Strong opinions Page 22
10. Wobbly English. The phrase «next door» is used to mean «next room» (pp. 122 and 133). A skeleton impossibly «pouts» on p. 122. Lenski in the duel «closing his left eye starts to level» but Arndt (p. 132) makes him take aim with «his left eye blinking» like the corresponding tail light of a turning truck; soon after which (p. 157) «Dead lies our dim young bard and lover by friendly hand and weapon felled». And the amazon of Six: xli whom Pushkin pictures as halting her steed before Lenski's grave is hilariously made to «rein in her charging horse».
11. Padding. Plug words and rhymes are bound to occur in rhymed versions, but I have seldom seen them used with such consistency and in such profusion as here. A typical example of routine padding (for the sake of a bad rhyme) is the puffing up of the literal «she says: farewell pacific dales, and you, familiar hill tops» (Seven: xxviii) to become, in Arndt's version; «(she) whispers: Calm valleys where I sauntered, farewell; lone summits that I haunted». When in the same chapter Tatiana is described by Pushkin as avidly reading Onegin's books whereupon «a different world is revealed to her», this becomes with Arndt: «an eager passage (!) door on door (!) to worlds she never knew before». Here simple padding shades into the next category of mistranslation.
12. Otsebyatina. This convenient cant word consists of the words ot, meaning «from», and sebya, meaning «oneself», with a pejorative suffix, yatina, tagged on (its ya takes improper advantage of the genitive ending of the pronoun, coinciding with it and producing a strongly stressed bya sound which to a Russian's ear connotes juvenile disgust). Lexically translated, it can be rendered as «come-from-one-selfer» or «from one-selfity». It is employed to describe the personal contributions of selfsufficient or desperate translators (or actors who have forgotten their speeches). Here are some grotesque examples of otsebyatina in Arndt. Pushkin is describing (Eight: xxiv) the guests at Princess N's soiree: «Here were, in mobcaps and roses elderly ladies, wicked looking; here were several maidens — unsmiling faces». This is all there is about those ladies and maidens, but Arndt otsebyatinates thus: «... redecorated ladies with caps from France and scowls from Hades; among them here and there a girl without a smile from curl to curl (a fiendish ungrin!). My other example refers to One: xxxiii where Pushkin has a famous description of «the waves, running in turbulent succession, with love to lie down at her feet»; this becomes «the waves . . . with uproar each the other goading, to curl in love about her feet». One hardly knows what infects one's fancy more painfully here — those waves prodding each other with tridents or that little drain-hole vortex in which their «uproar» ends.
Mr. Arndt's notes to his translation are lean and derivative but even so he manages to make several mistakes. The statement (p. xi) that the third edition of Eugene Onegin «appeared on the day of Pushkin's death» is wrong: it appeared not later than January 19, 1837, Old Style, that is at least ten days before the poet's death. He began writing Eugene Onegin not «on May 28, 1822», as Arndt (led astray by another bungling commentator and adding his own mistake) notes, but on May 9, 1823. The statuette of Napoleon with folded arms in Chapter Seven is not a «bust» (as stated in a note on p. 191): normal busts do not have arms to fold. The remark on p. 223 that «... Prolasov has been proposed» to fill in a gap in the printed text (first line of Eight: xxvi) is nonsense, since «Prolasov» never existed, being merely a comedy name (meaning «climber» or «vile sycophant») preserved in Pushkin's fair copy and misapplied by some editors to Andrey Saburov, director of the Imperial theaters.
Mr. Arndt's most bizarre observation, however, comes on page vi, towards the end of his preface: «The present new translation ... is not aimed primarily at the academic and literary expert, but at a public of Englishspeaking students and others interested in a central work of world literature in a compact and readable form». — which is tantamount to proclaiming: «I know this is an inferior product but it is gaily colored and nicely packed, and is, anyway, just for students and such people».
It is only fair to add that this «brilliant» (as said on the upper-side of the volume) and «splendid» (as said on its underside) new translation has won one half of the third annual Bollingen prize for the best translation of poetry in English (as the librarian James T. Babb of the Yale University Library announced on November 19, 1963, in New Haven, Conn.). The committee making the awards included Professors Peyre, Rene Wellek, and John Hollander, of Yale; and Professor Reuben A. Brouwer, of Harvard University. (I rely on Steve Kezerian, Director of the Yale University News Bureau, for the spelling of these names). Representing the permanent committee of administration at Yale was Donald G. Wing, Associate Yale Librarian. One cannot help wondering if any of the professors really read this readable work — or the infinitely remote great poem of their laureate's victim.
