nunia
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加入时间: 2005/11/04
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作者：nunia 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
p269
With Friends like Vladimir...
by this point, readers will probably feel they have endured enough of Nabokov's trashing of his rivals, and yet I cannot resist including just one last blast....
It turns out that Nabokov reserved by far his heaviest blunderbusses sandbagging his own former friend Edmund Wilson ( the two had even collaborated, many years earlier, on a translation of Pushkin's short play Mozart and Salieri). Why? Because silly Wilson had the unpardonable gall to rise in rpint, in the same journal, to the defense of Arndt's translation.
Amazingly, Nabokov's hardball savaging of his 'old friend' Mr. Wilson makes his criticism of Arndt look as wimpy as a two-year-old's petulant toss of a Nerf ball. Could it be that Nabokov took as his model of 'friendship' that between Onegin and Lensky, or (at least in Pushkin's version) that between Salieri and Mozart, in which one 'friend' muders the other? The usual Nabokovian barrage of arcane and recherche barbs is hurled without letup from beginning to thend, which is bad enough, but Nabokov goes way beyond bad taste in writing this unforgivably cruel passage:
A patient confidant of his long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian language, I have invariably done my beat to explain to him his monstrous mistakes of pronunication, grammar, and interpretation. As late as 1957, at one of our last meetings, in Ithaca, upstate New York, where I lived at the time, we both realized with amused dismay that, despite my frequent comments on Russian prosody, he still could not scan Russian verse. Upon being challenged to read Evegeniy Onegin out loud, he started to perform with great gusto, garbling every second word, and turning Pushkin's iambic line into a kind of spastic anapest with a lot of jawtwisting haws and rather endearing little barks that utterly jumbled the rhythm and soon ahd us both in stitches.
Such unrelenting verbal sadism makes for compelling reading, in a perverse way. It runs on for twenty pages in Nabokov's Strong Opinions. Take my word for it, or go look up the whole wretched thing yourself.
UNRELENTING VERBAL SADISM for 20 pages - wow!
作者：nunia 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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