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February 24, 2005
Nabokov and Pushkin
"The Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, one of this century's few genuinely synaesthetic writers, shared with his mother the faculty of coloured hearing. In his autobiography Speak Memory, Nabokov describes the colours which the letter-sounds always conjured for him: 'The long a of the English alphabet ... has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony. The black group also includes... hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped).'" (from 'Senses and Sensibility', a Fortean Times case study of two Russian synaesthetics.)
(Cassidy Curtis, with admirable precision, has drawn up colour charts of his happy affliction, letter-colour synaesthesia. Dr Hugo Heyrman provides a small directory of synaesthetes on the web.)
Nabokov may have been "genuinely synaesthetic", but I am not convinced by these sound/texture associations, which must have been written during one of his more tiresome moments; see also his 4-volume annotated translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (which he defends in the very tetrameter he removed from the text!)
I got Tom Beck's Onegin for Christmas this year, and despite his one glaring use of the word "OK", I like the translation, and so does the Guardian, which has this to say about Nabokov's attempt:
"he produced a very weird poem indeed, as accurate as he knew how, but unrhymed, often unscanned and with some very odd-sounding formulations (an animal's horns are "buttsome". Some might, along with Tom Beck, have preferred "thrusting"). "Uneven and sometimes banal", said Edmund Wilson, and much worse, in a review, and Nabokov's and Wilson's friendship lay in smithereens."
Here Nabokov expounds on his translation theories, defining three types of translator and three grades of linguistic evil.
Idle Words has this rapturous piece on Pushkin, if you need an introduction, or even if you don't.
Posted by michele at February 24, 2005 3:35 PM
Comments
You made me recal this post: http://nataliesolent.blogspot.com/2005_03_27_nataliesolent_archive.html#111218090933305034
with Amazon' link to a book exactly on a subject
Posted by: Tatyana at March 31, 2005 11:20 PM