1) Free access to (some) linguistics journals at De Gruyter Mouton: “we are pleased to offer you a free taste of our newest titles in linguistics – all articles published in 2011 and 2012 are now available for free!” (Thanks, Paul!)
2) How Do You Solve a Problem Like Lolita?: an hour-long BBC documentary on Nabokov and Lolita written and narrated by Stephen Smith. (Thanks, Rick!)
3) A complete transcription and translation of Linlin’s Hybrid Chinese-English monologue; if you haven’t seen the remarkable Miss Lin’s tour de force of language mixing, it’s here. (Thanks, Victor!)
THREE LINKS.
September 14, 2012 by 4 Comments
Miss Li reminds me: In the cafe where I eat lunch and play crib every day, there is a photo on the cash register of some small shop in some asian country with a sign that says ‘Sorry we are open’.
Thanks for the Nabokov documentary, I’ve been meaning to get around to reading Lolita for years now (never enough time, right?), maybe this will motivate me to finally do it, though I would like to maybe wait until I can read it in its original Russian.
Cheers,
Andrew
Andrew: Nabokov is dead, so you’ll wait a long time, then. (The Russian version is the author’s translation of his English original.)
Nabokov’s “Afterword” ends with the sentence “My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian language for a second-rate brand of English.” When I read this, it immediately reminded me of lines from Lest Darkness Fall: “He was naturally a quick speaker, and having to plod syllable by syllable through this foul language [Late Vulgar Latin] almost drove him crazy. […] Never again would he know the pleasures of […] speaking the simple, rich, sensitive English language.”
What I didn’t know about was the “Postscriptum” in Nabokov’s Russian translation: “[…] the scientific scrupulousness led me to preserve the last paragraph of the American afterword in the Russian text […] the story of this translation is the story of a disappointment. Alas, that ‘wonderful Russian language’ which, I imagined, still awaits me somewhere, which blooms like a faithful spring behind the locked gate to which I, after so many years, still possess the key, turned out to be non-existent, and there is nothing beyond that gate, except for some burned out stumps and hopeless autumnal emptiness, and the key in my hand looks rather like a lock pick.”
@Andrew: And to expand on John’s note a bit, the novels published before 1940 were written in Russian, while the novels published after 1940 were written in English.