxing, even blood and pain.” [ ] “...it would be a mistake to take that voice and its cold indifference to pain as “Nabokov’s own”, any more than we should identify Nabokov with Humbert Humbert, or for that matter with the “uptight man” who in “Breitensträter – Paolino” does not like washing naked in the mornings, and who is inclined to express surprise that a poet who works for two and a half connoisseurs earns less money than a boxer who works for a crowd of many thousands”. In the duel of possible selves that this piece stages, the “uptight man” embodies Nabokov’s fear of his own shadow; while the narrator embodies the cruelty incited by that fear” .
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*Nabokov on Play: Breitenstrater - Paolino by Thomas Karshan