Nabokov

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French (Nikolka Persik, Berlin: Slovo 1922) and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland from English (Anya v strane chudes, Berlin: Gamayun, 1923). Both playfully hark back, the one to courtly England, the other to Rabelaisian France. Nabokov cheerfully russianized both, trawling dictionaries for suitable archaic equivalents. He also made Wne appropriative translations of French and English poets, amongst them Verlaine, Rimbaud, Supervielle, Rupert Brooke, and Yeats.

The switch to primary use of English brought changes of approach. His translations into Russian, for all the interlingual play and neologizing that characterize Nabokov’s style, remained essentially domesticating: innovation is, after all, relative to normative form. The ‘russianizing’ of Lolita, for instance, which he took into his own ‘safe hands’ (1967), sparkles with all the energy of the original, featuring hundreds of new usages, and Russian in place of Anglophone allusions. Creative adjustments were defended on grounds of authorial licence.

Into English, however, the pattern is more complex: ‘fair imitation’ was abandoned for more or less word-for-word solutions when translating others, but for his own work, Nabokov always produced approximate replicas. Working methods varied, however: whereas Russian was always handled alone, Nabokov came to prefer collaboration into English, revising and polishing drafts prepared by skilled translators (mostly, and most happily, with his son Dmitri as ‘docile assistant’). Translation, he complained, drained him of precious energies needed for new writing and required ‘another section of the brain than the text of my book, and switching from the one to another by means of spasmodic jumps causes a kind of mental asthma’ (Letter to James Laughlin, 16 July 1942, in Selected Letters 1940–1977, ed. Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), 40).

The temptation to improve on the ‘greener fruits’ of an earlier self was irresistible to such a proliWc, inventive writer. In two cases, translation turned into serial rewriting: Otchaianie (1932), Wrst composed in Russian, was self-translated into English as Despair (1935), but further revised for republication, still as Despair, in 1966 (New York: Putnam’s, 1966). Nabokov’s memoirs began as Conclusive Evidence (1951), were reworked into Russian as Drugie berega (1954), and then underwent further transformation before Wnal publication as Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (New York: Putnam’s, 1966), a process he described thus: ‘This re-Englishing of a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the Wrst place, proved to be a diabolical task, but some consolation was given me by the thought that such multiple metamorphosis, familiar to butterXies, had not been tried by any human before’ (Speak, Memory

(1966), 12–13).

On his painful switch of language, Nabokov would later write:

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None of my American friends have read my Russian books and thus every appraisal on the strength of my English ones is bound to be out of focus. My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural language, my natural idiom, my rich, inWnitely rich and docile Russian tongue, for a second-rate brand of English. (‘On a Book Entitled Lolita’, 1956, postscript to Lolita

(1958), 316)

The achievement of Lolita is all the greater for this sense of loss, yet its success is, paradoxically, partly due to the relative weakness of Nabokov’s early English. Discovering he was ‘tri-literary’ rather than tri-lingual—never having lived in an English-speaking household, he lacked what he called ‘domestic diction’—Nabokov turned what he perceived as an impediment to advantage by giving his style a baroque, hyper-literary tone (‘You talk like a book,’ Lolita complains to Humbert). It would also engender some memorable, tragicomic outsiders (Pnin, Humbert, and Kinbote). The mature Nabokovian voice would be self-conscious, richly intertextual, and always a little foreign. It would resist easy access through involute structures and intricate language, its complexity increasing in inverse proportion to the rugged plainness of translation, although in fact both called for close attention (‘the re-reader’ being addressed in Ada).