Montreux, December 23, 1963
Published in The New York Review of Books on April 30, 1964. A «Second Printing, revised» of Arndt's «translation» appeared later (1965?) but despite the note saying (p. v) that «several emendations were suggested by Vladimir Nabokov's criticisms at various times» this «revised» version still remains as abominable as before.
A REPLY TO MY CRITICS
In regard to my novels my position is different. I cannot imagine myself writing a letter-to-the-editor in reply to an unfavorable review, let alone devoting almost a whole day to composing a magazine article of explanation, retaliation, and protest. I have waited at least thirty years to take notice — casual and amused notice — of some scurvy abuse I met with in my «V. Sirin» disguise, but that pertains to bibliography. My inventions, my circles, my special islands are infinitely safe from exasperated readers. Nor have I ever yielded to the wild desire to thank a benevolent critic — or at least to express somehow my tender awareness of this or that friendly writer's sympathy and understanding, which in some extraordinary way seem always to coincide with talent and originality, an interesting, though not quite inexplicable phenomenon.
If, however, adverse criticism happens to be directed not at those acts of fancy, but at such a matter-of-fact work of reference as my annotated translation of Eugene Onegin (hereafter referred to as EO), other considerations take over. Unlike my novels, EO possesses an ethical side, moral and human elements. It reflects the compiler's honesty or dishonesty, skill or sloppiness. If told I am a bad poet, I smile; but if told I am a poor scholar, I reach for my heaviest dictionary.
I do not think I have received all the reviews that appeared after EO was published; I fail to locate a few that I was sure I had in my chaotic study; but judging by the numerous ones that did reach me, one might conclude that literal translation represents an approach entirely devised by me; that it had never been heard of before; and that there was something offensive and even sinister about such a method and undertaking. Promoters and producers of what Anthony Burgess calls «arty translations» — carefully rhymed, pleasantly modulated versions containing, say, eighteen percent of sense plus thirty-two of nonsense and fifty of neutral padding are I think more prudent than they realize. While ostensibly tempted by impossible dreams, they are subliminally impelled by a kind of self-preservation. The «arty translation» protects them by concealing and camouflaging ignorance or incomplete information or the fuzzy edge of limited knowledge. Stark literalism, on the other hand, would expose their fragile frame to unknown and incalculable perils.
It is quite natural, then, that the solidly unionized professional paraphrast experiences a surge of dull hatred and fear, and in some cases real panic, when confronted with the possibility that a shift in fashion, or the influence of an adventurous publishing house, may suddenly remove from his head the cryptic rosebush he carries or the maculated shield erected between him and the specter of inexorable knowledge. As a result the canned music of rhymed versions is enthusiastically advertised, and accepted, and the sacrifice of textual precision applauded as something rather heroic, whereas only suspicion and bloodhounds await the gaunt, graceless literalist groping around in despair for the ob
scure word that would satisfy impassioned fidelity and accumulating in the process a wealth of information which only makes the advocates of pretty camouflage tremble or sneer.
These observations, although suggested by specific facts, should not be construed in a strictly pro domo sua sense. My EO falls short of the ideal crib. It is still not close enough and not ugly enough. In future editions I plan to defowleric it still more drastically. I think I shall turn it entirely into utilitarian prose, with a still bumpier brand of English, rebarbative barricades of square brackets and tattered banners of reprobate words, in order to eliminate the last vestiges of bourgeois poesy and concession to rhythm. This is something to look forward to. For the moment, all I wish is merely to put on record my utter disgust with the general attitude, amoral and Philistine, towards literalism.
It is indeed wonderful how indifferent most critics are to the amount of unwillful deceit going on in the translation trade. I recall once opening a copy of Bely's Petersburg in English, and lighting upon a monumental howler in a famous passage about a blue coupe which had been hopelessly discolored by the translator's understanding kubovyy (which means «blue») as «cubic»! This has remained a model and a symbol. But who cares and why bother? Mr. Rosen in The Saturday Review (November 28, 1964) ends his remarks on rhymed versions of Eugene Onegin with the expression of a rapturous hope: «It only remains for a talented poet like Robert Lowell to take advantage [of these versions] to produce a poem in English that really sings and soars». But this is an infernal vision to me who can distinguish in the most elaborate imitation the simple schoolboy howler from the extraneous imagery within which it is so pitifully imbedded. Again — what does it matter? «It is part of the act», as Mr. Edmund Wilson would say. The incredible errors in the translations from the Russian which are being published nowadays with frenetic frequency are dismissed as trivial blemishes that only a pedant would note.
