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Translating Mrs. Dalloway


So near and yet so far! Which is what one feels about her art
E.M. Forster. The Early Novels of Virginia Woolf.

We would not be at the trouble to learn a language
if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation.
James Boswell. The Life of Samuel Johnson.

 

In an interview with James Joyce by the Czech writer, Adolf Hoffmeister, (241, Granta Magazine /89, Spring 2005) Joyce talked about the difficulties translating Finnegans Wake: “ Work in Progress is not written in English or French or Czech or Irish. Anna Livia does not speak any of those languages, she speaks the speech of a river,” said Joyce (250.) Joyce also admonished the Czech writer by saying that if anybody had to translate it, that person must be a poet with the greatest poetic freedom to choose any river of the Czech geography because Finnegans Wake had been written, specifically listening to the river Liffey in Ireland. He even added: “I do not want to be translated. I have to remain as I am only explained in your language” (250.) Joyce’s words about his novel can be applied to the case of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

Even if it is possible to translate successfully the story of Clarissa Dalloway–her walk through London from Westminster to Regent’s Park, her thoughts, and those inside the minds of Septimus Warren Smith or Peter Walsh– into any modern language, to translate the cadence and the rhythm is an extremely difficult task. Mrs. Dalloway being a novel, could be read in English as a long poem or as a performance, remarks Sigrid Nunez: “It’s like remembering a performance of Schubert.” (“On Rereading Mrs. Dalloway,” in The Mrs. Dalloway Reader, Harcourt, New York, 2003, page 141.) I would ask: how can you change any of the notes without changing the entire meaning and the intensity of a Schubert’s composition? The rhythm and beauty of the text is so important to Woolf that her use of the stream of consciousness technique, praised by many essayists, serves to create aesthetic beauty as Erich Auerbach remarks on his essay “The Brown Stocking.”: “The erlebte rede were used in literature much earlier, but not for the same aesthetic purpose.” (“The Brown Stocking” in Mimesis, Princeton 2003, p.535)

I was never so angry about a translation as when, after finishing Mrs. Dalloway for the first time in English, I decided to read a Spanish version that a friend gave to me a few years ago. While I reread Mrs. Dalloway in Spanish, the music from the original text started to sound in my mind perhaps irrevocable and I could not stop making corrections to the text. Even the word “irrevocable,” which comes so natural and beautiful in the fourth paragraph of the novel, as if it were a couplet on a Shakespearean sonnet, sounded dull and affected when translated:

Before Big Ben strikes. There out it boomed. First a warning musical, then the hour, irrevocable. (Woolf, New York 1992)
Antes de las campanadas del Big Ben. ¡Ahora! Ahora sonaba solemne. Primero un aviso, musical, luego la hora, irrevocable. (Woolf, Madrid 1999) 1

The translation attempts to imitate the musicality of the word “strike” whose sound in English suggests the act of striking. Not in Spanish. The same can be said about “boomed”. The repetition of the words “¡Ahora! Ahora” imitates the cadence and rhythm that came naturally in the English version with “boomed.” These words at the end: “For there she was,” keep the reader’s fascination after finishing the story. The words are not the same when translated as: “Sí, porque allí estaba.” The comma, maybe unavoidable in Spanish, alters the meaning and music intended by Woolf. The translator erased the original beauty of the rhythm in English by trying to keep the literal meaning.

Thinking about the difficulties of a literal translation inevitably Borges came to my mind. He translated Woolf’s Orlando and gave a lecture on the topic “Music-World and Translation” during the 1970s in Harvard where he says: “According to a widely held superstition, all translations betray their originals.” (“Lecture 4. World-Music and Translation” in This Craft of Verse Harvard University, 2000.) Later on the lecture, Borges follows Matthew Arnold and defends a translation that privileges the aesthetic beauty over the literal meaning.

My bad experience with this translation of Mrs. Dalloway, made me think about the words of Dr. Johnson in Boswell’s book and all the precious hours dedicated to learn the English language. Perhaps those were the same reasons why Borges did not try to translate Mrs. Dalloway consciously knowing that the only correct way to read it was in English, as with Finnegans Wake.

_______________________________________________________________
1 La Señora Dalloway Editorial Millenium, Madrid 1999; Mrs. Dalloway, Everyman’s Library, 2002

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William Carlos Williams under the influence



William Carlos Williams under the influence
Borrowing from The Cantos to write the greatest American epic

«Ain’t it enuf that you so deeply influenced my formative years
without your wanting to influence also my later ones?»