Teaching Russian and European literature in translation gave further impetus to literalism. A literal translation did not seek to entertain or delight, but to educate and inform. Appalled at the shortcomings of versions praised by publishers and critics, Nabokov complained:

I am teaching a course in European Fiction at Cornell University and have selected as a permanent item Flaubert’s ‘Madame Bovary’. In September I ordered, for a class of 133 students [ . . . ] your edition of that novel [ . . . ] I devoted seven class meetings to the discussion of the novel, and at least 10 minutes of every such period had to be spent in correcting the incredible mistranslations (more exactly, only the worst of them). In point of fact every page of the book contains at least three or four blunders—either obvious mistakes, or slovenly translations giving the wrong slant to Flaubert’s intention. His lovely descriptions of visual things, clothes, landscapes, Emma’s hairdo etc. are completely botched by the translator. I had to revise all this, going through each word of the book with a copy of the French Wrst edition before me and have found, in addition to the various blunders due to the translator’s insuYcient French, a number of misprints due, in most cases, to faulty proofreading (‘beads’ for ‘meads’, ‘came’ for ‘cane’—that sort of thing) [...]

My intention was to use the book next year and in later years. As my classroom analysis of Flaubert’s style is a close one, and as my students are not expected to have enough French to turn to the French original, the situation is an alarming one [...] My suggestion is that

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before you make a new printing of your new edition (the one ‘based on the Eleanor Marx Aveling translation with corrections and modernization by the editor’, 1946), you accept from me a list of more than 1000 corrections [ . . . ] I have also come to the conclusion that a number of notes elucidating local, literary and historical allusions, which are absolutely incomprehensible to the American student, ought to be added to the English translation of the book [ . . . ] and this I would also be willing to do [ . . . ] (To John Selby, Editor at Rinehart, 17 January 1951 (Selected Letters (1989), 111–12))

Here are all the signs of Nabokov’s growing functionalism. The good reader, he believed, should be ready to work at the text, to take a Schleiermachian journey into an estranged world and meet the author (or translator) at least halfway:

The good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary and some artistic sense [ . . . and who will] notice and fondle details . . . Up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at the top, on a windy ridge, whom do you think he meets? The panting and happy reader, and there they spontaneously embrace and are linked for ever, if the book lasts forever [ . . . ] (‘Good Readers and Good Writers’, c.1940s, in Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981 / London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), 1–6)

The Art of Translation

Nabokov had begun to air his views soon after arrival in America, publishing the ‘The Art of Translation’ in 1941. Despite a taxonomist’s tendency to draw up rules and categories, he eschewed the abstractions of theory proper: sarcastically descriptive and stridently prescriptive, he appealed to an aesthetics that informed his own work. Couched in measured scholarly discourse, his views might have won more friends, but the colourful disparagements of a little-known foreign writer only raised hackles.

From ‘The Art of Translation’, The New Republic, New York, 4 Aug. 1941; repr. in

Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981 / London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), 315

Three grades of evil can be discerned in the queer world of verbal transmigration. The Wrst, and lesser one, comprises obvious errors due to ignorance or misguided knowledge. This is mere human frailty and thus excusable. The next step to Hell is taken by the translator who intentionally skips words or passages that he does not bother to understand or that might seem obscure or obscene to vaguely imagined readers; he accepts the

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blank look that his dictionary gives him without any qualms; or subjects scholarship to primness: he is as ready to know less than the author as he is to think he knows better. The third, and worst, degree of turpitude is reached when a masterpiece is planished and patted into such a shape, vilely beautiWed in such a fashion as to conform to the notions and prejudices of a given public.

[ . . . ]

Barring downright deceivers, mild imbeciles and impotent poets, there exist, roughly speaking, three types of translators—and this has nothing to do with my three categories of evil; or, rather, any of the three types may err in a similar way. These three are: the scholar who is eager to make the world appreciate the works of an obscure genius as much as he does himself; the well meaning hack; and the professional writer relaxing in the company of a foreign confre`re. The scholar will be, I hope, exact and pedantic: footnotes—on the same page as the text and not tucked away at the end of the volume— can never be too copious and detailed. The laborious lady translating at the eleventh hour the eleventh volume of somebody’s collected works will be, I am afraid, less exact and less pedantic; but the point is not that the scholar commits fewer blunders than a drudge; the point is that as a rule both he and she are hopelessly devoid of any semblance of creative genius. Neither learning nor diligence can replace imagination and style.