Even Professor Muchnic, who in a recent issue of The New York Revtew of Books delicately takes Mr. Guy Daniels apart as if he were an unfamiliar and possibly defective type of coffee machine, neglects to point out that in both versions of Lermontov's poem which she quotes — Daniels' effort and Baring's very minor (pace Mirski) poem — the same grotesque imp blows a strident trumpet. For we have here an admirable example of one of those idiomatic freaks that for reasons of mental balance foreigners should not even try to rationalize. Lermontov's Russian goes: Sosedka est' u nib odna . . . Kak vspomnish', kak davno rasstaliis And the literal sense is: «They have a certain neighbor [fern.] . . . Oh, to think how long ago we parted!» The form vspomnish' looks like the second person singular of «remember», but in this intonational arrangement it should be the first person in literal translation since it is addressed by the speaker to himself. Now, both versionists being ignorant of idiomatic Russian did not hesitate to use the second person (though actually the result gives a painfully didactic twist to the sentence, which should have made the translator think twice). Baring's version (which Professor Muchnic, I am sorry to say, calls «a wonderfully precise reproduction of the sense, the idiom») runs: «We had a neighbor . . . and you remember I and she ..». While the more humble Daniels translates: «There was a girl as you'll recall..». I have italicized the shared boner. The point is not that one version is better than the other (frankly there is not much to choose between the two); the point is that unwittingly both use the same wrong person as if all paraphrasts were interconnected omphalically by an ectoplasmic band.
Despite the violent attitude towards literalism, I still find a little surprising the intensity of human passions that my rather dry, rather dull work provokes. Hack reviewers rush to the defense of the orthodox Soviet publicists whom I «chastise» and of whom they have never heard before. A more or less displaced Russian in New York maintains that my commentary is nothing but a collection of obscure trifles and that besides he remembers having heard it all many years ago in Gorki from his high-school teacher, A. A. Artamonov.
The word «mollitude», which I use a few times, has been now so often denounced that it threatens to become almost a household word, like «nymphet». One of my most furious and inarticulate attackers seems to be an intimate friend of Belinski (born 1811), as well as of all the paraphrasts I «persecute». The fury is, I suppose, pardonable and noble, but there would be no sense in my reacting to it. I shall also ignore some of the slapstick — such as a little item in The New Republic (April 3, 1965) which begins «Inspector Nabokov has revisited the scene of the crime in L'affaire (Jnegutne» and is prompted by a sordid little grudge of which the editor, presumably, had no knowledge. A reviewer writing in the Novyy Zhurnal (No. 77), Mr. Moris Fridberg — whom I am afraid I shall be accused of having invented — employs a particularly hilarious brand of bad Russian (kak izvestno dlya lyubogo studenta, as known «for» every student) to introduce the interesting idea that textual fidelity is unnecessary because «in itself the subject-matter of [Pushkin's] work is not very important». He goes on to complain that I do not say a word about such Pushkinists as Modzalevski, Tomashevski, Bondi, Shchyogolev, and Gofman — a statement that proves he has not only not read my commentary, but has not even consulted the Index; and on top of that he confuses me with Professor Arndt whose preliminary remarks about his «writing not for experts but students» Mr. Fridberg ascribes to me. A still more luckless gentleman (in the Los Angeles Times) is so incensed by the pride and prejudice of my commentary that he virtually chokes on his wrath and after enticingly entitling his article «Nabokov Fails as a Translator» has to break it off abruptly without having made one single reference to the translation itself. Among the more serious articles there is a long one in The New York Times Book Review, June 28, 1964, by Mr. Ernest Simmons, who obligingly corrects what he takes to be a misprint in One: xxv: 5; «Chadaev», he says, should be «Chaadaev»; but from my note to that passage he should have seen that «Chadaev» is one of the three forms of that name, and also happens to be Pushkin's own spelling in that particular line, which otherwise would not have scanned.
