When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause célèbre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. But Vladimir Nabokov's wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as one of the twentieth century's novels of record not to the controversy its material aroused but to its author's u...
When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause célèbre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. But Vladimir Nabokov's wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as one of the twentieth century's novels of record not to the controversy its material aroused but to its author's use of that material to tell a love story almost shocking in its beauty and tenderness.
Awe and exhilaration–along with heartbreak and mordant wit–abound in this account of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America, but most of all, it is a meditation on love–love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.
With an Introduction by Martin Amis
作者简介
· · · · · ·
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokovs were known for their high culture and commitment to public service, and the elder Nabokov was an outspoken opponent of antisemitism and one of the leaders of the opposition party, the Kadets. In 1919, following the Bolshevik revolution, he took his family into exile. Four years la...
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokovs were known for their high culture and commitment to public service, and the elder Nabokov was an outspoken opponent of antisemitism and one of the leaders of the opposition party, the Kadets. In 1919, following the Bolshevik revolution, he took his family into exile. Four years later he was shot and killed at a political rally in Berlin while trying to shield the speaker from right-wing assassins.
The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a child Nabokov was already reading Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, alongside the popular entertainments of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. As a young man, he studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he had one child, a son, Dmitri.
Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction in English. In his afterword to Lolita he claimed: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses–the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions–which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way." [p. 317] Yet Nabokov's American period saw the creation of what are arguably his greatest works, Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962), as well as the translation of his earlier Russian novels into English. He also undertook English translations of works by Lermontov and Pushkin and wrote several books of criticism. Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.
All literati is impotent and verbose. 亨博特絮絮叨叨的叙述使他本人显得更加偏执、软弱、狂热，人格特质十分突出，虽然读起来有时候会冗长—洛丽塔应该也是类似感觉的吧，有时候崇拜他很富有知识想法，有时却想对他自我陶醉、矫情的文人酸气说，“滚你妈的！还有完没完了！”或者说，“闭嘴吧，你这个性无能的中二病老头子！”
Humbert's "Wanted" poem after Lo's gone. It has so much obsession that no movie's able to capture. Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze. Hair: Brown. Lips: scarlet. Age: five thousand three hundred days. Profession: none, or "starlet." Where are you hiding, Dolores Haze? Why are you hiding, darling? (I Talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling). Where are you riding, Dolores ...
2013-01-17 02:445人喜欢
Humbert's "Wanted" poem after Lo's gone. It has so much obsession that no movie's able to capture.
Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Hair: Brown. Lips: scarlet.
Age: five thousand three hundred days.
Profession: none, or "starlet."
Where are you hiding, Dolores Haze?
Why are you hiding, darling?
(I Talk in a daze, I walk in a maze
I cannot get out, said the starling).
Where are you riding, Dolores Haze?
What make is the magic carpet?
Is a Cream Cougar the present craze?
And where are you parked, my car pet?
Who is your hero, Dolores Haze?
Still one of those blue-capped star-men?
Oh the balmy days and the palmy bays,
And the cars, and the bars, my Carmen!
Oh Dolores, that juke-box hurts!
Are you still dancin', darlin'?
(Both in worn levis, both in torn T-shirts,
And I, in my corner, snarlin').
Happy, happy is gnarled McFate
Touring the States with a child wife,
Plowing his Molly in every State
Among the protected wild life.
My Dolly, my folly! Her eyes were vair,
And never closed when I kissed her.
Know an old perfume called Soliel Vert?
Are you from Paris, mister?
L'autre soir un air froid d'opera m'alita;
Son fele -- bien fol est qui s'y fie!
Il neige, le decor s'ecroule, Lolita!
Lolita, qu'ai-je fait de ta vie?
Dying, dying, Lolita Haze,
Of hate and remorse, I'm dying.
And again my hairy fist I raise,
And again I hear you crying.
Officer, officer, there they go--
In the rain, where that lighted store is!
And her socks are white, and I love her so,
And her name is Haze, Dolores.
Officer, officer, there they are--
Dolores Haze and her lover!
Whip out your gun and follow that car.
Now tumble out and take cover.
Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Her dream-gray gaze never flinches.
Ninety pounds is all she weighs
With a height of sixty inches.
