Howlers, Humour, Hubris : Translation and Truth in Nabokov’s Onegin
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1In his quirky Commentary to his controversial, literal translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin,1 Nabokov states that “[s]cholarship without humility or humor is a basic type of pedantry” (Nabokov in Pushkin 1964 II: 46). For those familiar with Nabokov’s scholarship, not least of all his Onegin, this remark will seem strange. For example, his disparagement of pedants is odd, since he is one: on the same page he states that “[o]ne variety of pedant is the person who likes to perorate, to air, if not to preach, his opinions, with great thoroughness and precision of detail,” which is an accurate description of his own practice; indeed, in his review of Nabokov’s Onegin John Wain asserts that “if the history of pedantry ever comes to be written,” Nabokov will be one of its “heroes” (Wain 1965: 32).2
2One of the two traits that Nabokov thinks temper pedantry does not tally with the Nabokov we know, either: as Alexander Dolinin observes, “if his own work sparkles with humor and wit, humility is definitely not one of its virtues” (Dolinin 1995: 126). Nabokov would not argue with this: in interview he admits that “[b]oundless modesty and what people call ‘humility’ are virtues scarcely conducive to one’s complacently dwelling upon one’s own work—particularly when one lacks them” (Nabokov 1973: 110). Irony complicates our interpretation of remarks like these;3 nevertheless, the haughty and arrogant author is a recognisable, recurring figure in Nabokov’s interviews, his fiction (e.g., The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, Pale Fire, Ada, Transparent Things, Look at the Harlequins!) and his scholarship, and is very much to the fore in his Onegin.
3With respect to the second attribute that Nabokov believes scholarship cannot do without, we are on firmer ground, for humour was a crucial part of his repertoire as a scholar; indeed, it would be difficult to think of an example of his scholarship that does not contain a healthy dose of it. Many readers relish this approach; others are hostile to it, affirming that humour has no place in scholarship. Dolinin, for example, despite praising Nabokov’s “spark[ling] humor and wit,” reproaches him for the “often unscholarly, playful tone of his commentary” to Onegin (Dolinin 1995: 117). The implication here is that Nabokov’s humour undermines or detracts from the essential seriousness of the enterprise. But Page Stegner’s comment on the humour in Nabokov’s novels is germane to this argument and applies equally well to his scholarship: it “demonstrates Nabokov’s abiding conviction that a serious theme does not necessitate a solemn style” (Stegner 1966: 21).
4With respect to Nabokov’s work within the field of translation, nothing could be more serious than his decade-long labour on Onegin and perhaps nowhere are his pedantry, his hubris and his humour more apparent; in this respect, it crystalizes these three crucial aspects of his personality and his scholarship. I think that there are good reasons as to why this should be the case, and in the pages that follow I examine them. My focus is not on Nabokov’s translation of Onegin per se, nor on the translations of his predecessors (having no Russian, I am not qualified to comment on either); rather, I focus on the way that Nabokov uses humour in his Commentary to attack his predecessors, an approach which sparked as much controversy as his decision to render Pushkin’s novel-in-verse in literal form.
5Before we begin our analysis of Nabokov’s humour and hubris in his Commentary to Onegin, it might be helpful to situate this work in the context of Nabokov’s standing and reputation at the time it appeared. It is fair to assume that many English language readers coming to Onegin for the first time in the 1960s did so because Nabokov was at the helm: in 1964, when the first edition of his Onegin was published, he was famous and had firmly established his comic credentials with novels like Pnin, Lolita and Pale Fire; thus, he had a captive audience who had reason to suppose that anything that he was involved with—even in the field of scholarship—would be humorous to a degree. This expectation on the part of Nabokov’s readers may account for their readiness to see innocent eccentricities as examples of his usual tomfoolery. For instance, in the body of his translation Nabokov includes pages of blank paper to indicate omitted or unwritten stanzas, even (rather naughtily) numbering the non-existent lines.4 Inevitably, this was greeted with suspicion in some quarters: “Can parts of this work be intended as an elaborate joke?” asked Ronald Hingley; “Can the author of Pnin perhaps be taking the mickey?” (Hingley 1965: 171). Being familiar with Nabokov’s humour, Hingley assumed that here was more of the same. This is a good example of the risks involved when using humour in a scholarly context, a subject that we will revisit later in this essay.