WCW’s letter to Ezra Pound, 12 April 1954 (1)

William Carlos Williams’s aim of writing an epic using as a raw material a small New Jersey city is very ambitious. Perhaps even more ambitious than Pound’s agglutination of eras and languages in the Cantos, or Eliot’s purpose to representing the decadence of the whole modern world in The Waste Land.

To write the 5 books of Paterson, Williams borrowed patterns and music from Eliot’s poems and ideas and sources from Ezra Pound. The rhythm and cadence of T.S. Eliot is everywhere in Paterson, and Pound’s Cantos is used by the Rutherford poet as a pattern to write his own big epic. Paterson is the “magnus opus that I’ve always wanted to do” as Williams call it in a letter to Pound in November of 1936.

The two poets that Williams disdained publicly most of his life are the ones he imitates the most. He was not happy about that influence, but he could not deny it either, as he says in this letter to Robert McAlmon:

Pound is] a one sided bastard if there ever was one, who has borrowed from everybody, including myself in the old days, but he’s done a good job, surpassingly good. And I’ve borrowed from him much more than I’ve given. Everyone has who has followed him. Yeats specially (qted, In Thirlwall, 220).

Pound’s influence is clear in all William’s first books. But by 1946, when he published the first book of Paterson, Williams thought that those influences had been erased and lost among the fabulous structure of his work. However, as the critic K.L. Goodwin says “ the one whose work has been touched at the greatest number of points by Pound, and the one who has shown the greatest ability to avoid mere imitation, is William Carlos Williams” (Goodwin, 144).

One of the main influences of Pound in Williams’s Paterson is the imagist theory of poetry. Paterson is full of images, from the beginning of the first book: the city-person is described using some of the best imagist lines written by Williams. Paterson certainly is an imagist epic, which has sudden changes of voices and breaks of verse, combined with long portions of prose. Goodwin connects this treatment of Paterson as Williams’s intention of using merely descriptions to generate sensations, avoiding any kind of subjectivity:

Many passages from Paterson are imagistic. The reason for the frequency of such passages may be that the whole poem is a symbolic treatment of man through the features of the city, Paterson, and as this symbolic connection is partly brought out through prose interludes, Williams felt that he could indulge in objective description without having to make the relationship between it and the theme explicit (Goodwin, 150-151).

When using certain images, Williams seems to be looking for them. He’s not getting what image he gets from inspiration and putting them into the poem. He seems to be looking for images that he needs to fit a certain plan. He seem to be looking for images to replace ones that he had seen before in other epic poems. Some of the images that Williams is looking for, seem to have their origin in The Cantos. I think that a good example of this kind of research is found in this lines from A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930):

City of patterned streets; again the vision:
Down in the viae stradae, toga’d the crowd, and arm’d,
Rushing in populous business,
And from parapet looked down
And North was Egypt,
The celestial Nile, blue deep,
cutting low barren land,
Old men and camels
Working the water-wheels (Pound, 17).

The fragmented city of these lines of The Cantos, could be traced to the unreal city that T.S. Eliot evokes in The Waste Land. In Eliot’s poem there is an interest to describe poetically the interdependence of cities and water. The water manifestated as river, sea, or rain. There is a historical fact of dependance of cities and rivers. But there is also a pattern in the way Pound, Eliot and Williams use the relationship water-city, as in these lines from the Book One of Paterson (1946):

Immortal he neither moves nor rouses and is seldom
seen, thought he breathes and the subtleties of his
machinations
drawing their substance from the noise of the pouring
river
animate a thousand automatons (Williams, 6)

The connection between the people of a city with the river and the implications of productivity and some kind of technological activity in Pound’s Cantos is there, even if transformed, in the verses of Paterson. The talent of Williams is that since Paterson is a city and a man at the same time, the figure of “populous business” of The Cantos kind of vanishes. In Paterson there is a transformation of the images coming from The Cantos. It is not very difficult to trace the steps of their change, however In The Cantos, The Nile river is a source of productivity, an instrument of “progress” who moves the water-wheels, while the “pouring” Passaic river and the “machinations” of Paterson are combined to move those thousand “automatons”. The technology is different, but both poems are connected by the idea of the river as an agent of transformation.

