Maurice Couturier: "I am not sure I made myself clear in my earlier posting about the arduous task of translating "Pnin". I wasn't referring only to Nabokov's attitude towards his protagonist (though it is hard to bear it when you are spending long hours, days, months on the text) but also to the torture I was experiencing while trying to make sense of his convolute language, namely his floating syntax and the lack of overdetermination in his use of verbs and adjectives at times. Polysemy is the rule in human language, I know, but I am talking about something else here, namely a certain lack of control on the part of the author [ ] Being such a great admirer of Nabokov, I am venting here something of a disappointment."
Jansy Mello: Disappointment with the novel’s floating syntax and convolute language or with the lack of control on the part of the author is a conclusion that only a dedicated and admiring translator can truly feel during the process of recreating VN's magic in a different language. It’s not VN’s sadism towards his translator that which bears the greater weight, or this is how it seems to me now, but VN’s involuntary convolutions in Pnin.* Would it be too much to ask of Maurice Couturier to give us one or two samples of Pnin’s most problematic sentences in translation ?
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*I did a brief checking on what was written about "Pnin" in the Wikipedia while looking for the date of its publication ( 1957 and VN’s fourth novel in English) and then I became surprised by a specific paragraph related to cruel mockeries and sadism:
"According to Boyd, Pnin is Nabokov's response to Don Quixote which he had read a year earlier. Nabokov lambasted Cervantes for his cruelty to Quixote, seeming to encourage the reader to be amused by the eponymous character's pain and humiliation. The title of the book, Boyd claims, lends even more credence to this theory, as it sounds like and nearly spells "pain.” (Boyd, AY, 1991,p.271-72).
To my non-native English speaking eyes (and ears) the wiki redaction cited above is disconcertingly ambiguous since it seems to suggest that, for B. Boyd, it was Nabokov’s intention “to encourage the reader to be amused by…,” when it’s exactly the opposite that he observes (“ But if the opening of Pnin appears to ask us to hoot at the novel’s hero, Nabokov suddenly turns the story about [ ] He has a complex inner existence Don Quixote is never allowed, and his pain suddenly matters. Mistake-prone Pnin comes to sum up all human mishaps and misfortunes, the strange blend of comedy and tragedy in all human life.”). This kind of false shock has never happened with me while reading Pnin: my confusions were always Pnin’s confusions and I always thought that they’d been deliberately planted in the novel by the author.