My car is limping, Dolores Haze,
And the last long lap is the hardest,
And I shall be dumped where the weed decays,
And the rest is rust and stardust.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When Humbert found Lo again, married and pregnant.
I find it to be a defining scene that distinguish our dear HH from the rest of the pedophiles. it's really about Lolita, not Lolita as the "nymph"...
"I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else... this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another's child, but still gray-eyed. still sooty-lashed. still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
HH confronting Quilty before killing him:
"Because you took advantage of a sinner
Because you took advantage of my disadvantage...
Because you cheated me of my redemption."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
After HH drives away from Quilty's house and reaches a hill where he can oversee a little town far away and he thinks he hears the sound of children play:
"I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Vladimir Nabokov on this book:
How he (accurately) foresees that the readers will skip... lol
"The passage in between must be reduced to sutures of sense, logical bridges of the simplest design, brief expositions and explanations, which the reader will probably skip but must know they exist in order not to feel cheated."
Meaning behind this book? I think he believes that literature should be an intrinsic quality instead of a mean to serve some higher purpose.
"Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call Literature of Ideas...
It is childish to study a work of fiction in order to gain information about a country or about a social class or about the author..."
纳博科夫对自己这部作品的非同寻常之处深具自知之明。在前言当中，他就借虚构的编者John Ray之口，以辩护者的姿态，袒露了他对Lolita的定位：“…and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise.”同样的口吻，也暗示了他对这本书的争议地位的预期。因此，前言一定程度上被用作读者与作品中间的缓冲区，一剂镇静剂，当然，也是他对自己...
2017-04-18 22:312人喜欢
纳博科夫对自己这部作品的非同寻常之处深具自知之明。在前言当中，他就借虚构的编者John Ray之口，以辩护者的姿态，袒露了他对Lolita的定位：“…and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise.”同样的口吻，也暗示了他对这本书的争议地位的预期。因此，前言一定程度上被用作读者与作品中间的缓冲区，一剂镇静剂，当然，也是他对自己作品的辩词。有时，他近乎站在了读者的立场上，安抚般地指摘Humbert Humbert的堕落败坏之处：“that had our demented diarist gone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent psychopathologist, there would have been no disaster”；“No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity, that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. He is not a gentleman.”似乎是要预告他的种种不是，好让读者在直面这些令常人不齿的话题时，反感不致于被惊异所放大。但是这些话的背后，无疑有“尽管如此这般”的潜台词。所有这些冒天下之大不韪的内容，都无法作为埋没和排斥这部作品的理由，因为——纳博科夫此时仍圆滑地讨好着传统读者——尽管如此，仍不妨碍读者们为Humbert对Lolita温柔而热烈的情诗而着迷（“But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author!”），还因为这部作品自有它迫切的道德说教意义（“They warn us of dangerous trends; they point out potent evils. Lolita should make all of us - parents, social workers, educators - apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.”）。
不过，这些都并不是Lolita最重要的意涵。纳博科夫所做的最破天荒的事，就在它引起争议的“新”里。即使躲在John Ray的面具后面，碍于阅读传统的力量，他自然也无法理直气壮地为自己辩白。但是，他能把对迂腐的阅读传统的讽刺融在讨好中。“For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of the 'real' people beyond the 'true' story, a few details may be given as received from Mrs. 'Windmuller'…”两个引号中的"real"和"true"，暗中批评了“虚构小说建立在真人真事上”的成见。而随后那六个带引号的“化名”，又反过来消解了它们自己的真实性。讽刺的口吻在这一段末露了头，“The caretakers of the various cemeteries involved report that no ghosts walk”，故事中死者都已经入土为安，不再在真实世界里出没——一笔就划清了虚构与真实的界限。下一段中讽刺的口吻更为辛辣直白。纳博科夫对照了Lolita中对色情内容的艺术化处理，和那些“robust philistine”所惯见的庸俗恋爱作品，指责了能够毫无怨言地容忍庸俗的情爱却指摘Lolita的低俗的读者的自我矛盾和过分拘谨（“paradoxical prude”）。
