The Translator's Doubt

Using Vladimir Nabokov as its ‘case study’ the book aprroaches translation as a crucial avenue into literary history and theory, philosophy and interpretation. The book attemps 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. Addressing specific texts (both literary and cinematic), the book investigates Nabokov’s deeply ambivalent relationship to translation as an hermeneutic oscillation on his part between the relative stability of meaning, which expresse sitself philosophically as a faith beyond, and deep metaphysical uncertainty. While Nabokov’s practice of translation changes profoundly over the course of his carreer, his adherence to the Romantic notion of a ‘true’ but ultimately elusive metaphysical language remains paradoxically constant.