Nabokov’s Pushkin

NABOKOV'S PUSHKIW When the news spread abroad some years ago that Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita, Pale Fire, Speak Memory, etc., was engaged in translating Eugene Onegin, there was expectant excitement among admirers of Pushkin. Several attempts to turn Pushkin's novel in verse-his most ambitious work and usually regarded as the supreme classic of Russian literature-into a corresponding rhymed stanza-form in English had already been made, but the results were open to grave criticism. Now the ideal translator seemed to have appeared at last. Mr. Nabokov was the descendant of an old family of the Russian aristocracy that had played a worthy part in the liberal politics of Czarist Russia, he had been brought up in that Russia until the outbreak of the Bolshevist Revolution, he had later lived in England and western Europe, had attended Cambridge and other European universities and had finally settled in the United States where he became Professor of Russian literature at Cornell University. He had produced bocks of all kinds (including verse) in both his native and his adopted tongues, which showed him to be not merely a master of both languages in the ordinary pragmatic sense, but a literary artist in both with an unusual sensitivity to the finer shadings of expression and verbal harmony in Russian and in English. His writing revealed in him also a dash of that New YorkeTish sophistication which does not come amiss in a translator of Pushkin. From such a background and such an equipment we might have expected one of the masterpieces of translation to emerge. On opening Vol. I of this handsome set of volumes from the Bollingen Foundation our first reaction is one of profound disappointment, almost of dismay. We are even tempted to reproach Mr. Nabokov in terms like those used by Dante regarding the pope who "made the Great Refusal" by declining to accept the high office which the poet counted on him to fill so nobly. Our sadness is increased as we read the two exquisitely turned stanzas on the art of translation in the precise metre of Pushkin's poem with which Mr. Nabokov whets our appetite while intimating at the same moment that he is not going to satisfy it. I reproduce here the 6rst of these stanzas because (l) it is such a convincing specimen of what be might have done as a translator, ( 2) it implies satirically his objection to a rhymed version, (3) it also adumbrates his own theory of translation. Here is the stanza: What is translation'? On a plattcr A poet's pale and glaring head. "'Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Alexandr Pushkin, translated from the Russian, with a Commentary by Vladimir Nahokov, in four volumes: Vol. I, Translator's Introduction: Eugene Onegin The Translation, pp. xxvi + 345; Vol. II: The Commentary : Preliminaries and ChapteIS One to Five, pp. xxi + 547; Vol. Ill: Commentary, Chapters Six to Eight, "Onegin's Journey" and "Chapter Ten," Appendixes, pp. xvi + 540; Vol. IV, Index, pp. 1-109: Russian Text (Photographic Reproduction of the 1837 edition), pp. 1-310. New York, Pantheon Books. 1964. NABOKOV'S PUSHKIN A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter, And profanation of the dead. The parasites you were so hard on Are pardoned if I have your pardon, o Pushkin, for my stratagem. I traveled down your secret stem And reached the root and fed upon it; Then, in a language newly learned, I grew another stalk and turned Your stanza, patterned on a sonnet, Into my honest, roadside proseAll thorn, but cousin to your rose. 303 So what we ultimately get is the first accurate literal translation of the poem into "honest roadside prose," the stanza-form being preserved to the eye by making each English line correspond to a Russian line as in the passage from the preliminaries to the duel (Chapter VI, stanza 26) which I reproduce below, and which will also illustrate the roughness of the English, for Nabokov does not hesitate to make even the order of the words in English correspond to the order in Russian, thus putting objects before verbs, etc. On the dam leaning, Lenski had been...