前言当中，纳博科夫狡猾地把对Lolita最重要任务的暗示夹藏在了那些貌似重要的文学意义预告中。他的关怀之一，就是探索欲望（爱欲）与文明（禁忌）的关系。他并非着意要制造不道德的娈童争议，而是要用艺术的文字呈现热烈的爱情和兽性的欲望缠绕交融的真实爱情状态。Humbert也承认，自己那不道德的兽欲，一旦触碰Lolita，就会化为柔情和温存。于是人类奉为纯洁永恒的爱情和突破道德边界的兽欲之间的界限在哪里呢？Humbert显然是个常规意义上的“性变态”人物，他为热烈的爱火蒙蔽了双眼，主动违逆社会禁忌，又徒劳地为自己辩护的行为，是为道德卫士所不齿的。但是他的辩护是不是也可以看作对社会规约的反嘲呢？Humbert无奈又语中带刺：“…I found myself maturing amid a civilization which allows a man of twenty-five to court a girl of sixteen but not a girl of twelve”。Humbert还进一步引证：在更原始的群岛社会或者印度东部省份，社会对性行为年龄的管控要宽松得多。进一步我们就要随着他问：文明规约的本质是什么？什么是道德？道德规定和人性能完全相符么？这样看，“不道德”又意味着“不人性”么？Humbert（纳博科夫）的观点自然没有那么偏激，完全否认社会规范的合理性。他也会动用科学知识，证明Lolita已经到了天然性成熟的年龄——他并没有违反天然的人性。
对文明的探讨并不局限在爱情上。可以说，Humbert冗长而平淡的“环美游记”，正是把Humbert所代表的过分精致的欧洲文明与美国文明的冲撞，带到以全美为范围的舞台上——一个移动的舞台。这一点在“The Enchanted Hunter”旅馆的章节就埋下了伏笔。汽车旅店是鱼龙混杂的社会场所，是文明风貌的窗口，遍布冷嘲的Humbert可以下口讽刺之处。冗长而单调的行程，把Lolita小妖精的魅力之下粗野低俗的口味、肮脏混乱的生活习惯、堕落的教育全盘暴露出来。尽管叙述者的矛头指向了战后美国文化（“Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous”在作者层面上显然是反话），很难说纳博科夫对Humbert身上那种旧大陆的过度文明（over-civilization）是不加批判的。从Humbert光怪陆离得不真实的童年经历，到充满矛盾的第一段婚姻，再到道貌岸然的第二段婚姻生活，再到Lolita床前的如履薄冰和对自己意图的“纯洁”狡辩，都是对Humbert和他身上的文明气质的暗中讽刺。
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my lions. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. TA. 第一段，不是中文翻译所能翻译的好的。其实第二段也不是中文能翻译的好的，太长了但是。(3回应)
2011-03-06 19:054人喜欢
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my lions. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. TA.引自第1页
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my lions. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. TA. 第一段，不是中文翻译所能翻译的好的。其实第二段也不是中文能翻译的好的，太长了但是。(3回应)
2011-03-06 19:054人喜欢
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my lions. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. TA.引自第1页
Page 5 The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain. All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other. but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children wo...
2013-05-08 21:32
Page 5
The softness and fragility of baby animals caused us the same intense pain.
All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other;
hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other.
but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do.
There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would start on a long cautious journey; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children granted us sufficient concealment to graze each other's salty lips.These incomplete contacts drove our healthy and inexperienced young bodies to such a state of exasperation that not even the cold blue water, under which we still clawed at each other, could bring relief. 引自 Chapter 3
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a p...
2017-03-06 01:51
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.引自 Part One 1
It is a question of local adjustment of certain distance that the inner eye thrills to surmount, and a certain contrast that the mind perceives with a gasp of perverse delight.
2013-08-03 23:31
It is a question of local adjustment of certain distance that the inner eye thrills to surmount, and a certain contrast that the mind perceives with a gasp of perverse delight. 引自第17页
My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident （picnic, lightning） when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style（I am writing under observation）， the sun of my infancy had set:surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges...
