The New Yorker, 2005-11-07

[fiefoe]

"The Translation Wars" / David Remnick

• Cervantes complained that reading a translation was "like looking at the Flanders tapestries from behind: you can see the basic shapes but they are so filled with threads that you cannot fathom their original lustre."
• "Garnett breaks things into simple sentences. she Hemingwayizes Dostoyevsky, if you see what I mean."
• [Nabokov] "In art as in science there is no delight without detail, ...unless (the details) are thoroughly understood and remembered, all "general ideas" (so easily acquired, so easily resold) must necessarily remain but worn passports allowing their bearers short cuts from one area of ignorance to another."
• Wilson found the key to imaginative art in the injuries and humiliations suffered by a writer in his youth - in Nabokov's case, the humiliation of being stripped of his homeland, of being forced to wander the world far from his home and his language. Nabokov's revenge, he feels, is "sado-masochistic," and it expresses itself in an infuriating perversion of Pushkin.
  
• [Nabokov] "...my learned friend could have concluded that Byron ("Listening debates not very wise or witty") and Tennyson ("Listening the lordly music") must have had quite as much Russian blood as Pushkin and I."
• I ... shifted (from Russian) to the sunny promise and mathematical logic of French.
  
• "The task is to maintain that level without falling into banality. Remember, this is the author of 'A Boring Story.' (Chekhov) takes banal people and puts them into banal situations, but he has hope for them."
  

fissile: Possible to split.
epigone: A second-rate imitator or follower, especially of an artist or a philosopher.
Hans Memling

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