translate this to persian:
All of which brings us to the Law of Narrative Diction: By their words shall
ye know them. Word choice and placement and combination act to define a
writer’s style, texture, tone, mood. Everyone has the same language; no two
people use it the same way. Sometimes writers don’t even use it the same way
from book to book.
Try this one on for size: “‘Wow! Looks swank!’ remarked my vulgar darling
squinting at the stucco as she crept out into the audible drizzle and with a
childish hand tweaked loose the frock-fold that had stuck in the peach-cleft—to
quote Robert Browning.” We’ve got ourselves a two-fer—the main speaker, who
is the narrator, and the person, the “vulgar darling,” who offers the aesthetic
statement. What can we discern here? First of all, that the narrator is someone
for whom “wow” and “swank” are vulgarisms lying outside his working
vocabulary, although they are very much typical of the speech of the other
person in this scene, who says them naturally. He, on the other hand, can speak
of an “audible drizzle” and employ “peach-cleft” for a different sort of cleft, one
that sweaty frocks might hang up in, as well as writing in an alliterative
(squinting…stucco, frock-fold) and almost cloyingly poetic way. So we might
deduce that she is young and relatively unschooled, as evidenced by that bit of
1950s slang, he older, rather more literate and even literary, if not inevitably in
ways that are profitable or even particularly attractive. Would it surprise you to
find that her name is Lolita? Yes, that fussy narrative diction and hauteur belong
to our favorite child-molestor, Humbert Humbert. I’ve talked about his
hideousness elsewhere. For now we want to notice the brilliance of this
nonnative speaker, Vladimir Nabokov, in capturing both the diction of an
overeducated immigrant to these shores (not hard, perhaps, since English was his
third language) but also the argot of the American teenager circa 1955. His
brilliance, for many of us, has to do with his ear for language, for the
Americanisms most of us rarely notice. In Pnin (1957), for instance, the hapless
immigrant professor of the title is confronted by all manner of native speakers—
hustlers and sycophants, glory grabbers and social climbers—no two of which
sound alike. And in Pale Fire (1962), which for many readers stands as his
masterpiece, he plays off the immigrant voice of the possibly mad, possibly
royal Charles Kimbote against the family and acquaintances of the poet John
Shade, again with perfect pitch for the things Americans of various stations and
generations do to the Mother Tongue. There are many pleasures along with a few
frustrations in reading Nabokov. The frustrations have to do with how much
smarter the writer is than the average bear, which includes professors of English.
The pleasures lie chiefly in what he can do with language, with our language, as
he makes it his own playground. The games, the puzzles, the puns, the tricks he
can make English do—those are all wonderful. Most wonderful of all, however,
is how he can make us sound, how he can capture so perfectly the speech of the
new and strange people he found when he discovered America.
Speaking of sound: rocks. Not “fiddlesticks” or “humbug” or “phooey.”
Rocks. More specifically, “O, rocks.” That just says volumes about the speaker.
Later on, she’ll say a mouthful in her closing soliloquy, but for now, two words
suffice. She also has a few things to say about Leopold, who knows words like
“metempsychosis” but has a few kinks of his own. Here’s Molly’s own
pronouncement on her husband: “well hes beyond everything I declare
somebody ought to put him in the budget.” You can’t say fairer than that.