2020-05-28 15:05
My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident （picnic, lightning） when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style（I am writing under observation）， the sun of my infancy had set:surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill in the summer dusk a furry warmth, golden midges.引自第98页 In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. Through the darkness and the tender trees we could see the arabesques of lighted windows which, touched up by the colored inks of sensitive memory, appear to me now like playing cards--presumably because a bridge game was keeping the enemy busy. She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely glowed above us between the silhouettes of long thin leaves；that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me,her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again； and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine；then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.
引自第104页Hugh Broughton, a writer of controversy in the reign of James the First, has proved that Rahab was a harlot at ten years of age...Dante fell madly in love with his Beatrice when she was nine, a sparkling girleen, painted and lovely, and bejeweled, in a crimson frock, and this was in 1274， in Florence, at a private feast in the merry month of May. and when Petrarch fell madly in love with his Laureen, she was a fair-haired nymphet of twelve running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight, in the beautiful plain as descried from the hills of Vaucluse.引自第110页
Divorce proceedings delayed my voyage, and the gloom of yet another World War had settled upon the globe when, after a winter of ennui and pneumonia in Portugal, I at last reached the States.引自第130页We lived in prefabricated timber cabins amid a Pre-Cambrian world of granite. We had heaps of supplies——the Reader's Digest, an ice cream mixe chemical toilets, paper caps for Christmas. My health improved wonderfully in spite or because of all the fantastic blankness and boredom. Surrounded by such dejected vegetation as willow scrub and lichens； permeated, and, I suppose, cleansed by a whistling gale； seated on a boulder under a completely translucent sky（through which, however, nothing of importance showed）， I felt curiously aloof from my own self. 引自第131页For a moment, we were both in the same warm green bath of the mirror that reflected the top of a poplar with us in the sky. 引自第144页We are paying with hail and gale for the tropical beginning of the month.引自第153页Angel,Grace
Austin, Floyd
Beale, Jack
Beale, Mary
Buck,Daniel
Byron, Marguerite
Campbell, Alice
Carmine,Rose
Chatfield,Phyllis
Clarke,Gordon
Cowan, John
Cowan,Marion
Duncan,Walter
Falter,Ted
Fantasia,Stella
Flashman, Irving
Glave,Mabel
Goodale,Donald
Green, Lucinda
Hamilton,Mary Rose
Haze,Dolores
Honeck,Rosaline
Knight, Kenneth
McCoo,Virginia
McCrystal,Vivian
McFate,Aubrey
Miranda,Anthony
Miranda,Viola
Rosato,Emil
Schlenker,Lena
Scott,Donald
Sheridan,Agnes
Sherva,Oleg
Smith,Hazel
Talbot, Edgar
Talbot,Edwin
Wain,Lull
Williams,Ralph 引自第153页Main character:Humbert the Hummer.
Time:Sunday morning in June
Place:sunlit living room.
Props:old, candy-striped davenport, magazines phonograph, Mexican knickknacks（the late Mr. Harold E. Haze--God bless the good man--had engendered my darling at the siesta hour in a blue-washed room, on a honeymoon trip to Vera Cruz, and mementoes, among these Dolores, were all over the place）。 She wore that day a pretty print dress that I had seen on her once before, ample in the skirt, tight in the bodice, short sleeved, pink, checkered with darker pink, and to complete the color schemes,she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple. She was not shod, however, for church. And her white Sunday purse lay discarded near the phonograph.
My heart beat like a drum as she sat down, cool skirt ballooning, subsiding on the sofa next to me, and played with her glossy fruit. She tossed it up into the sun-dusted air, and caught it——it made a cupped polished plop.
HumbertHumbert intercepted the apple .
"Give it back, "she pleaded, showing the marbled flush of her palms. I produced Delicious. She grasped it and bit into it, and my heart was like snov under thin crimson skin, and with the monkeyish nimbleness that was so typical of that American nymphet, she snatched out of my abstract grip the magazine I had opened （pity no film had recorded the curious pattern, the monogrammic linkage of our simultaneous or overlapping moves）. Rapidly, hardly hampered by the disfigured apple she held, Lo flipped violently through the pages in search of something she wished Humbert to see. Found it at last. I faked interest by bringing my head so close that her hair touched my temple and her arm brushed my cheek as she wiped her lips with her wrist. Because of the burnished mist through which I peered at the picture, I was slow in reacting to it, and her bare knees rubbed and knocked impatiently against each other Dimly there came into view:a surrealist painter relaxing, supine, on a beach and near him, likewise supine, a plaster replica of the Venus di Milo, half-buried in sand. Picture of the Week, said the legend. I whisked the whole obscene thing away. Next moment, in a sham effort to retrieve it, she was all over me. Caught her by her thin knobby wrist. The magazine escaped to the floor like a flustered fowl. She twisted herself free, recoiled, and lay back in the right-hand corner of the davenport. Then, with perfect simplicity, the impudent child extended her legs across my lap.
