Posted by Joffre on 17/4/2009, 23:10:30, in reply to "Re: Petersburg"
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Yeah, I guess I've never heard of that elsewhere either. Because it's more recent, I didn't think of it. Hamsun's Hunger might be considered a little obscure. I'd read that way before the Burt book though. I learned of it from reading Henry Miller. I guess a lot of those novels are obscure to people who don't read or don't read beyond the best seller list. I've even met someone who'd never heard of Don Quixote. I think I surely knew something of Don Quixote before I left junior high school. I don't know where I learned such stuff. My school wasn't much good, and my parents weren't readers. I guess maybe my school was good enough to slip in the fact of Don Quixote's existence at least.
About Nabokov's judgement, I got distracted from the point. His judgement could be quite quirky, but I didn't mean to say I don't think Petersburg is a great novel. It certainly doesn't get talked about as much as those other three, but I liked it. I thought the style was interesting and the story entertaining. The M/M translation has good notes, I think. Do you think you'll replace that Cournos? Last year, as I mentioned here, I replaced the Ginsberg translation of The Master and Margarita, which I'd read twice. That was another case of a really messed up translation. I've replaced three others. I think the Muir translation of Kafka's Trial was a similar mess. I found that the Steegmuller translation of Madame Bovary was much preferred. And as that also seems to be the case with the PV translations of Dostoievski, I replaced Sidney Monas with that.
Once again, I got distracted from the point. I think Nabokov's judgement is based on formal concerns that we wouldn't be able to see. I think he admires the architecture of the book, the way it's parts fit together and such as that. It's too bad he didn't lecture on it. If he did lecture on it, that lecture isn't in the Lectures on Russian Literature which I haven't read but should probably get.
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