翻訳と創造 : 複言語作家V・ナボコフの体験

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The essay is an attempt to explore the mind of the multi-lingual writer V. Nabokov (1899-1997), who wrote in three different languages: Russian, Frence and English. His social background as the last Russian aristocrat-writer and the eventful course of his life are first reviewed briefly. Then, three works which involve his command of multiple languages-the collection of autobiographical stories entitled Speak, Memory (First English version 1951, Russian version 1953, Final English version 1966), his translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1961, revised edition 1972), and his own "novel" Pale Fire (1962)-are discussed. Born in 1899 to a wealthy Russian aristocratic family, Nabokov was always acutely aware of his own class. Coming from the same social environment as the great nineteenth century Russian noble writers, Pushkin, Turgenev, Tolstoi and Chekhov, he, like them, had governesses and tutors of French,. English and Russian for his childhood education so as to become proficient in all these tongues. At the outbreak of the 1917 Revolution, when his family was forced to leave Russia, he went to Cambmidge, England for college education. His life in England, however, aroused within him his patriotic identity, driving him to determine to continue the lineage of the great Russian writers. Graduating from Cambridge, he moved to Berlin where he started his career as a writer in Russian. However, he could have few readers as his homeland was closed for him, seemingly forever. Misfortunes came in droves. In 1922 his father, who had been a moderately liberal statesman under the Czarist regime, was assassinated in Berlin. With the rise of Hitler, he had to leave Germany as his wife was Jewish. They had to flee in turn from Paris, where they had moved from Berlin, when the Nazis took over the French capital. His mother dying alone and poor in Prague, he left the nightmare-ridden Europe in 1940 at age 40 to live in the United States. In America he had an opportunity to contribute to the New Yorker, which naturally required him to write in English. Between January 1948 and June 1950, eleven short pieces based on his personal experiences in Russia and in Western Europe were printed in the prestigious weekly. Adding four more pieces of similar nature, he published in 1951 his first book in English, Speak, Memory. Two years later, as he translated his own book into his native language, Russian, he "discovered that... the neutral smudge [in the English version] might be forced to come into beautiful focus so that the sudden view could be identified, and the anonymous servant named." Another thirteen years later, in 1966, he translated this Russian version into English again. The present essay tries to examine what brought into the world of English writing "this re-Englishing of a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place." It further discusses Nabokov's project of translating Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, which became not only a complete translation of some 5500 lines of the original Russian poem, but also Nabokov's commentaries on them, several times bulkier than the original work. Interested in Pushkin's efforts in Onegin to create a new language available for high literature through transplanting numerous Gallicisms into the hitherto naive Russian, Nabokov, translating that Russian language into English, attempted to produce a new poetic language for English. His efforts were not rewarded, as few American readers appreciated his "unreadable" English. Nevertheless Nabokov continued to believe in the validity of his commentaries as his own creation. He then published a curious "novel" Pale Fire (1962), consisting of a 999 line English poem in heroic couplets entitled Pale Fire, the posthumous work of a fictional American poet John Shade, and ah extensive preface and copious notes by Charles Kimbote, the similarly fictional last king of Zembla, a small country on the fringe of Russia, living incognito now in America as a professor of Zemblan language. While Shade's poem records a banal family saga of a provincial American university professor, Kimbote in his notes, declaring that "for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word," explains it as a poetic transformation of the story of the Zemblan king which he told Shade.
東京芸術大学の論文

翻訳と創造 : 複言語作家V・ナボコフの体験

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東京芸術大学 | 論文

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