引自第159页The dandelions perished. A reek of sap mingled with the pineapple.引自第180页A surprise awaited me when at last the coins had satisfactorily clanked down and a voice allowed to answer mine.引自第223页She walked up to the open suitcase as if stalking it from afar, at a kind of slow-motion walk, peering at that distant treasure box on the luggage support. She stepped up to it, lifting her rather high-heeled feet rather high, and bending her beautiful boy-knees while she walked through dilating space with the lentor of one walking under water or in a flight dream. Then she raised by the armlets a copper-colored, charming and quite expensive vest, very slowly stretching it between her silent hands as if she were a bemused bird-hunter holding his breath over the incredible bird he spreads out by the tips of its flaming wings Then（while I stood waiting for her） she pulled out the slow snake of a brilliant belt and tried it on Then she crept into my waiting arms, radiant, relaxed, caressing me with her tender, mysterious, impure, indifferent, twilight eyes——for all the world, like the cheapest of cheap cuties. For that is what nymphets imitate——while we moan and die.引自第239页She told me the way she had been debauched We ate flavorless mealy bananas, bruised peaches and very palatable potato chips, and die kleine told me everything. Her voluble but disjointed account was accompanied by many a droll moue. As I think I have already observed, I especially remember one wry face on an"ugh！ "basis:jelly-mouth distended sideways and eyes rolled up in a routine blend of comic disgust, resignation and tolerance for young frailty.引自第260页
By putting the geography of the United States into motion，I did my best for hours on end to give her the impression of"going places",of rolling on to some definite destination，to some unusual delight.I have never seen such smooth amiable roads as those that now radiated before us，across the crazy quilt of forty-eight states.Voraciously we consumed those long highways，in rapt silence we glided over their glossy black dance floors.Not only had Lo no eye for scenery but she furiously resented my calling her attention to this or that enchanting detail of landscape；which I myself learned to discern only after being exposed for quite a time to the delicate beauty ever present in the margin of our undeserving journey.By a paradox of pictorial thought，the average lowland North-American countryside had at first seemed to me something I accepted with a shock of amused recognition because of those painted oilcloths which were imported from America in the old days to be hung above
washstands in Central-European nurseries，and which fascinated a drowsy child at bed time with the rustic green views they depicted-opaque curly trees，a barn，cattle，a brook，the dull white of vague orchards in bloom，and perhaps a stone fence or hills of greenish gouache.But gradually the models of those elementary rusticities became stranger and stranger to the eye，the nearer I came to know them.Beyond the tilled plain，beyond the toy roofs，there would be a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness，a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm，peeled-peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional，dove-gray cloud fusing with the distant amorous mist.There might be a line or spaced trees silhouetted against the horizon，and hot still noons above a wilderness of clover，and Claude Lorrain clouds inscribed remotely into misty azure with only their cumulus part conspicuous against the neutral swoon of the background.Or again，it might be a stern El Greco horizon，pregnant with inky rain，and a passing glimpse of some mummy-necked farmer，and all around alternating strips of quick-silverish water and harsh green corn，the whole arrangement opening like a fan，somewhere in Kansas.
Now and then，in the vastness of those plains，huge trees would advance toward us to cluster self-consciously by the roadside and provide a bit of humanitarian shade above a picnic table，with sun flecks，flattened paper cups，samaras and discarded ice-cream sticks littering the brown ground.A great user of roadside facilities，my unfastidious Lo would be charmed by toilet signs——Guys-Gals，John-Jane，Jack-Jill and even Buck's-Doe's；while lost in an artist's dream，I would stare at the honest brightness of the gasoline paraphernalia against the splendid green of oaks，or at a distant hill scrambling out——scarred but still untamed——from the wilderness of agriculture that was trying to swallow it.
