Chapter 52 translator's words

Vladimir Nabokov is a famous Russian-American scholar, stylist, writer and translator. He was born in 1899 into a noble family in St. Petersburg.His grandfather was the Minister of Justice of the Tsar, and his great-grandfather was the first president of the Russian Royal Academy of Medicine.His father was a judge. He was arrested and imprisoned in 1908 for participating in the leadership of the Cadets. He served in the Provisional Government in 1917. After the revolution broke out, he fled to Crimea. His family went into exile in Western Europe via Turkey, and he ran a liberal exile newspaper in Berlin. In 1922, he was assassinated by two exiled right-wing royalists, one of whom later became Hitler's official in charge of Russian exile affairs.

Before Nabokov went into exile with his parents, he inherited the estate of two thousand acres of land from his uncle.He first studied Slavic and Romance languages ​​at the University of Cambridge, England, and obtained a bachelor's degree, and then engaged in Russian writing in Berlin and Paris. He had published a collection of poems in Russia as early as 1916.During his twenty years of exile in Europe, he, together with the Russian writer Bunin, enjoyed a reputation in the circle of exiles.On the eve of the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, he immigrated to the United States, and successively taught Russian and European literature and literary creation at Stanford University, Wellesley College, and Cornell University. A famous writer Thomas Pynchon.Nabokov had switched to writing in English since 1938.In his spare time, he likes to collect butterflies and other Lepidoptera insects. From 1942 to 1948, he also worked as a researcher at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, where he discovered several new species of butterflies and moths.A Western critic believes that it is precisely because of this hobby that he can, like Chekhov, observe people and social situations meticulously and interpret them with a scientific and prudent attitude.He became an American citizen in 1945, emigrated to Switzerland in 1960, and died of illness in 1977.

Nabokov wrote a large number of works in his life. It is estimated that there are more than 400 Russian poems, six Russian poetic dramas, three Russian prose dramas, and fifty-two short stories (twenty of which have been translated into Chinese). English) and seventeen novels (six of them are written directly in English).He is mainly famous for his novels, and his important works include (1926), "King, Queen, Jack" (1928), (1930), "Honor" (1931), (1932), (1936), "The Gift" (1937), "An Invitation to a Beheading" (1938), "The True Life of Sebastian Knight" ( 1941), "Sign of the Concubine" (1947), (1955), (1957), "Pale Fire" (1962) and "Ada" (1 969) etc.In 1951, he published his autobiography "Speak, Memory", which was revised in 1966. The famous American poet and critic E. B. White thought that this autobiography was well written and should be listed as a university. A must-read book for the English department.

In 1944, Nabokov completed a book on Gogol.In his early days, he also translated Roman Rolland's "Cora Brenon", Lewis Carroll's poems, Keats, Byron, Baudelaire, Musset, Shakespeare, Tennyson's poems into Russian. Later, he translated Lermontov's "Contemporary Hero", the twelfth-century Russian epic "Igor's Expedition" and Pushkin's "Evgeny Onegin" into English.Nabokov disapproved of arty paraphrase, he advocated literal translation, and explained by notes and comments.His translation of "Eugene Onegin" in 1964 consisted of four volumes with 2,000 pages, and the translation only occupied 228 pages, which was a huge project.

Nabokov always lived in hotels, apartments or other people's houses in exile. This kind of life led to the fact that most of the characters in his novels were exiles or artists like him. They wanted to get rid of the reality of spiritual emptiness and suffering While immersed in the memories of the past, pure art, chess or some other abnormal behaviors, the works reveal a sense of frustration, depression and even a sense of mental breakdown. In terms of style, although he inherited the tradition of Russian and European literature, he was also influenced by the anti-traditional influence of some writers like Joyce, Proust, and Kafka in this century.He boldly explored literary form and language, so he was unique in the innovation of form and technique.His works are humorous and meticulous in description. He also likes to create puzzles in his works, just like a magician doing tricks, which highlights his unique style.However, his work is often cryptic.A Western critic said that when he read his works, he was like falling into a fog for the first time, and he saw some clues and sorted out some clues on the second time. It is also necessary to prepare a "Webster's Dictionary" as a guide.In addition, some critics say that he manipulates the characters in his pen like a puppet, and his language is like the colors on the wings of a butterfly. They think that he is the most important American writer since Faulkner, or the most stylized and original writer since Joyce. .The French writer Jean-Paul Sartre classified Nabokov as one of the anti-fiction writers, saying that he "had a desire in exile to tear down all the structures he had built and start a new one."

But it was his controversial novel that brought Nabokov international fame.The outline of the story is roughly that a middle-aged European man named Humbert married a twelve-year-old girl because of his love affair with her mother Charlotte, and then Charlotte died, exempting Humbert from murdering her attempt.He took Lolita on a trip to the United States, staying in many motels, and finally achieved his desire.Lolita ran away with another man, and Humbert tracked down and killed the man. Although Lolita was "aging" and pregnant at this time, depraved and degraded, he still loved her very much... The novel was first published in Paris in 1955, and officially published in the United States in 1958. The critics discussed it differently. Some thought it was an immoral novel, and some thought it was a comparable novel. Some people think that the author used the character of Humbert to mock some American desires, satirized the American ambitions, idealized views on youth, and Humbert's kind of Shameless individualism.British literary critic Marcus Cunliffe believes that the more sexually explicit works of Henry Miller and others in the United States today are not banned books, but even more staid and outdated; he wrote in "History of American Literature" , "is a novel of astonishing wit and vigor about the vulgar side of American society like Nabokov; Find a poet-sociologist Nabokov and write it right."

In terms of the purpose of creation, Nabokov did not like others to call him a "moral satirist". He repeatedly declared: "I have no social purpose, no moral information; I have no general idea to develop." His favorite Western writers are Sterne, Hawthorne, Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Melville, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Borges, while Stendhal, Balzac and Zola as "three abominable mediocre writers". Although Nabokov has passed away, his reputation is growing day by day. In recent years, there have been many monographs and articles studying him from various angles. Some people are making annotations to help readers understand his works. Various biographies have been published. Many of his works The Russian works were translated into English by his son Dimitri.

The novel was originally serialized intermittently in four chapters in The New Yorker magazine from 1953 to 1957. It was Nabokov's first novel that attracted widespread attention and popularity from American readers.It describes the life of an exiled old Russian professor teaching in an American university.He has a gentle and eccentric personality, and is out of tune with the surrounding environment. He is often ridiculed by his colleagues, and his wife has abandoned him.He was alone, so he could only indulge in the pile of old papers, delving into ancient Russian culture and classical literature to comfort himself; recalling the past all the time, revealing a strong nostalgia.Nabokov subtly blends Russian culture and modern American civilization, and portrays a distressed man who has lost his motherland, severed the connection with his motherland culture, and lost his love.

In this work, the author also expresses his abhorrence of Freud's theory, ridiculed the popular psychoanalysis in the United States, and implicitly satirized the McCarthyism prevailing in the United States at that time.The satire on American institutions, while exaggerated, is not distorted.Nabokov's erroneous views on communism occasionally appear in the book, and readers will of course view it with a critical eye. Nabokov likes to make riddles, and the structure sometimes takes a 360-degree turn, which can also be seen in a book. For example, who is the storyteller is not known until the last chapter, or the ending plot turns again. Go back to the beginning of Chapter 1 and so on.British literary critic G. M. Hyde once compared Pnin, portrayed by Nabokov, with the little character Arkady Arkadyevich in Gogol's "Overcoat", and believed that Nabokov was inspired by Gogol. It is not unreasonable to say that his writing style has a great influence.