Now comes the authentic poet who has the two last assets and who Wnds relaxation in translating a bit of Lermontov or Verlaine between writing poems of his own. Either he does not know the original language and calmly relies upon the so-called ‘literal’ translation made for him by a far less brilliant but a little more learned person, or else, knowing the language, he lacks the scholar’s precision and the professional translator’s experience. The main drawback, however, in this case is the fact that the greater his individual talent, the more apt he will be to drown the foreign masterpiece under the sparkling ripples of his own personal style. Instead of dressing up like the real author, he dresses up the author as himself.

We can deduce now the requirements that a translator must possess in order to be able to give an ideal version of a foreign masterpiece. First of all he must have as much talent, or at least the same kind of talent, as the author he chooses [ . . . ] Second, he must know thoroughly the two nations and the two languages involved and be perfectly acquainted with all details relating to his author’s manner and methods; also, with the social background of words, their fashions, history and period associations. This leads to the third point: while having genius and knowledge he must possess the gift of mimicry and be able to act, as it were, the real author’s part by impersonating his tricks of demeanor and speech, his ways and his mind, with the utmost degree of verisimilitude [ . . . ]

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During the 1950s, Nabokov translated chieXy for academic purposes. His version of the anonymous Slovo o polku Igoreve, for example, was originally prepared for teaching at Harvard in 1949, but when published, with commentary and notes, in 1960 under the title

The Song of Igor’s Campaign. An Epic of the Twelfth Century (Vintage 1960; repr. Ann Arbor: Ardis 1988), Nabokov deliberately rendered it still ‘less readable’, warning: ‘I have ruthlessly sacriWced manner to matter and have attempted to give a literal rendering of the text as I understand it.’ Despite the rough-hewn texture, it retains some poetry: the Old Russian text, originally composed in the twelfth century, or perhaps forged in the eighteenth, is rendered in broadly modern English, with archaisms employed in token rather than in toto, matching perceived anachronisms for the sake of ‘historical exactitude’. In this, he diVered signiWcantly from Pound, for example, whose transposition of an entire text to a past, dead form Nabokov considered fake, no matter how (or, especially, whether) ‘inspired’. The abstruse lexis that occurs everywhere in Nabokov is used always for precision of meaning rather than eVect.

The Song of Igor’s Campaign, p. 36, lines 130–50

Igor leads Donwards his warriors. His misfortunes already

are forefelt by the birds in the oakscrub. The wolves, in the ravines,

conjure the storm.

The erns with their squalling summon the beasts to the bones. The foxes yelp

at the vermilion shields. O Russian land,

you are already behind the culmen!

Long does the night keep darkling. Dawn sheds its light.

Mist has covered the Welds.

Stilled is the trilling of nightingales; the jargon of jackdaws has woken. With their vermilion shields

the sons of Rus have barred the great prairie, seeking for themselves honor,

and for their prince glory.

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From foreword to the translation, in collaboration with Dmitri Nabokov of Lermontov’s A Hero of our Time (New York: Doubleday, 1958)

This is the Wrst English translation of Lermontov’s novel. The book has been paraphrased into English several times, but never translated before. The experienced hack may Wnd it quite easy to turn Lermontov’s Russian into slick English cliche´s by means of judicious omission, ampliWcation, and levigation; and he will tone down everything that might seem unfamiliar to the meek and imbecile reader visualized by his publisher. But the honest translator is faced with a diVerent task.

In the Wrst place we must dismiss, once and for all the conventional notion that a translation ‘should read smoothly’ and ‘should not sound like a translation’ (to quote the would-be compliments, addressed to vague versions, by genteel reviewers who have and never will read the original texts). In point of fact, any translation that does not sound like a translation is bound to be inexact upon inspection; while, on the other hand, the only virtue of a good translation is faithfulness and completeness. Whether it reads smoothly or not, depends on the model, not on the mimic.