The particular talent of Williams is that he applies the technique of imagism not just to static objects. There is qualitative jump from the stillness of Eliot’s images in The Waste Land to the way Williams sees the world, as Goodwin writes:

Williams’s assimilation and adaptation of Imagism seems to me to be one of the most successful uses of the technique (…) He applied imagism not just to static images but to moving ones: to the swaying of the trees, the flight of birds, and the fall of water. As a result his imagistic poems lack the stillness that occurs in those of Eliot… (Goodwin, 151).

In addition, Williams used a group of personal letters in Paterson. He intercalates them through the poem. Some of these letters are the ones from the underprivileged mother of one of his patients, Marcia Nardi to which Williams points as the letters that helped him to unify some of the main topics of his epic. Nardi’s letters were very important to the purposes of Williams to fit some of the gaps of his “magnus opus,” as Paul Mariani details in William Carlos Williams A New World Naked:

Nardi’s letter would serve to recapitulate nearly all the major themes with which his autobiographical poem had been concerned: The woman as victim, complaining, accusing, crying out in pain; the divorce between the two sexes and the danger that the woman would turn to other woman for solace; the woman as the energy and the flower of a man’s life; the poem itself as a confession of inadequacy; the socioeconomic ills that had created so many of the tensions between men and women, making of the man a false nurturer and forcing the woman into an unnatural dependency on man (…) that letter turned out to be, as Williams would explain years later, a found object paralleling Eliot’s infamous use of footnotes at the end of The Waste Land (Mariani, 462-463).

What kind of “voice” was Williams looking for? A comparison between an excerpt from Nardi’s letter and a famous one from The Cantos, proves that maybe he was looking for more than a simple voice to explain his points. Williams was looking for a voice to match this famous letter from Pound’s Canto XXVI:

To the supreme pig, the archbishop of Salzburg:
Lasting filth and perdition.
Since your exalted pustulence is too stingy
To give me a decent income
And has already assured me that here I have nothing to hope
And had better seek fortune elsewhere;
And since thereafter you have
Three times impeded my father and self intending departure
I ask you for the fourth time
To behave with more decency, and this time
Permit my departureWolfgang Amadeus, august 1777 (Pound, 128).

Williams found the match, in this excerpt of a long letter from Nardi that he published at the end of Paterson’s Book 2 (1948):
The anger and the indignation which I felt towards you now has served to pierce through the rough ice of that congealment which my creative faculties began to suffer from as a result of that last note from you. I find myself thinking and feeling in terms of poetry again. But over and against this is the fact that I’m even more lacking in anchorage of any kind than when I first got to know you. My loneliness is a million fathoms deeper, and my physical energies even more seriously sapped by it; and my economic situation is naturally worse, with living costs so terrible high now (Williams, 89).

There is in both letters, a feeling of the anxiety from somebody with a creative mind, suffering a state of dependence, trapped in the hands of somebody who has the power to control his destiny. It is very interesting to deduce that in this playful use of Nardi’s letter, Williams is assuming the position of “The supreme pig.”

The different voices struggling in Patterson are the different Personæ that Pound brings into The Cantos. There is the remarkable similarity between the criticism of usury made by Pound in The Cantos and criticism that Williams made of usury. As Goodwin notes, Williams “was not yet ready to follow Pound by attempting to versify it but such an attempt was made in a vehement attack on usury” (Goodwin, 156.) Williams attacks usury in these lines from Book 2 of Paterson:

The Federal Reserve System is a private enterprise…a private monopoly… (with power)…given to it by a spineless Congress (…)
They create money from nothing and lend it to private business (the same money over and over again at a high rate of interest), and also to the Government whenever it needs money in a war and peace… (Williams, 73)

This is a very similar point of view as the one of Pound about usury. But the similarity of ideas is not the most important to confront the borrowing of ideas from The Cantos.

The main point is that, like the idea of a river as the source of life for a city and main center of the economic activity, or as the anger of the creator against his master, many of the topics defined already by Pound in his A Draft of XXX Cantos from 1930, are present in Paterson.

It is true that Williams mastered the technique of imagism. Constraining his poem to the sources provided by documents about Paterson and people of New Jersey, he created a poem that is proudly 100% American in its content. But he was following some rules established by Pound. Old Ezra defined most of the topics that could be considered in a twentieth-century epic. Writing Paterson, Williams is filling the gaps, taking out European or Asian references and filling them with American elements.

In many ways, The Cantos is also a 100% American epic, because its creator is a product of the different brooks that shaped this country. And he is the original source. In many ways The Cantos is the blue Nile that running from above, higher than spires, higher even than the office towers watered the minds of many poets of this country and developed into brilliant poems like Paterson.