At night，tall trucks studded with colored lights，like dreadful giant Christmas trees，loomed in the darkness and thundered by the belated little sedan.And again next day a thinly populated sky，losing its blue to the heat，would melt overhead，and Lo would clamor for a drink，and her cheeks would hollow vigorously over the straw，and the car inside would be a furnace when we got in again，and the road shimmered ahead，with a remote car changing its shape mirage-like in the surface glare，and seeming to hang for a moment，old-
fashionedly square and high，in the hot haze.And as we pushed westward,patches of what the garage-man called"sage brush"appeared，and then the mysterious outlines of table-like hills，and then red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers，and then a mountain range，dun grading into blue，and blue into dream，and the desert would meet us with a steady gale，dust，gray thorn bushes，and hideous bits of tissue paper mimicking pale flowers among the prickles of wind-tortured withered stalks all along the highway；in the middle of which there sometimes stood simple cows，immobilized in a position（tail left，white eyelashes right）cutting across all human rules of traffic.引自第277页Well, we all wonder if anybody in the family has instructed Dolly in the process of mammalian reproduction. The general impression is that fifteen-year-old Dolly remains morbidly uninterested in sexual matters, or to be exact, represses her curiosity in order to save her ignorance and self-dignity. All right-fourteen. You see, Mr. Haze, Beardsley School does not believe in bees and blossoms, and storks and love birds, but it does believe very strongly in preparing its students for mutually satisfactory mating and successful child rearing. We feel Dolly could make excellent progress if only she would put her mind to her work. Miss Cormorant's report is significant in that respect. Dolly is inclined to be, mildly speaking, impudent. But all feel that primo, you should have your family doctor tell her the facts of life and, secundo, that you allow her to enjoy the companyof her schoolmates' brothers at the Junior Club or in Dr. Rigger's organization, or in the lovely homes of our parents."引自第333页
No hereafter is acceptable if it does not produce her as she was then, in that Colorado resort between Snow and Elphinstone, with everything right: the white wide little-boy shorts, the slender waist, the apricot midriff, the white breast-kerchief whose ribbons went up and encircled her neck to end behind in a dangling knot leaving bare her gaspingly young and adorable apricot shoulder blades with that pubescence and those lovely gentle bones, and the smooth, downward-tapering back. Her cap had a white peak. Her racket had cost me a small fortune. Idiot, triple idiot! I could have filmed her!I would have had her now with me, before my eyes, in the projection room of my pain and despair!
She would wait and relax for a bar or two of white-lined time before going into the act of serving, and often bounced the ball once or twice, or pawed the ground a little, always at ease, always rather vague about the score, always cheerful as she so seldom was in the dark life she led at home. Her tennis wasthe highest point to which I can imagine a young creature bringing the art of make-believe, although I daresay, for her it was the very geometry of basic reality.
引自第380页".. Because, really,"I continued,"there is no point in staying here."
"There is no point in staying anywhere,"said Lolita.引自第397页She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds...but thank God it was not that echo alone that I worshiped.What I used to pamper among the tangled vines of my heart, mon grand pécbé radieux, had dwindled to its essence: sterile and selfish vice, all that I canceled and cursed. You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court, but until I am gagged and half-throttled,I will shout my poor truth.I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another's child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine; Changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allons vivre quelgue part où nous ne serons jamais séparés; Ohio? The wilds of Massachusetts? No matter, even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torn-even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita.
引自第440页
I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.
2020-01-20 15:37
I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.
Alice是女的
上海译文出版社2005版
张不赖
上海译文出版社2005版
夏日飞雪Sara
外语教学与研究出版社2000版
核桃·兰花草
译林出版社2000版
东囡西北
外语教学与研究出版社2000版
希夷
译林出版社2000版
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Humbert's "Wanted" poem after Lo's gone. It has so much obsession that no movie's able to capture. Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze. Hair: Brown. Lips: scarlet. Age: five thousand three hundred days. Profession: none, or "starlet." Where are you hiding, Dolores Haze? Why are you hiding, darling? (I Talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling). Where are you riding, Dolores ...