For obvious reasons I cannot discuss all the sympathetic reviews. I shall only refer to some of them in order to acknowledge certain helpful suggestions and corrections. I am grateful to John Bayley (The Observer, November 29, 1964) for drawing my attention to what he calls — much too kindly, alas — «the only slip» in my commentary: uAuf alien Gipfeln» (in the reference to Goethe's poem) should be corrected to « Ueber alien Uipfeln». (1 can add at least one other: My note to Two: xxxv: 8 contains a silly blunder and should be violently deleted.) Anthony Burgess in Encounter has suddenly and conclusively abolished my sentimental fondness for FitzGerald by showing how he falsified the «witty metaphysical tentmaker's» actual metaphors in «Awake] for morning in the bowl of Night . . . «. John Wain, in The Listener (April 29, 1965), by a sheer feat of style has made me at once sorry for one of my «victims» and weak with laughter: «This [the discussion of prosody], by the way, is the section in which Arthur Hugh Clough gets described as a poetaster; the effect is like that of seeing an innocent bystander suddenly buried by a fall of snow from a roof . . . «. J. Thomas Shaw, in The Russian Review (April 1965), observes that I should have promoted Pushkin after his graduation to the tenth civil rank («collegiate secretary») instead of leaving him stranded on the fourteenth rung of the ladder; but I cannot find in my copy the misprinted Derzhavin date which he also cites; and I strongly object to his listing James Joyce, whom I revere, among those writers whom I condemn «in contemptuous asides» (apparently Mr. Shaw has dreadfully misunderstood what I say about Joyce's characters falling asleep by applying it to Joyce's readers). Finally, the anonymous reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement (January 28, 1965) is perfectly right when he says that in my notes I do not discuss Pushkin's art in sufficient detail; he makes a number of attractive suggestions which, together with those of two other reviewers and several correspondents, would make a fifth volume, or at least a very handsome Festschrift. The same reviewer is much too lenient when he
remarks that «a careful scrutiny of every line has failed to reveal a single careless error in translation». There are at least two: in Four: xliii: 2T the word «but» should be deleted, and in Five: xi: 3, «lawn» should be «plain».
The longest, most ambitious, most captious, and, alas, most reckless, article is Mr. Edmund Wilson's in I he New York Review of Books (July 15, 1965)*, and this I now select for a special examination.
* This is the text readers should consult. It is reprinted in an abridged, emended, and incoherent form in Edmund Wilson's A Window on Russia Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1972.
A number of earnest simpletons consider Mr. Wilson to be an authority in my field («he misses few of Nabokov's lapses», as one hasty well-wisher puts it in a letter to The New York Review on August 26), and no doubt such delusions should not be tolerated; still, I am not sure that the necessity to defend my work from blunt jabs and incompetent blame would have been a sufficient incentive for me to discuss that article, had I not been moved to do so by the unusual, unbelievable, and highly entertaining opportunity that I am unexpectedly given by Mr. Wilson himself of refuting practically every item of criticism in his enormous piece. The mistakes and misstatements in it form an uninterrupted series so complete as to seem artistic in reverse, making one wonder if, perhaps, it had not been woven that way on purpose to be turned into something pertinent and coherent when reflected in a looking glass. I am unaware of any other such instance in the history of literature. It is a polemicist's dream come true, and one must be a poor sportsman to disdain what it offers.
As Mr. Wilson points out with such disarming good humor at the beginning of his piece, he and I are old friends. I fully reciprocate «the warm affection sometimes chilled by exasperation» that he says he feels for me. When I first came to America a quarter of a century ago, he wrote to me, and called on me, and was most kind to me in various matters, not necessarily pertaining to his profession. I have always been grateful to him for the tact he showed in not reviewing any of my novels while constantly saying flattering things about me in the so-called literary circles where I seldom revolve. We have had many exhilarating talks, have exchanged many frank letters. A patient confidant of his long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian language and literature, I have invariably done my best to explain to him his monstrous mistakes of pronunciation, grammar, and interpretation. As late as 1957, alone of our last meetings, in Ithaca, upstate New York, where I lived at the time, we both realized with amused dismay that, despite my frequent comments on Russian prosody, he still could not scan Russian verse. Upon being challenged to read Evgeniy Onegin aloud, he started to perform with great gusto, garbling every second word, and turning Pushkin's iambic line into a kind of spastic anapest with a lot of jaw-twisting haws and rather endearing little barks that utterly jumbled the rhythm and soon had us both in stitches.