I really enjoyed the Nabokov correspondences. For someone whose public persona was at times acerbic or terse, his letters show him to be a chummy, polite, and at times even jocular sort of fellow. I’m going to start signing my letters, “I shake your hand.” His chess diss (about the lieutenant who hemmed and hawed for ages and then played an illegal move) made me laugh, too. It’s sad that Pertzoff’s life and career were so plagued by mental health struggles—I’m glad he was able to produce a pretty impressive output anyway. Nabokov’s dragonizations were super impressive and beautiful.
The Vanderschelden reading seemed a bit strange to me. It uses lots of analytical, almost scientific language to point out phenomena that are largely intuitive. Different authors expect different things from translations of their work; a variety of relationship dynamics occur between authors and translators. Awesome! Most of the interesting quotes (No offense intended!) were from other authors, like this from Kundera: “The translator considers himself the ambassador from that authority to the foreign author. That is the error: every author of some value transgresses against ‘good style,’ and in that transgression lies the original…”
Borges’s essay is so funny and clever and brilliant. My favorite part might be: "He had no intention of copying it. His admirable ambition was to produce a number of pages which coincided—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes” (Hurley 91). I also took a Henry James class last semester that was cross-listed between Philosophy and English, so we spent some time on William James’s ideas, too; it was fun to see him invoked. “A handwritten list of lines of poetry that owe their excellence to punctuation” is great. Need to read it.
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