Pushkin

In a lecture given in Paris in 1937 (attended by James Joyce) entitled ‘Pouchkine: ou le vrai et le vraisemblable’ (‘Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible’, trans. Dmitri Nabokov, New York Review of Books, 31 March 1988), Nabokov had declared:

Those of us who really know him revere him with unparalleled fervor and purity, and experience a radiant feeling when the richness of his life over-Xows into the present to Xood our spirit [...] To read his works [ . . . ] and to reread them endlessly is one of the glories of earthly life.

Nabokov’s early eVorts at translating Pushkin were considered ‘the best translations of poetry of any kind’ by the American critic Edmund Wilson (The Nabokov-Wilson Letters : Correspondence between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, 1941–1971, ed. Simon Karlinsky (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 42), who encouraged the publication of a small collection (Three Russian Poets: Pushkin, Lermontov and Tyutchev, Vladimir Nabokov, Norfolk: New Directions, 1945). Nabokov later dismissed these translations as ‘graceful imitations’, however, and in 1955 expressed his deep misgivings about ‘traducing’ Pushkin in a poem published in The New Yorker. Ostensibly a model of the fourteen-line Onegin stanza, Nabokov’s poetic apology was reprinted in his translator’s introduction to Eugene Onegin (1964 and 1975, vol. i. 9). It begins:

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What is translation? On a platter A poet’s pale and glaring head,

A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter, And profanation of the dead.

[ . . . ].

Nabokov felt ambivalent about translating Pushkin. He longed to reveal to the Anglophone world a poet that meant more to himself (and all Russian speakers) than any other, yet found the impersonation involved in conventional translation increasingly abhorrent, especially while he still feared sounding second-rate in his own creative voice. He knew that Pushkin’s special magic, like that of all great poets, lay in the speciWc ‘combinational delights’ of sound and sense that would always elude recapture in another language. In the Nabokovian universe, the speciWc is constantly opposed to the general, while mimicry, masquerade, and imitation are always equated with falsity, fakery, and phoneyness. After years of experimentation, Nabokov Wnally hit on the ‘right approach’ but only disclosed it a decade later. He meanwhile outlined the diYculties in ‘Problems of Translation: ‘‘Onegin’’ in English’.

From ‘Problems of Translation: ‘‘Onegin’’ in English’, Partisan Review, 22 (1955), Repr. in R. Schulte and J. Biguenet (eds.), Theories of Translation (Chicago: Chicago University Press 1992); and in L. Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader (New York & London: Routledge 2000)

I

I constantly Wnd in reviews of verse translations the following kind of thing that sends me into spasms of helpless fury: ‘Mr (or Miss) So-and-so’s translation reads smoothly.’ In other words, the reviewer of the ‘translation,’ who neither has, nor would be able to have, without special study, any knowledge whatsoever of the original, praises as ‘readable’ an imitation only because the drudge or the rhymster has substituted easy platitudes for the breathtaking intricacies of the text. ‘Readable,’ indeed! A schoolboy’s boner is less of a mockery in regard to the ancient masterpiece than its commercial interpretation or poetization. ‘Rhyme’ rhymes with ‘crime,’ when Homer or Hamlet are rhymed. The term ‘free translation’ smacks of knavery and tyranny. It is when the translator sets out to render the ‘spirit’—not the textual sense—that he begins to traduce his author. The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.

[ . . . ]

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IV

The person who desires to turn a literary masterpiece into another language, has only one duty to perform, and this is to reproduce with absolute exactitude the whole text, and nothing but the text. The term ‘literal translation’ is tautological since anything but that is not truly a translation but an imitation, an adaptation or a parody.

