Translation as Revision: Vladimir Nabokov’s Russian Works in Translation
Lyndsay Miller, The University of Glasgow
Vladimir Nabokov, throughout a career spanning six decades, five countries, three languages, two continents and two calendars, was an ‘incorrigible reviser’, constantly altering his own works.[1] He noted that ‘even the dream I describe to my wife across the breakfast table is only a first draft’.[2] This paper examines revision as a device employed by Nabokov in the translations of his Russian works into English, undertaken following the critical and commercial success of Lolita. Nabokov uses translation to revise his works in two distinct ways. Firstly, he develops and foregrounds key thematic material from Lolita in order to retrospectively impress an overall design onto his oeuvre. Thus, Nabokov uses his scandalous text to create the authorial persona of VN. Secondly, he adds instructive forewords to his translated texts, with the intention of guiding the reader. This ‘authorial trespassing’ has the dual effect of informing the reading process and reinforcing his newly-fashioned authorial persona onto his texts.[3]
Nabokov’s revisions to his translated works intrude upon both the original and translated texts. This causes them to become incomplete after the point of their completion and to join with one another, which leads to the creation of an interconnected oeuvre. The resultant dynamic model of oeuvre construction destabilises the individual component texts, which lose their autonomy as a consequence of the multiple tracks of revisions affecting them contemporaneously. The subsequent textual form is a fully cohesive oeuvre, which could be termed a ‘supertext’, constituted of every part of Nabokov’s corpus at all times: akin to a Möbius strip referring endlessly to itself.
[1] Julian Connolly, Nabokov’s Early Fiction: Patterns of Self and Other (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p.17.
[2] Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 3.
[3] Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (London: Chatto and Windus, 1994), p. 186.
The Duel of Honour and its Radical Inverse
Jamie Daniel & Nathan Hamel, The University of Glasgow
Our project will investigate figurations of the duel of honour in nineteenth century Russian literature, parodies of the duel in Diderot and Proust, and ultimately what a juxtaposition with de Sade’s radical inversion thereof can offer.
We shall begin with Pushkin using the duel in Eugene Onegin (1837) to expose the position of masculine potency within a phallogocentric economy, as well as presenting the duel as a constructed performance. Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov (1880), shares this with Pushkin, along with locating castration anxiety as conducive to the duel, but specifically presents the Zosima’s duel with reference to a patriarchal Super-Ego. Chekhov subsumes these arguments in ‘The Duel’ (1891), and goes further than his predecessors, presenting the duel as ontologically self-referential (and therefore compromised), but also triangulating the construct with reference to a maternal-subconscious-Ego. In doing so, he shows the masculine libidinal economy to be dependent upon the maternal, without which the Death-Drive is abnegated; masculine potency questioned (the maternal annihilated in the subject), the duellist is always already castrated. To a similarly radical degree, Proust, in Sodom and Gomorrah (1921-2), both queers and ridicules the duel, presenting it as a substance-less construct, only ever with reference to a patriarchal Super-Ego – that is, a specifically feudal patriarchal Super-Ego.
It is here that the Marquis de Sade becomes relevant. Sade’s libertines are all of the nobility, which is explicitly stated to be a pre-condition of their libertinage, and yet also contrary to the espoused tenets of libertinage. By valourising specifically non-reproductive sexual practices (an apotheosis is reached in the final orgy of Juliette (1797-1801), where the libertines not only focus their sexual energies exclusively upon non-reproductive acts, but also simultaneously slaughter their progeny, undoing their prior acts of pro-creation), de Sade annuls the notion of masculine potency – the primary impetus for staging a duel. He presents us with the duel’s “phantasmic counterpart”[1] in La philosophie dans le boudoir (1795). By conceiving of the duel as such, we see, in Eugenie’s dildo, that the duellist’s rapier or pistol belies precisely the same phallic lack, and that the execution of the progenitor, along with the annihilation of her sexual potential, is the same figuration as structuring the duel with reference to the annihilated Maternal. The key difference is that, in the duel, this violence is repressed, whereas, in the libertine ideology, this is the totalising Symbolic statement. Viewed as such, the duel functions within a feudal Symbolic as the Lacanian Object petit A – simultaneously “radically alien” to, and “conceptualised as a condition of [the ideology’s] possibility”[2]. In the case of the libertine, precisely the opposite is true. We argue, however, that this reading of the duel is only possible in the Sadean radical inverse; transgression exposes the machinations of the patriarchal authority.
[1] Slavoj Zizek, ‘Lacan with Eyes Wide Shut’ in How to Read Lacan (London: Granta Publications, 2006), (pp.40-60) p.56.
[2] Michael Syrotinski, Deconstruction and the Postcolonial (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), p.58.
Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Beauty of Transgression
Mauro Di Lullo, The University of Glasgow
This paper intends to discuss transgression and memory in literature through Pier Paolo Pasolini’s transgressive novel ’’Ragazzi Di Vita’’.
‘’Ragazzi Di Vita’’, literally boys of life, idiomatically hustlers) is a novel by the Italian author, poet and intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini The novel tells the story of Riccetto, a street yob who the readers are first introduced to during his Confirmation and First Communion. Not too long afterwards, Riccetto is stealing from a blind beggar and a convent. Over the next few years, the reader follows along with Riccetto as he goes from robbery to scam to prostituting himself and back again while wandering around. During this time, many of his companions are killed or die off and there is an atmosphere of constant transgression present in the story. Riccetto is finally arrested and put in jail after trying to steal some iron in order to buy his fiancée an engagement ring. He is released later and goes back to his same life of transgression. Pasolini makes it clear to the readers that Riccetto and his peers are wanderers and thieves by nature, they have no clear life plans; Riccetto becomes the embodiment of a beautiful transgressive hero. Pasolini finds Riccetto and his companions to be free from modernity and consumerism and rooted in a way of life that has since been lost. He also admired what he considered their pre-political antagonism and transgressive behaviour still clearly separated from the partisan politics that plagued modern Italy and all the Western cultures.
Ragazzi di vita can be compared to some of Pasolini’s more transgressive films like Mamma Roma, La Ricotta (Curd Cheese) and Salo in developing his own form of art through a dialectics of transgression, separate from that of other post-war directors. Pasolini carried neo-realism further creating a kind of hyper-realism in which transgression becomes the dominant element. While neo-realism highlights the common individual in his/her daily life, Pasolini seeks to highlight the transgressive lives and the forgotten memory of the sub-common man and woman.
Ragazzi di Vita will be discussed as a landmark for the development of a literature of transgression. The novel was criticized among the public upon its release and was heavily censored. The Italian government condemned it for its ‘offensive’ transgression. The Italian Communist party did not approve the book as well accusing Pasolini of lack of historical memory. It was not the first time Pasolini had faced persecution; yet the controversy and criticism of his transgressive novel created attention and new potentialities for literature and the arts.
Pasolini had succeeded to start shedding light on the beauty and attractiveness of transgression and on the forgotten heroes he wanted the public to remember.
University of Glasgow PG Conference 