6These risks were exacerbated by Nabokov’s natural comedic instincts. He was temperamentally unable to tackle almost any subject, no matter how serious, without some degree of levity; in fact, there may be a correlation between the two: the more serious the context, the more inclined he was to express his humorous side. This impulse was compounded by his enjoyment in confounding readers’ expectations and by his instinct to transgress limits and trespass upon proprieties (in his fiction, Lolita is the most obvious example of this tendency, but it is certainly not the only one). In sum, there is a spirit of perversity in Nabokov’s personality akin to the one that Poe describes in “The Imp of the Perverse,” an antic, irrepressible imp that compels him to clownishness almost in spite of himself, and that leads him, on occasion, beyond the bounds of what some would consider good taste and good sense. This, of course, is part of what makes Nabokov Nabokov, and the majority of his readers wouldn’t have it any other way; unfortunately, it is also what makes him his own worst enemy at times, especially when he directs funny but vicious barbs towards fellow scholars. It is often said that humour does not translate well, that of all aspects of a writer’s style it is the most fraught with potential difficulties because there are so many variables at play in the process of linguistic migration. In Nabokov’s Onegin humour becomes a force in and of itself during this process: this aspect of his personality persistently bubbles up and causes all sorts of problems.
7There is a further point that should be taken into account when examining Nabokov’s humorous approach to his Commentary to Onegin: namely, the influence of Pushkin’s personality and style on Nabokov. Wit was as important to Pushkin’s writing as it was to Nabokov’s, and beyond all of the various ways in which it was used in his work it represented, at a fundamental level, liberty. As Nabokov states in “Russian Writers, Censors, and Readers,” Pushkin “composed extremely arrogant and extremely independent and extremely wicked verse in which a dangerous freedom of thought was evident” (Nabokov 1981: 5). This comment accounts in large part for Nabokov’s approach. What better, more appropriate way for him to pay homage to Pushkin than with a style that, with its humour and its hubris, its irreverence and its iconoclasm, closely resembles that of its subject?
8Evidence of hubris isn’t hard to find in Nabokov’s Commentary to Onegin and inevitably puts one in mind of fictional scholar Kinbote from Pale Fire (1962), the novel that he composed while working on Onegin.5 As Dolinin notes,
Now and then the authorial persona of the commentary, not unlike the protagonist in Pale Fire, grows out of proportion and starts to supplant the reality of Pushkin and his novel by self-projections and “strong opinions” […] any scholar of Nabokov will find in the Commentary many illuminating statements indispensable for a deeper understanding of his—not Pushkin’s—artistic consciousness that cannot help reflecting itself even when it is directed outward. (Dolinin 1995: 126-127)
9By way of illustration, here is Nabokov’s annotation to the word “beefsteaks”: “The European beefsteak used to be a small, thick, dark, ruddy, juicy, soft, special cut of tenderloin steak, with a generous edge of amber fat on the knife-side. It had little, if anything, in common with our American ‘steaks’—the tasteless meat of restless cattle” (Nabokov in Pushkin 1964 II: 149). Our enjoyment of this feast boils down to how we respond to being served such steaks when we may have ordered something different from the menu: in other words, “[t]he discursiveness of the commentary is one of its delights or irritations, according to your taste” (Hingley 1965: 171). Edmund Wilson was of the latter camp, and complained to the waiter: “he supplies us with more information than we need […] to a degree that we are almost surprised that we should not be given the zoological data on the bear in Tatyana’s dream” (Wilson 1965: 177).6 Further funny examples abound, all of which justify the comparison with Kinbote. Nabokov closes an annotation on lingonberries with a mock-indignant demand that echoes Kinbote’s cry for recognition in helping to preserve Shade’s poem for posterity: “I expect some acknowledgment for all this information from future translators of Russian classics” (Nabokov in Pushkin 1964 II: 326). And when discussing Pushkin’s ancestry, Nabokov even recycles a joke that he gave to Kinbote, describing Catherine the Great as the “self-made widow” of Peter III (Nabokov in Pushkin 1964 III: 390; cf. Nabokov 1962: 83).