Bibliography

Breslin, James E. William Carlos Williams An American Artist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
Goodwin, K.L. The Influence of Ezra Pound. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Mariani, Paul. William Carlos Williams A New World Naked. New York: Mc Graw-Hill, 1981

Pound, Ezra. The Cantos. London: faber and faber, 1986.

Thirlwall, John C. The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1957

Williams, William Carlos. Paterson. New York: New Directions, 1995.

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Waiting for the Barbarians

And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
Constantine P. Cavafy.Waiting for the Barbarians

The expeditionary force against the barbarians prepares for its campaign,
ravaging the earth, wasting our patrimony.
J.M.Coetzee. Waiting for the Barbarians

J.M. Coetzee’s book is a parable about the use of fear to control the masses. At the same time, Waiting for the Barbarians is the tale of a man who wants to decipher himself through the interpretation of his dreams and of other people.
Colonel Joll is fighting the Barbarians. Their power has been multiplied by the rumours: “The barbarian tribes were arming, the rumour went” (8), “A rumour begin to get the rounds that they are diseased” (13), “The rumour going about brigade headquarters … is that there will be a general offensive against the barbarians in the spring” (50), “Instead the air is full of anxious rumours” (123.)
Joll is the creation of an Empire that needs the fear to survive. Joll is the irrational product of an irrational fear.
It is impossible not to see an uncanny parallel between the current war on terror and Coetzee’s Empire. Like the Magistrate, people who opposed the invasion of Iraq were ridiculed. The power of these barbarians has been multiplied artificially by the Empire, to create a scenario where the population permits torture and unnecessary violence. There is no difference between the Barbarians and the Empire: “Of what use is … to raise the alarm when the criminal and the civil guard are the same people?” (123).
Another big subject of the book is the decadence. There is a permanent reference, to the cycles of nature opposed to the artificial cycles of the Empire: “For the duration of the winter the Empire is safe” (38), “How can I accept that disaster has overtaken my life when the world continues to move so tranquilly through its cycles?” (94), “Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jugged time of raise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe” (133).
The Magistrate fights his own war against aging and decadence. He discovers himself trapped in an invisible and powerful contract where he had changed his freedom for the promise of a peaceful life at the end of his life: “I have not asked for more than a quiet life in quiet times”(8), “All I want now is to live out my life in ease in a familiar world, to die in my own bed and be followed to my grave by old friends” (75).
The Magistrate is also an interpreter. One of his hobbies is to decipher the hieroglyphics on the ancient slips that he finds under the dunes. There are recurrent dreams throughout the whole book, and he tries to interpret them as if they were the clue to understanding his weaknesses, the decadence of his own desire, and his relationship with women. He knows that he is controlled by lust: “Sometimes my sex seemed to me … a stupid animal living parasitically upon me … anchored to my flesh with claws I could not detach”(45). However, the Magistrate tortures himself and not the others; he tries to live in peace with the people that he rules.
The Magistrate is a simple man. It is in his opposition to Colonel Joll, and the blindness of the Empire that he looks like a hero. He risks his life to prove himself that he is not a slave of the Empire: “I must assert my distance from Colonel Joll! … There is nothing to link me with torturers” (44), “My alliance with the guardians of the Empire is over … the bond is broken, I am a free man” (78).
The war transforms the Magistrate into a symbol against irrationality. He is the only one who seems not to be controlled by the fear of the Barbarians: “show me a Barbarian army and I will believe” (8). And he is the only one who understands the consequences of the Empire’s crimes: “ ‘When some men suffer unjustly,’ I said to myself, ‘it is the fate of those who witness their suffering to suffer the shame of it’” (139).

Waiting for the Barbarians J.M. Coetzee. Penguin Books, New York, 1980

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Leyendo Half of a Yellow Sun

La discusión más importante fue sobre el final de la novela. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie crea varios personajes prometedores. Odenigbo, el profesor, anti imperialista, amante de los buenos libros, el buen brandy y la música clásica; Ugwu, el campesino que llega a la casa de Odenigbo, el devorador de libros, el pequeño hombre que aprende las ventajas dedesarrollar el intelecto, Kainene & Olanna, las dos gemelas no idénticas, hijas de padres adinerados, muy educadas: Olanna idealista y bella, capaz de hablar igbo e inglés con perfecto acento; Kainene la práctica (y no tan bella) capaz de lidear con bandidos, bribones políticos y contrabandistas ,heredera de los mismos instintos de negociante de su padre. Richard, es el británico perdido en este pais que no entiende y al que ha llegado para encontrarse a sí mismo. Richard en proceso de escribir un libro, Ugwu en el proceso de aprender a escribirlo.