The problem, then, is a choice between rhyme and reason: can a translation while rendering with absolute Wdelity the whole text, and nothing but the text, keep the form of the original, its rhythm and its rhyme? To the artist whom practice within the limits of one language, his own, has convinced that matter and manner are one, it comes as a shock to discover that a work of art can present itself to the would-be translator as split into form and content, and that the question of rendering one but not the other may arise at all. Actually what happens is still a monist’s delight: shorn of its primary verbal existence, the original text will not be able to soar and to sing; but it can be very nicely dissected and mounted, and scientiWcally studied in all its organic details [ . . . ]

VII

[ . . . ] Here are three conclusions I have arrived at: 1. It is impossible to translate Onegin in rhyme. 2. It is possible to describe in a series of footnotes the modulations and rhymes of the text as well as all its associations and other special features. 3. It is possible to translate Onegin with reasonable accuracy by substituting for the fourteen rhymed tetrameter lines of each stanza fourteen unrhymed lines of varying length, from iambic diameter to iambic pentameter.

These conclusions can be generalized. I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity. I want such footnotes and the absolutely literal sense, with no emasculation and no padding—I want such sense and such notes for all the poetry in other tongues that still languishes in ‘poetical’ versions, begrimed and beslimed by rhyme. And when my Onegin is ready, it will either conform exactly to my vision or not appear at all.

[Nabokov’s Onegin Wnally reached publication in 1964. The method was didactic and scholarly. Rather than recreating Pushkin’s ‘limpid harmonies [ . . . ] multiple melodies [ . . . ] and precise and luminous images’ in the usual Byronic pastiche, Nabokov attempted to match not only meaning word-for-word but the syllabic rhythm of the Russian as well. The stanzaic form was retained but all other rhetorical features suppressed, although lyric moments still glint like shards among rubble. The English translation was interlinear, designed to keep pace exactly with Pushkin’s cyrillic on a second line and its roman transliteration on a third. Notes would ideally be accommodated close to the relevant text, even though some of them ran to many sides. In the event, the published edition

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comprised four separate volumes, one each for the English and Russian texts, and two for the 1200 pages of compendious notes and commentaries. These analyse details of style, variants, and sources and place both poem and poet in full historical, intellectual, and artistic contexts. Nabokov’s provocative Foreword sets the tone.]

From Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin, trans. from the Russian, with commentary, by Vladimir Nabokov, (Bollingen Series 72, 1964); Princeton: Princeton University Press, rev. 1975), vol. i, Foreword, pp. vii–x

[ . . . ] Can Pushkin’s poem, or any other poem with a deWnite rhyme scheme, be really translated? To answer this we should Wrst deWne the term ‘translation.’ Attempts to render a poem in another language fall into three categories:

(1) Paraphrastic: oVering a free version of the original, with omissions and additions prompted by the exigencies of form, the conventions attributed to the consumer, and the translator’s ignorance. Some paraphrases may possess the charm of stylish diction and idiomatic conciseness, but no scholar should succumb to stylishness and no reader be fooled by it.

(2) Lexical (or constructional): rendering the basic meaning of words (and their order). This a machine can do under the direction of an intelligent bilinguist.

(3) Literal: rendering, as closely as the associative and syntactical capacities of another language allow, the exact contextual meaning of the original. Only this is true translation.

Let me give an example of each method. The opening quatrain of Eugene Onegin, transliterated and prosodically accented, reads:

Moy dya´dya sa´mih che´stnı¨h pra´vil,

Kogda´ ne v shu´tku zanemo´g,

On uvazha´t sebya´ zasta´vil,

I lu´chshe vıdumat’ ne mo´g . . .

This can be paraphrased in an inWnite number of ways. For example:

My uncle, in the best tradition,

By falling dangerously sick

Won universal recognition

And could devise no better trick . . .

The lexical or constructional translation is:

My uncle [is] of most honest rules [:] when not in jest [he] has been taken ill, he to respect him has forced [one], and better invent could not . . .