Translating Autobiography into Fiction

Chiasmus and the Play of the Authorial Mind in Hamlet and Pale Fire

Authors

Delia Ungureanu Harvard University and University of Bucharest

Abstract

The traditional view of Nabokovian criticism holds that Shakespeare's Timon of Athens is the major intertextual source for Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire. In this paper, I will argue that Hamlet, not Timon of Athens, is the major source for Nabokov's rewriting. To do so, I will use historical, biographical, linguistic, stylistic, and rhetorical arguments, and examine chiasmus as a structural device used both by Nabokov and Shakespeare.

Author Biography

Delia Ungureanu, Harvard University and University of Bucharest

Delia Ungureanu is Assistant Professor of Literary Theory in the Department of Literary Studies at the University of Bucharest and Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard. Her research fields include Surrealism as world literature, oneiric literature, politics and ideology, sociology of (world) literature, poetics and rhetoric, canon and canon formation, literary institutions, and European modern and modernist poetry. Her book Poetica Apocalipsei. Razboiul cultural in revistele literare romanesti (1944-1947) [The Poetics of the Apocalypse: The Cultural War in the Romanian Literary Magazines (1944-1947), Bucharest University Press, 2012] was nominated for the 2012 Literary Awards of the Writers' Union in Romania, as well as the literary magazine Observator cultural's 2012 Literary Awards in the category Best 2012 Debut in Literary Theory and Criticism. Other publications include essays on canon formation and on modern poetry and poetics, which have appeared in edited volumes and literary journals in three languages (English, French, Romanian). She is currently working on a book about surrealism as world literature that will look at the worldwide spread of Surrealism through Breton and Dali, as well as the legacy of surrealism in Borges, Nabokov, Orhan Pamuk and Mircea Cartarescu. She is co-editing with Thomas Pavel (University of Chicago) a volume dedicated to Romanian literature to be published at Brill in 2017, "Romanian Literature for the World: Circulation and Exchange on the International Market."