La historia está bien contada, los personajes se desarrollan, se complican, crecen. Sin embargo, hacia la tercera parte la mayor parte de ellos se desinfla (un cierto sabor amargo en la boca, como si la novela estuviera inconclusa o como si la escritora no se hubiera tomado todo el tiempo necesario para construir el desenlace.

Interesante la perspectiva histórica-la guerra civil en Nigeria y la lucha por crear el estado independiente de Biafra.

Pero sólo Tolstoi puede contar toda una guerra y a la vez escribir una obra maestra (claro, con 800 páginas más).

 

Response paper to Half of a Yellow Sun

Ugwu wonder[s] if he had died and this was what happened at death: an unending journey in a car. (395)

 

“War is very ugly” says Adichie’s father. Adichie’s book is the novel of a group of people and their transformation through the war’s experience.

Like the best novels, the heroes are depicted as human beings, with all their defects. Ugwu will never forget the day when the worst of him emerged. His sister’s rape reminds him of a guilt that he will carry on his shoulders all his life.

I admire the way Adichie used the disappearance of Kainene to give Half of a Yellow Sun a mood that stays with the reader after finishing the last page of the novel.

Kainene represents the people who disappeared in the war, but at the same time creates in the reader a sense of loss that is stronger than the death of a character. Nobody knows, we can even imagine that not even the writer knows, what has happened to Kainene.

Adichie creates a character that redeems herself through the experience of the war. For exemple, Kainene seems to be more human than ever when she helps the people at the refugee camp. Kainene is the one who seems to understand better than anyone else the mechanics of the war.

The transformation of Richard surprised me also. He seemed to be a character lost in an unknown territory–a version of Conrad’s Marlow. Marlow is surrounded by a hostile land and people who will never understand him completely. However, Richard ends like Lord Jim, because he is the one that Ugwu looks to find some comfort after the war. He is the one who understands Ugwu’s heart, and what to do after the news of tragic death of Eberechi.

Madu, the patriotic and heroic symbol of the military resistance, seems at the end to be the one who can’t understand Richard.

Olanna and Odenigbo, who started as the crucial characters of the plot, ended as the more crumbled, the more deteriorated. Their faith let them survive the war, but they look as weak and hollow as the house they found back in Nsukka.

Through all, the book is very important in mentioning books that play an important role in the development of the plot. One of the books is the one that Richards is writing. The other is the one that Ugwu writes, inspired by the Narrrative of Frederick Douglas.

Like Adichie, the books are used as vehicles of transformation and healing. They inspired the authors, and the authors write their owns book looking to inspire others.

Maybe the best revenge for Adichie is the scene when Ugwu discovered the pile of books burned in the patio of the Nsukka house: “Why did they have to burn them?” Ugwu asks (418). Maybe it is the same reason that explains why people have to write books after a war–to keep the memory of what has happened alive.
As Adichie says at the end of her final note: May we always remember (435.)

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The God of Small Things

 

This is my review for the class English and the Anglophone World.
The book is The God of Small Things by the Indian writer Arundhati Roy.

 

The clue to Arundhati Roy’s story is in this passage taken from the khatakali episode. As a kathakali dance, Roy mixes real life and mythology to create great story:

The Great Stories are the one that you heard and want to hear again. The ones that you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet though you listen as though you don’t…In the Great stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again (Roy, 218)

The novel is a Heart of Darkness where you have to enter with your heart on your hand. The plot of The God of Small Things develops in circles around a single event, a single day. The novel is made of small things, significant things. All of them together build the whole drama.

There is a villain who loves, Baby Kochama who still writes I love you in her diary, many years after the death of Father Mulligan. And there are lovers who are villains: all the other characters. From the ambassador Estha «Elvis» to the Ambassador Rahel, from Velutha to Ammu or the laconic Sophie Mol. Everybody loves and everybody kills in their own way. And even some of the most pathetic stories of love in this book are full of sadness and crime at the same time.

