Nabokov made me laugh maybe 15 times. Here are two examples: “For if in Russian and French, the feminine rhyme is a glamorous lady friend, her English counterpart is either an old maid or a drunken hussy from Limerick” (116) and “There are four English complete versions unfortunately available to college students… All four are in meter and rhyme; all are the result of earnest effort and of an incredible amount of mental labor; all contain here and there little gems of ingenuity; and all are grotesque travesties of their model, rendered in dreadful verse, teeming with mistranslations” (120). Come on, that’s hilarious! This reading’s tone wasn’t super dissimilar from that of many darkly humorous moments in Lolita.
It was also quite interesting to read about the international, multilingual underpinnings of Pushkin’s work, and how he was influenced by French masters as well as French (and to a lesser extent English) poetic traditions. That further complicates the already near-Sisyphean task of translating Mr. Russian Literature himself.
Here is another striking passage: “The person who desires to turn a literary masterpiece into another language, has only one duty to perform, and this is to reproduce with absolute exactitude the whole text, and nothing but the text. The term ‘literal translation’ is tautological since anything but that is not truly a translation but an imitation, an adaptation or a parody” (119). Though the language is harsh, I think I sort of agree? Insofar as it could be helpful to have terms that distinguish between different ways of transmogrifying a text. But I guess the implied lesserness of the “adaptation” and “parody” channels is where I feel less convinced. I do love the idea of extensive, thorough, vast footnotes to clue readers into sonic things that may not come across in more literal translations.
I enjoyed Levine’s discussion of Kristeva’s notion of “woman’s inevitable marginality as an advantage” in step with artist-hood (89). And also the mother tongue discourse!
Bly’s steps process seems really promising; I want to try iterating like that for future translations of my own.
Drew
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