The case of Peter A. Pertzoff was an interesting read, not only because of his troubled career interrupted by illness and enriched by so many different positions, but because we had available the process he worked with Nabokov, a literal translation submitted to a proficient author who revises, modifies and suggests. At first the chapter made it seem like Pertzoff actually occupied a rather subordinate position in regard to Nabokov, almost like a scribe who comes up with a rough draft that the author polishes into greatness, but looking into the letters you can notice that his work is respected and celebrated, while still being revised (i.e. the letter from November 24th, 1938 or March 1941). This case worked perfectly to illustrate the type of relationship between author and translator that Vanderschelden examines in her article, in a more in-depth instance since her examples are mostly kept brief but accurate due to the number of author-translator duos she brings into her argument. One thing that caught my attention was the fact that she introduces the interpretative constraint translators feel when working with the author, limiting the multiplicity of signifiers in the text, and that made me think about self-translators: as authors, they must know what they meant in the original, and as translators they must have a more reduced margin of error because of that, so are they attempting against what we consider the nature of translation, interpretive freedom?
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