Is it a tragedy? Is it a love story? Both of them. A tragic love story. A Romeo and Juliet with Indian flavor, with a river and magnificent secondary characters. It is difficult not to get surprised by some of the turns of the plot. I was amazed by the narrative of Margareth Kochamma and Chacko’s first encounter. And through the whole episode after the death of Velutha and Sophie Mol, as a good optimist, I was looking for the pony too.

There is play with destiny. The unavoidable destiny where all the characters are conducted by their own choice. As Rahel and Estha noticed, they choose to save Ammu, comdemning Velutha. Velutha choose to condemn himself, loving Ammu.

The drama of Rahel develops through the whole book. They are the more developed characters, the most intriguing. However, the big tragedy is Ammu’s one. The episode at the end, the full description of Ammu and Velutha’s first sexual contact, after the recitation of the whole tragedy, serves to reaffirm the triumph of love over death, if not in real life, at least in the mythical world.

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Reading Lolita in Tehran

Esta es la respuesta a la primera parte del libro de la escritora iraní Azar Nafisi. Es un conjunto de memorias acerca de un grupo de lectura conformado por mujeres iraníes, estudiantes de literatura inglesa, a comienzos de la década de los 80. La lectura se realiza mientras se implementa en Irán el riguroso control «moral» del regimen del Ayatholla Khomeini.

Algunas de las obras discutidas en Teherán: Lolita de Nabokov, Daisy Miller de Henry James, El Gran Gatsby de Fitzgerald, Orgullo y Prejuicio de Jane Austen, Madame Bovary de Flaubert. De cierta manera, este libro está escrito desde un punto de vista parecido al de una muy buena novela gráfica que leí hace algunos años: Persépolis de Marjane Satrapi.

Response paper to Reading Lolita in Tehran
By Ulises Gonzales

The idea of putting The Great Gatsby on trial made me think about the whole idea of criticism, particularly recent criticism about the whole idea of a Western Canon. When critics take on the task of criticizing a novel, aren’t they starting a new trial on the literary works of the masters?
Even the trial by the Iranian people at the time of the Islamic revolution was an exercise of criticism. Although the tools where not the old ones established by Aristotle—and all the classical critics who followed him—but by those of fanaticism and religious ideas. There are novels and poems that have stood many trials, survived them, and come out stronger than before, such as Sophocles, Virgil or Shakespeare. Others, sometimes enthroned as the sublime expression of literary achievements, have succumbed to those trials and have been forgotten.
From my point of view, Nafisi is doing the same that the British critic Leavis did when he named Eliot, Conrad, James and Austen as the greatest novelists of English literature. Nafisi is using Fitzgerald and Nabokov’s novels as a way to interpret the years he lived in Iran after the Islamic Revolution. Picking us those authors—and leaving others in obscurity—Nafisi is also acting as a critic. As George Steiner claimed in Real Presences,, if there was no criticism, then creators could be considered critics. This is so because when a writer decided to use a novel or a poem as his or her influence or to follow a certain writer’s style, that writer is exercising criticism. Even when I picked Leavis or Steiner to write this paper, I am exercising criticism and putting these authors on trial, once again.
Nafisi’s book is a memoir of the hardest years of the Islamic Revolution. Iran is not as it was when Nafisi was teaching at the University of Tehran , but her book stands as a valuable recollection of those times. Through her book, we could understand how literature helped her to survive all those years. Also, in reading her book we have a powerful demonstration of how to use literature as a way to analyze a society. Iran and its leaders are analyzed through fictional characters like Professor Humbert or Gatsby.
The answers given at the trial of Fitzgerald’s novel could summarize the different points of view of Iranian society at that time—its doubts and contradictions.
I agree with Roland Barthes when he writes in Criticism and Truth that a novel is eternal not because it gives just one meaning to many different men, but because it suggests many different meanings to a single man. I would like to think that Reading Lolita in Tehran has also many different meanings according to the many interests of its author and readers.
Some of the readings and interpretations in Nafisi’s private classes are strongly attached to the feminism, and the analyses I like the most of Lolita came from that specific point of view. There are other meanings that the reader picks up on when Lolita is analyzed through the historical events happening in Iran at that time. Some comparisons with the new regime place the novel against totalitarianism. Another reading has to do with the profession of the author and her deep love for literature. She uses Nabokov, Austen, James and Fitzgerald because she admires those novels as art.

Those different layers of interpretations and readings are what is most captivating for me. The complexity of different loves: her students, her books, her country. All of them are (re)interpreted through a bunch of novels that she loves.

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