This is going to sound monumentally egotistical, but at an early stage in my writing I became conscious of using wordplay that I knew wouldn’t translate well into another language. That came out of my obsession with the works of Vladimir Nabokov. So I stopped doing too much of that, which is difficult because wordplay comes fairly natural to me. And the problem with wordplay that’s too abstruse is this: if a reader doesn’t get it, then it was a waste of time to do it in the first place; if a reader does get it, it’s not really that much to get. I’ve analyzed the double entendres and multilingual puns in several of Nabokov’s books. That’s not what’s of most interest about him as a writer. What is interesting is his idiosyncratic persona and his obsession with death, harm, loss, and all those bad things which are at the core of literature in general but which, for a major big shot writer of the modern era, are especially pronounced in Nabokov.
Bill Tracer on 12 Jun 13I recently came upon a post exploring the possibility of Time Travel. In that post the writer, ( my friend &tarunandlaxmi ) pointed out that most conventional scientists of our day think backward time travel, or traveling into the past is an impossibility. However, according to Relativity Theory skipping into the future should be quite possible, given the ability to attain great speeds approaching but not quite reaching the speed of light. We aren't that fast yet, but if we should live long enough, and attain sufficient technological advancement, relativistic speeds are within our grasp. When that day comes, the principles of time dilation will make future time travel very possible. However, by that method, it is a one way trip. There would be no way to come back with that particular technological approach. But we are still left with the question; is it possible to travel back to the past, by some other technological method?
