I have posted the draft PDF of the first of the D-items, translations in Albanian. Only five editions of Nabokov have been published in Albanian: one of Машенька / Mary and four of Lolita / Лолита, one of which was published in the U.S.
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Tags: Albanian, translations
I am working on the first draft pages of D-items, that is, Nabokov books translated by others. Over the next several months I will first post all D-item drafts by the languages in which the translations were done. Later, I will post the same D-items by the A-items from which they were derived, by the countries of publication, and by the dates of publication. Books that are compilations of translations of different Nabokov A-items will be handled separately later as M-items.
D-item entries parallel A-item entries in designation and format. Here is a sample entry for a translation of Mashen’ka into Albanian and published in Albania in 1999.
The key elements are:
- The general D-item number, D8, paralleling the A-item number, A8, from which it is derived.
- The general title of the A-item number, Машенька / Mary, the Russian and English titles of the A-item book.
- The specific D-item number, D8.sq.1.1, a compression of four key pieces of information:
- the general D-item number, D8;
- the standard international two-letter code, sq, for the language, here, Albanian. sq is derived from the native name for the language, gjuha shqipe;
- the translation number, 1, here, the first translation of Mash’enka in Albanian;
- the edition number of that translation, 1 here, the first edition of the first translation.
- Under the specific D-item number, additional information: the standard international two-letter code for the country, al and the year of publication, 1995.
- In the next column, the translation heading, First Albanian translation, referring here to the translation language, Albanian, and not the country.
- The edition heading, First Albanian edition, referring here to the country in which the translation was published.
- In parentheses, the publisher, Apollonia.
- Some information is presented, when possible, in the language’s native orthography (be it Arabic or Chinese, for example): the book title, Nabokov’s name, the translator’s name, and the works in the book, all transliterated and translated.
- The city of publication is transliterated and/or Americanized. For example, Tirana instead of Tiranë, or Beijing instead of 北京.
- The publisher name is transliterated when necessary.
In designing this format, I have tried to balance readability with scanability and fullness of information with compression of information. I would like to receive your feedback on the layout.
I would also like to hear from anyone who can help me track down translations in any of the 45 languages into which Nabokov has been translated. For instance, I have been able to track down copies of or information on only five editions in Albanian (with four others scheduled for this year). One is of Mashen’ka and four are of Lolita. I am sure that there are more.
Tags: translations
This is the final installment of the final A-item of the drafts of the revised and updated bibliography. The “Complete” in the heading is obviously tentative. Lolitas in their original English and Russian versions gush from the presses of publishers in the English- and Russian-speaking worlds (and in the non-English speaking world as texts for the study of American literature).
The full Lolita / Лолита draft encompasses 83 editions in English and Russian. The most recent installment adds A28.74, a Russian edition from Azbuka that was the first to reinstate a paragraph missing from all previous Russian editions. On that note, I’ve also included some information about the errors and corrections in various English language editions.
Next, D-items — translations by others than Nabokov.
I’ve posted the sixth version of the update to the draft pages of Lolita / Лолита. There are 72 English and Russian editions in this update, published from 1955 through 2006. Of interest are four editions published in Russia, two in English (A28.66 and A28.69), a quasi-finely-bound edition in Russian (A28.67), and a very expensive, finely-bound, limited edition in Russian (A28.72).
I’ve posted the fifth version of the update to the draft pages of Lolita / Лолита. There are 59 English and Russian editions in this version (eventually there will be more than 80), published from 1955 through 2000. Of interest are English language editions published in China (A28.44 and A28.58) and Korea (A28.48), a large print edition (A28.47), and two editions of The Annotated Lolita with corrections (A28.40 and A28.43).
Here’s a new update to the draft pages of Lolita / Лолита. So far there are 37 editions in English and Nabokov’s Russian translation, published from 1955 through 1991. Included this time are the first 15 editions of Nabokov’s Russian translation which were published in Russia (the first one by Izvestia, 1989) and two editions with corrections (Vintage, 1989, and The Annotated Lolita, Vintage, 1991).
I’ve added a new update to the draft pages of Lolita / Лолита. Included are the first nineteen editions in English and Nabokov’s Russian translation, from 1955 through 1987. I’ve added the U.S. and British The Annotated Lolita (with Alfred Appel, Jr.’s supplementary material, corrections, and quotations from Nabokov), two Ardis Russian editions (reproduced from the 1967 Phaedra edition with its errors), and five book club editions.
I’ve updated the new draft pages of Lolita / Лолита to include the first eight editions, from 1955 through 1969. I’ve added the first wrappers editions from Fawcett (US, 1959) and Corgi (Britain, 1961), the long run of paperback printings from Putnam’s/Berkley (US, 1966–1987 and possibly later), and the first edition of Nabokov’s Russian translation, from Phaedra (US, 1967).
And so we reach the end of the A-items, for now, with Lolita / Лолита. There are dozens of editions and hundreds of printings in English and Nabokov’s own translation into Russian. Here I start out with only the first three editions, or A-items: The Paris Olympia Press edition of 1955, the American Putnam edition of 1958, and the British Weidenfeld & Nicolson edition of 1959. I will add more editions next week. Lolita is A28 in the 1986 bibliography.
The pdf of the draft pages is not acting sanely in Firefox and I am working on the problem. It is displaying properly in Safari and Chrome. I don’t know if it behaves in Internet Explorer and other browsers.
I just noticed that my blog’s spam filter was overly aggressive on Robert Nelson’s recent comment on my Sebastian Knight draft pages and tried to trash it. Fortunately I was able to snatch it back and post it. But I may have missed other comments. Please let me know if the despammer did you wrong by sending an email to blog@vnbiblio.com.
Tags: novel
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