纳波科夫之子访谈

曾园

His Father’s Siren, Still Singing <nyt_headline></nyt_headline>&lt;script language="JavaScript" type="text/JavaScript"&gt;[script]null[/script]&lt;/script&gt;&lt;script language="JavaScript" type="text/JavaScript"&gt;[script]null[/script]&lt;/script&gt;<div id="toolsRight">&lt;script language="javascript"&gt;[script]null[/script]&lt;/script&gt;<form name="cccform" target="_Icon"><input type="hidden" name="Title" /><input type="hidden" name="Author" /><input type="hidden" name="ContentID" /><input type="hidden" name="FormatType" /><input type="hidden" name="ublicationDate" /><input type="hidden" name="ublisherName" /><input type="hidden" name="ublication" /></form><div class="articleTools"><div class="toolsContainer"><ul class="toolsList" id="toolsList"><li class="email"><a id="emailThis" href="http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/weekinreview/04nabokov.html"><font color="#333333">Sign In to E-Mail or Save This</font></a> </li><li class="print"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/weekinreview/04nabokov.html?_r=1&amp;oref=slogin&amp;ref=books&amp;pagewanted=print"><font color="#333333">Print</font></a> </li><li class="singlePage"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/weekinreview/04nabokov.html?_r=1&amp;oref=slogin&amp;ref=books&amp;pagewanted=all"><font color="#333333">Single Page</font></a> </li><li class="reprints"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/weekinreview/04nabokov.html?_r=1&amp;ref=books&amp;oref=slogin#"><font color="#333333">Reprints</font></a> </li><li class="post" id="post"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/weekinreview/04nabokov.html?_r=1&amp;ref=books&amp;oref=slogin#"><font color="#333333">Share</font></a> <ul class="hide" id="postList"><li class="digg"><a href="&amp;#106;avascript:articleShare('digg');"><font color="#004276">Digg</font></a></li><li class="facebook"><a href="&amp;#106;avascript:articleShare('facebook');"><font color="#004276">Facebook</font></a></li><li class="mixx"><a href="&amp;#106;avascript:articleShare('mixx');"><font color="#004276">Mixx</font></a></li><li class="yahoobuzz"><span class="yahooBuzzBadge-form" id="yahooBuzzBadge-form"><a href="http://buzz.yahoo.com/article/new_york_times/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2008%2F05%2F04%2Fweekinreview%2F04nabokov.html"><span style="padding-left:20px;cursor:hand;line-height:16px;position:relative"><span style="display:block;background:url(http;left:0px;width:16px;cursor:hand;position:static;top:0px;height:16px"><font color="#004276"></font></span>Yahoo! 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The previous December, he told The New York Times that the “not quite finished manuscript” was called “The Original of Laura,” that it had already been “completed in my mind” and that during a recent hospital stay, “in my diurnal delirium,” he had “kept reading it aloud to a small dream audience in a walled garden.” Shortly afterward, Nabokov’s editor at McGraw-Hill revealed that the author was about to do the actual writing, in pencil on 3-by-5-inch index cards (Nabokov never worked with a typewriter). Then, in words parroted by the editor, Nabokov would “deal himself a novel.”</p><div id="articleInline"><div id="inlineBox"><a class="jumpLink" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/weekinreview/04nabokov.html?_r=1&amp;ref=books&amp;oref=slogin#secondParagraph"><font color="#666699">Skip to next paragraph</font></a> <div class="image"><div class="enlargeThis"><a href="&amp;#106;avascript:pop_me_up2('http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/05/04/weekinreview/04nabokovCA01ready.html',%20'04nabokovCA01ready',%20'width=378,height=600,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,resizable=yes')"><font color="#004276" size="2">Enlarge This Image</font></a></div><a href="&amp;#106;avascript:pop_me_up2('http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/05/04/weekinreview/04nabokovCA01ready.html',%20'04nabokovCA01ready',%20'width=378,height=600,scrollbars=yes,toolbars=no,resizable=yes')"><font color="#004276"><font size="2"><img height="278" alt="" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/05/04/weekinreview/04nabkov.1901.jpg" width="190" border="0" /></font> </font></a><div class="credit">Carl Mydans/Time &amp; Life Pictures — Getty Images</div><p class="caption"><strong>CARD TRICK</strong> Vladimir Nabokov liked to write in his car, using index cards. </p></div><div id="sidebarArticles"><h4>Related</h4><h2><a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/n/vladimir_nabokov/index.html"><font color="#004276">Times Topics: Vladimir Nabokov</font></a></h2></div></div></div><a name="secondParagraph"></a><p>Nabokov, however, was able to build only part of the complete deck — 138 index cards, with many erasures and much emendation — before falling ill for the last time. Known as an artistic perfectionist and a literary purist, he left behind instructions that the cards were to be destroyed. But neither his wife, Véra, nor his son, Dmitri, now nearly 74, could bring themselves to carry out Nabokov’s injunction. Since Véra’s death in 1991, Dmitri — who was also a translator of his father’s early work and is now his literary executor — had by some accounts been wrestling mightily with the question of whether to follow his father’s wishes and consign the cards to the flames, or to preserve the manuscript for posterity.</p><p>The last work of a modern master, however fragmentary, is a matter of public interest and scholarly importance. The nuances of “Laura” and her fate have been hotly debated on bookish Web sites and elsewhere, with <a title="More articles about Tom Stoppard." href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/tom_stoppard/index.html?inline=nyt-per"><font color="#004276">Tom Stoppard</font></a>, for example, calling for the matches and John Banville urging clemency in The Times of London. Now, Dmitri Nabokov has announced that “Laura” will indeed be published, and suggests in a Q. and A. conducted by e-mail with the Week in Review that, in fact, her peril has been exaggerated. <span class="bold"><strong>STEVE COATES </strong></span></p><p>•</p><p><span class="italic"><em>It’s been three decades since your father’s death. Why did it take you so long to decide the fate of “Laura”, and how did you come to your final decision? How difficult has it been?