Word: lolitas
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Nabokov's original translation in 1937 fell upon an indifferent market (he had yet to write Lolita, which was to make him famous). Most of the copies of Despair remained in the London publisher's custody; in 1940 a Luftwaffe bomb reduced them to confetti. Nabokov explains all this in a foreword to this revised translation-also his own -and enters his usual caveat against reading anything into the book that isn't there: "Despair, in kinship with the rest of my books, has no social comment to make, no message to bring in its teeth...
...constant attempt to prove it is real." Russian-born Author Nabokov prefers to believe it is not. For him, real life ended with a bang in the 1917 Revolution. Ever since then he has quietly taken refuge in an elegant, ironic domain of private jokes and personal fantasies. Lolita made him famous because the private joke was also a public one that millions found appalling or appealing. His other works (The Eye, Pale Fire, Pnin, etc.) have been more complex fantasies. One of them is this prophetic, satirical play, written in 1938 and now gracefully translated from the Russian...
Disney's Pollyanna is looking more like an aging Lolita now, but it's perfectly all right. Old Child Actress Hayley Mills, who will reach 20 this month, arrived in Manhattan under the proud chaperonage of her parents-though a photographer did manage to ascertain that the kid has lovely legs. In fact, she is such a family concern that for her latest picture, the Upcoming Gypsy Girl, Mother Mary Bell Mills wrote the script, Father John Mills directed and Daughter Hayley acted as a 17-year-old who falls in love with a gypsy. "This silly thing...
...York Review of Books last July, picking apart the translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin by Novelist Vladimir Nabokov, 66. At last, in the February Encounter, Lolita's scholarly old man replied to Bunny. "A number of earnest simpletons consider Mr. Wilson to be an authority in my field," Nabokov began, and went on to recall their old association: "I invariably did my best to explain to him his monstrous mistakes of pronunciation, grammar and interpretation" of Russian. And, just to finish the job: "Mr. Wilson's use of English is also singularly imprecise...
...formation from "sex" to "libido," the announcer would note, "Freud would have remarked that some at the game sublimate their instincts by kicking and throwing a ball, while others direct their energies to other ends." Then the band would race euphorically around the gridiron to form the word "Lolita" and would play "Thank Heaven for Little Girls...