The translator's doubts: Vladimir Nabokov and the ambiguity of translation (Russia)

Using Vladimir Nabokov as its "case study," this dissertation approaches translation as a crucial avenue into literary history and theory, philosophy and interpretation. I attempt to bring together issues in translation and the shift in Nabokov studies from an earlier emphasis on the "metaliterary" to the more recent "metaphysical" approach. The specific texts I address are: Nabokov's early translation of Alice in Wonderland , his literalistic version of Eugene Onegin, and his screenplay of Lolita (compared to its two cinematic adaptations by Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne). This corpus represents the three major types of translation defined by Jakobson: the "interlingual," the "intralingual," and the "intersemiotic."; The first chapter compares Nabokov's translation of Alice with several little-known earlier versions of the same text. Nabokov's Russified translation, the result of his Deuleuzian "deterritorialization" of tradition, paves the way towards his own earliest fictions.; The second chapter studies Nabokov's "metaphysics," linking his novel Pale Fire to his translation of Eugene Onegin. Nabokov's Onegin is an allegorical translation that, by displacing Pushkin's original into commentary and criticism, allows the translator to engage in the same gesture as the original by signifying his text's non-coincidence with itself. Pale Fire can be seen as a parodic transformation of this metonymical model into a metaphorical one, in which the appropriation of the original creates an epidemic of far-fetched analogies and substitutions.; In the third chapter I further probe the theoretical opposition between metaphor and metonymy and explore this figural tension in the workings of Lolita both as novel and screenplay. I then analyze the deployment of the cinematic codes shaping the narrative structure of Kubrick's and Lyne's film versions.; While Nabokov's practice of translation underwent significant changes over the course of his career, his adherence to the Romantic notion of a "true" but ultimately elusive metaphysical language remained constant. In foregrounding Nabokov's ambivalent relation to translation, I uncover an hermeneutic oscillation on his part as to the relative stability or instability of meaning, which expresses itself philosophically as a faith in the beyond alternating with deep metaphysical uncertainty.