Funny I should come across this about an hour before finishing Vladmir Nabokov's crazy awesome Laughter in the Dark, and just after reflecting with a friend about the nature of Nabokov's translations from his own Russian. Seems that Laughter in the Dark was translated into English by Winifred Roy in 1936, four years after its publication--and Nabokov hated the book that emerged.
He called it "loose, shapeless, sloppy, full of blunders and gaps, lacking vigour and spring, and plumped down in such dull, flat English that I could not read it to the end." He undertook his own English translation, publishing it in 1938, the same year he began his first English-only novel.
Good thing for me, because what I read was tight, swift-moving, dark and funny. I think the words "sardonic" and "trenchant" often come up in book reviews to describe writing like this. I often shook my head in bemused awe at the kind of stuff this writer could get away with. I mean, a villain named Axel Rex? A sentence like: "An electric milk van on fat tires rolling creamily?" Incredible. But the point is, Nabokov gets away with it. It works. This is a perfectly crafted book.
This early novel is often named among Nabokov's most sheer entertaining, even with characters that make me cringe. That rings right with my experience, swallowing it damn near whole in less than a day. The book's also often called a mean-spirited portrait of Germany and its people--which is something I didn't particularly see. Sure, the characters induce the aforementioned cringes and there's a few jibs at Berlin, but it was nothing that shadowed my impression of the country. But Nabokov was living unhappily as an exile in 1930s Germany when he wrote this book, with his part-Jewish wife, and perhaps it is convenient to paint the biography thickly over the fiction. It is interesting to know, though, that Nabokov lessened the German-ness of his characters' names in the English translation, in hopes that this visual, fast-moving novel would better catch the eye of Hollywood. It didn't, not til years later, and John Banville writes in the introduction to my copy that the ultimate result wasn't very good.
But, really, who cares? We've got the book itself.
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