Vladimir Nabokov's Bilingual Poetry - (Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics) by Maria Emeliyanova (Hardcover)

About the Book

The book offers the first comprehensive analysis of Vladimir Nabokov's self-translated poetry, examining texts from his novels The Gift and Lolita, stories, and collections to explore how bilingualism, memory, and poetic form intersect in a unique interlingual space central to his literary practice.

Book Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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.