</em></span></p><p>In the words of one blogger, 30 years is tantamount to eternity in the given context, which would absolve me from any disobedience of my father’s wishes. More seriously, it did not take me 30 years to come to a decision with regard to burning the manuscript. I had never imagined myself as a “literary arsonist.” I also recalled, parenthetically, that when my father was asked, not very long before his death, what three books he considered indispensable, he named them in climactic order, concluding with “The Original of Laura” — could he have ever seriously contemplated its destruction?</p><p>It took the passing of time, the input of a few good advisers, and, above all, some concentrated thinking on my part, for the idea to crystallize of what exactly to do with the precious cards. Safekeeping, no matter how secure, would never guarantee their permanent immunity from revelation. To publish, then, but how? </p><p></p><p><span class="italic"><em>How do you respond to those who suspect a financial motivation?</em></span></p><p>It’s true that my wheelchair requires some costly modifications to fit into the trunk of a Maserati coupe.</p><p></p><p><span class="italic"><em>Why would your father have wanted “Laura” destroyed? </em></span></p><p>In a calmer moment, if he were no longer in a race against death to complete the work, I think, sincerely, that he would not. By the same token, if one wants to finish something before dying, one perseveres to the utmost, rather than destroying it. This should be an obvious answer to a rather fatuous question some have posed: Why didn’t he burn it well ahead of time and have done with it?</p><p></p><p><span class="italic"><em>Your mother didn’t have the heart to burn it either. There’s a famous story about how she stopped your father from burning his manuscript of “Lolita.”</em></span></p><span class="italic"><em><p>It was an entirely different situation. What my father was carrying to the incinerator was a draft of the completed work, which the publishers feared and, he strongly suspected, the public was bound to misconstrue. At that stage, the working title was “Juanita Dark.” Had she been incinerated, even if not at the stake, she would have become a latter-day Juanita d’Arc.</p><div id="articleInline"><div id="inlineBox"><a class="jumpLink" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/weekinreview/04nabokov.html?pagewanted=2&amp;_r=1&amp;ref=books#secondParagraph"><font color="#666699">Skip to next paragraph</font></a> <div id="sidebarArticles"><h4>Related</h4><h2><a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/n/vladimir_nabokov/index.html"><font color="#004276">Times Topics: Vladimir Nabokov</font></a></h2></div></div></div><a name="secondParagraph"></a><p><font color="#004276"></font></p><p><span class="italic">You have guarded this manuscript very closely. How many people now have seen it, or have direct knowledge of its contents?</span></p><p>Excluding those present at my father’s oneiric reading, five or six.</p><p></p><p><span class="italic">It is said to involve a corpulent scholar married to a wildly promiscuous woman named Flora; is that accurate?</span></p><p>So far so good.</p><p></p><p><span class="italic">Can you offer any other tidbits?</span></p><p>Here are a couple of lines I have previously quoted to no one: “A process of self-obliteration conducted by an effort of the will. Pleasure bordering on almost unendurable ecstasy. ...”</p><p></p><p><span class="italic">How long will it be? I recently reread the very moving “Mary,” your father’s first novel. It’s only a little over 100 pages.</span></p><p>That is a good approximation of the “Laura” volume’s total length.</p><p></p><p><span class="italic">Would you describe “Laura” more as an outline, or as fragmentary? I mean, are there portions that are more or less finished? I know your father described his method as assembling sections of a puzzle.</span></p><p>Or picking up the cards and dealing himself a novel. I am afraid that the situation is so unusual that I cannot be specific, other than to say that, in addition to the principal portion, there is much else that appears complete.</p><p></p><p><span class="italic">Even with “Laura” in her present state, Brian Boyd, your father’s biographer, has said the book nevertheless contains wonderful, boundary-pushing “new fictional devices.” Who might appreciate the novel most? Scholars? Readers? Both?</span></p><p>It took Brian quite some time to arrive at that conclusion and I am glad that he did, for it coincides with my own assessment.</p><p>My father once said that his ideal reader was the one he saw in his shaving mirror in the morning. To answer your question more pointedly, I would not divide prospective consumers of this work by category, but rather by their eye for image and the capacity of their spine to tingle.</p><p></p><p><span class="italic">The index cards are a well-known compositional technique of your father’s, which he immortalized in “Pale Fire.” Would you consider publishing a facsimile of the cards themselves?</span></p><p>Yes.</p><p></p><p><span class="italic">What place does “Laura” hold in your heart? You’ve lived with her for many years. Does she affect the way you see any of your father’s other novels?</span></p><p>She has been a capricious concubine. I am sure she is glad for the permission to survive and — why not? — to affect my vision.</p></em></span><p><span class="italic"><em></em></span>&nbsp;</p></div>

老残

大哥，翻译下啊。

酒童

兄弟,翻译下啊。

花随人圣

<p>兄弟是不可靠的……</p><p>大意是，纳老留下了一本遗稿，可能会即将出版。遗稿写在3X5英寸的卡片上。书名叫做“The Original of Laura”。这本书纳老据说是让儿子烧掉的。结果家里人都不舍得烧（他老婆当时把《洛丽塔》从火堆里抢救出来，估计从此觉得从火里抢东西是值得的）。儿子也不想当“文学纵火犯”，于是三十年后的今天，该书面世了。题目是否可以翻译成“劳拉的原型”，各位大佬？</p><p>有力者掏美元去亚马逊买就是了。非常显摆的~~</p>