纳博科夫对自己这部作品的非同寻常之处深具自知之明。在前言当中，他就借虚构的编者John Ray之口，以辩护者的姿态，袒露了他对Lolita的定位：“…and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise.”同样的口吻，也暗示了他对这本书的争议地位的预期。因此，前言一定程度上被用作读者与作品中间的缓冲区，一剂镇静剂，当然，也是他对自己...
4 有用 匿名 2015-06-11
初中的时候以看皇叔的目的读了这本，看了3/4也没发现黄在哪里。最近又读了一下，才发现那时候真是拿衣服。
5 有用 阿依达 2014-03-28
All literati is impotent and verbose. 亨博特絮絮叨叨的叙述使他本人显得更加偏执、软弱、狂热，人格特质十分突出，虽然读起来有时候会冗长—洛丽塔应该也是类似感觉的吧，有时候崇拜他很富有知识想法，有时却想对他自我陶醉、矫情的文人酸气说，“滚你妈的！还有完没完了！”或者说，“闭嘴吧，你这个性无能的中二病老头子！”
2 有用 海上花开 2007-02-05
自己现编英文的怪叔叔~~
11 有用 琴 酒 2013-10-20
以前读的时候因为词汇太难放弃了，这遍读还好。重读的原因大概是受纳博科夫回忆这本书的语气所吸引，他总是那么亲切的称呼洛丽塔为“我的小仙女”，像是对待心爱的蝴蝶标本。比小时候读的时候懂了很多，亨伯特对读者的引诱，叙述被压抑的一面，在同情和罪恶之间摇摆。新发现是这本书里的环境描写特别好，有很浓重的拼贴感，但又笼罩在意识和无意识、辩解和天真的角力之下。但最大的乐趣大概是看见亨伯特的法语就想象他的腔调小声把... 以前读的时候因为词汇太难放弃了，这遍读还好。重读的原因大概是受纳博科夫回忆这本书的语气所吸引，他总是那么亲切的称呼洛丽塔为“我的小仙女”，像是对待心爱的蝴蝶标本。比小时候读的时候懂了很多，亨伯特对读者的引诱，叙述被压抑的一面，在同情和罪恶之间摇摆。新发现是这本书里的环境描写特别好，有很浓重的拼贴感，但又笼罩在意识和无意识、辩解和天真的角力之下。但最大的乐趣大概是看见亨伯特的法语就想象他的腔调小声把它读出来。 (展开)
70 有用 已注销 2011-01-31
纳博科夫那种软软的情绪，在软软的法文中轻轻地流淌。当时我一点法语都不懂，看的有点恼火，总觉得他在背着我卖弄风情。
0 有用 MagZ 2020-07-02
read in 2018
0 有用 Huiii 2020-07-02
反而是那些蜿蜒的山路、不起眼的汽车旅馆，荒僻小镇上的main street和安静的加油站最激起自己的情绪，想起那次环美自驾了...可惜不可能再有相同的lolita了（不瞎想了）。重逢Lolita那一章写得太强了，那最后一句话，“雨刷开到最大，却抹不掉我满脸的泪花”看到无比心痛，最后二人的“心理战”也感觉达到了想象力的极致。我仍然不认可纳博科夫说的“从一本小说中看到一个国家、阶层或者作者，是幼稚的想... 反而是那些蜿蜒的山路、不起眼的汽车旅馆，荒僻小镇上的main street和安静的加油站最激起自己的情绪，想起那次环美自驾了...可惜不可能再有相同的lolita了（不瞎想了）。重逢Lolita那一章写得太强了，那最后一句话，“雨刷开到最大，却抹不掉我满脸的泪花”看到无比心痛，最后二人的“心理战”也感觉达到了想象力的极致。我仍然不认可纳博科夫说的“从一本小说中看到一个国家、阶层或者作者，是幼稚的想法”，不过也要尊重他只是讲好一个无比美丽而动人的故事的信念。 (展开)
0 有用 NiurNiur 2020-06-21
Your butterfly and your chess
0 有用 Leaky Faucet 2020-06-20
原著实在是太好了 纳博科夫的语言真的有魔力啊
0 有用 北枳 2020-06-16
一个疯子的辩解:病名为爱