GSAS Lecture: Olga Voronina, "Translation as Interpretation: From Nabokov’s Letters to Véra to the Metaphysical Wordplay in 'Ultima Thule'"

Date: 

Thursday, October 22, 2015, 4:15pm

Location: 

Barker 230


Olga Voronina, Assistant Professor of Russian at Bard College, received her doctorate from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University in 2010. 

Vladimir Nabokov’s previously little-known correspondence with his wife was recently published by Penguin Classics and is now coming out from Knopf as Letters to Véra, edited and translated from the Russian by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd. This heavily annotated volume documents more than fifty years of family happiness (1923-1976), provides rare insights into Nabokov’s creative process, and contains revealing cameo sketches of leading figures of Russian emigration in Berlin, Paris, Prague, London, and the United States.

In her lecture, Dr. Voronina will discuss the process of translating and editing the letters as a pathway towards interpreting one of the most enigmatic works by Nabokov, the unfinished novel Solus Rex, only two chapters from which appeared in print as short stories, “Ultima Thule” (1942) and “Solus Rex” (1940). The lecture will include a linguistic analysis of crossword puzzles and verbal riddles Nabokov composed and inserted in his letters to Véra in 1926; a close reading of “Ultima Thule” as a letter of a bereft widower to his deceased wife; and a textual examination of Véra Nabokov’s unpublished essay “On Dmitri’s Childhood,” references to which Nabokov included both in “Ultima Thule” and his autobiography.

 

Reviewers on Letters to Véra:

“…exemplary translation and annotation make this collection something of a biography in itself.” - Donald Rayfield, “His Better Half,” Literary Review, September 21, 2014.
http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/rayfield_09_14.php

 

“…meticulously edited . . .  Nabokov writing for his first and most important reader . . . this is Nabokov uncut. . . Nabokov comes on strong . . .  some remarkable pen portraits…” - Duncan White, “Beauty out of the Banal,” Sunday Telegraph, September 21, 2014. 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/11104474/Letters-to-Vera-by-Vladimir-Nabokov-review-beauty-out-of-the-banal.html

“… this extraordinary and wonderful collection of letters to his wife restores <Nabokov> to us as the virtuoso of prose. They are some of the most rapturous love letters anyone has ever written, love letters from the length of a lifelong marriage; beautiful performances for Véra, Nabokov’s wife, and incidentally for us. The publishers have immediately issued this volume as a Penguin Classic. I don’t think we will quibble with that.” - Philip Hensher, “Nabokov’s Love Letters are Some of the Most Rapturous Ever Written,” The Spectator, September 27, 2014
http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/books-feature/9321232/letters-to-vera-by-vladimir-nabokov-book-review/

 

<…>  admirable edition of the letters – the first in any language <…>  - Michael Wood, “Dear Poochms,” The London Review of Books, Vol. 23, No. 20, 23 September 2014
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n20/michael-wood/dear-poochums

 

 

"Letters to Véra is better suited to the scholar than to the general public, but its publication is an impressive achievement. Copiously annotated and amply indexed, it is extremely user-friendly. <…> the richly textured, eminently readable translations by Boyd and Olga Voronina are admirably faithful. An enormous amount of research has gone into the annotation, and a generation of scholars of the emigration will be in Boyd and Voronina’s debt. - Eric Naiman, “Vladimir to Véra,” The Times Literary Supplement, October 30, 2014
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1476791.ece

"Superbly edited by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd, these letters reveal Nabokov as a considerable wit, with a gift for terse put-downs and fascination with what remained outside his class and culture – whether it was Greyhound buses in Massachusetts or the New York subway. Now, perhaps for the first time, the Russian writer emerges distinct from the shadows of his biographers, and as one of the most uxoriously besotted writers of all time. - Ian Thomson, “Letters to Véra by Vladimir Nabokov review – scenes from a happy marriage,” The Observer, November 9, 2014.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/09/letters-to-vera-vladimir-nabokov-review-happy-marriage/print

"These letters are a wonderful evocation of a different, more fraught era and a world where literature meant so much more than today. They also give a more nuanced picture of a famous marriage and provide a revealing self- portrait of a generous and loving man." - Louis Nowra, “Nabokov’s Letters to His Wife Were Full of Love and Longing,” The Australian, February 7, 2015.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/vladimir-nabokovs-letters-to-his-wife-were-full-of-love-and-longing/story-fn9n8gph-1227209266758?nk=c9a6bc45cf8541cc3bd185835cf9317e

<…> the true gift of these letters is how they immerse the reader in a soul-warming bath of Nabokov’s tender and exuberant love, not only for his wife but for literature and for life itself. - Maria Popova, “Vladimir Nabokov’s Passionate Love Letters to Véra and His Affectionate Bestiary of Nicknames for Her,” Brainpickings, December 3, 2014. 
http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/12/03/letters-to-vera-vladimir-nabokov/