Vladimir Nabokov's Bilingual Poetry: The Mirror of Self-Translation - Hardcover

by Maria Emeliyanova (Author)

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), author of such bestselling novels as Lolita and Pale Fire, was also an extraordinarily prolific poet, a poetry translator, and a self- translator. Yet, the intersection of these activities - Nabokov's endeavour as a self- translator of poetry - remains largely unexplored to this day. This book represents the very first exhaustive analysis of the poems Nabokov self-translated for his novels, short stories, and poetry collections. The results of this study shed completely new light on Nabokov's lifelong involvement with poetry and its translation by introducing self-translated poetry as an interlingual poetic space where the intricate connections between poetry, memory, and bilingualism can be solved.

Author Biography

Maria Emeliyanova is a researcher at the University of Padua (Italy). She obtained her Ph.D in Modern languages in 2021 at Ca' Foscari University of Venice (Italy) and, as part of a joint degree program, a Ph.D. in English literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel). She is associate editor of Partial Answers: a Journal of History of Ideas. Her interests focus on the study of the work of transnational literatures, investigating the phenomenon of self-translation as a hybrid form of inner translation and creative literary expression.