10As these examples show, humour goes hand in hand with this hubristic, far-from-pale personality. But Nabokov’s humour is not always this tame. There are occasions like these, where he jokes at no particular person’s expense (Catherine the Great aside), but his humour is predominantly satirical, targeting previous translators of and commentators on Onegin, whose “amusing howler[s]” and “comic predicament[s]” he delights in highlighting (Nabokov in Pushkin 1964 II: 531-532; III: 243). Prior to the publication of his Onegin, Nabokov had fired opening salvos at Oliver Elton and Walter Arndt for the “howlers” they committed (Nabokov 1955: 122; Nabokov 1973: 232), but he had plenty of firepower left. As Dolinin notes, Soviet scholar N.L. Brodski’s “moronic misinterpretations of Pushkin are Nabokov’s prime laughing stock” (Dolinin 1995: 127). Nabokov calls Brodski a “Soviet toady,” whose work is “shamelessly grotesque” (Nabokov in Pushkin 1964 III: 363). Dmitri Chizhevski is mocked, too, for what Nabokov calls the “comic naïvetés in his running, or rather stumbling, commentary” (Nabokov in Pushkin 1964 III: 363). Nabokov is no less dismissive of American scholar Babette Deutsch’s translation: “In the college library copy of this ‘translation’ that I consulted, a poor, misguided, foolish, endearing, anonymous college student has dutifully written in pencil the word ‘Irony’ against the [word] ‘better’ of [Chapter 8] XVIII: 1. Irony, indeed” (Nabokov in Pushkin 1964 III: 189). Dolinin thinks that Nabokov is unduly harsh, and claims that he borrowed information from other scholars: “His discussion of [Pushkin’s Russian sources, parallels, and subtexts] mostly repeats or develops the observations made earlier by Russian and Soviet scholars (often without proper acknowledgement) […]. Using every opportunity to trample on his predecessors for both an unpardonable howler and a trifling misprint, he seldom avows his indebtedness to them or pays tribute to their real achievements” (Dolinin 1995: 125, 127). I am forced to defer to the judgment of others here; my focus lies in the method of the attack, and its motivation.
11In such cases, Nabokov’s humour expresses his sense of superiority, and thus he epitomises the type of person whom Thomas Hobbes had in mind when formulating his famous Superiority Theory of humour: “the passion of laughter […] is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly” (Hobbes 1650: 20). I am interested in the role that humour plays in establishing Nabokov’s “eminency” over these other scholars; in how effective humour is as a means of highlighting their “infirmity”; and most important, in the motivation that lies behind Nabokov’s humorous wisecracks on mis-translators—in particular, mis-translators of Onegin. The investigation will take us from Nabokov’s Onegin to his interviews, lectures and fiction—but there is a purpose to these divagations, as I hope will become apparent as the argument proceeds.
12After Lolita brought Nabokov fame in 1955, a long round of interviews allowed him ample opportunity to express his eminency over other writers in relation to his former position as a little-known émigré author in the English-speaking world. “Do you read many new novels?” asked an anonymous interviewer who, puzzled by Nabokov’s reaction, was forced to enquire further: “Why do you laugh?” “I laugh,” Nabokov replied, “because well-meaning publishers keep sending me—with ‘hope-you-will-like-it-as-much-as-we-do’ letters—only one kind of fiction: novels truffled with obscenities, fancy words, and would-be weird incidents. They seem to be all by one and the same writer—who is not even the shadow of my shadow” (Nabokov 1973: 4). Israel Shenker elicited a similar response. “What is your position in the world of letters?” he asked in 1971. “Jolly good view from up here,” Nabokov replied (Nabokov 1973: 181). Two years previously he had considered a more restrained but no less conceited form of contempt. Asked by Alden Whitman how he ranked himself in relation to writers past and present, he suggested substituting a sign now common in emails and text messages: “I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile—some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question” (Nabokov 1973: 133-134). For Nabokov, laughter was the most effective way of killing off the competition: “I don’t think I mock popular trash more often than do other authors who believe with me that a good laugh is the best pesticide” (Nabokov 1973: 117). Here, again, is the hubris that is such a feature of the Onegin Commentary and that so annoys Nabokov’s detractors (and his fans, too, on occasion); even wedded to humour, as it almost always is, it can be hard to take at times, and a tad tiresome; on a surface reading it comes across as distinctly Hobbesian, the words of an arrogant author glorifying in his intellectual superiority to all and sundry.
13Nabokov reserved his most virulent laughter for canonical authors. “I refuse to be guided and controlled by a communion of established views and academic traditions,” he declared, responding to Wilson’s complaint in his review of Nabokov’s Onegin about his “instinct to take digs at great reputations” (Nabokov 1973: 266). In the Afterword to Lolita Nabokov had scorned “topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann” (Nabokov 1957: 315). He echoes these remarks in his Commentary to Onegin, where he writes of “the plaster idols of academic tradition, from Cervantes to George Eliot (not to speak of the crumbling Manns and Faulkners of our times)” (Nabokov in Pushkin 1964 III: 189). For Christopher Ricks, these “literary swipes” exemplify the “facetious provocativeness which is always waiting to claim Nabokov”: “can even Nabokov’s undoubted powers of sarcasm quite deal with those four in three lines?” (Ricks 1964: 168). Once again, humour and hubris combine to exasperate Nabokov’s critics and call into question his judgments. Is there any way to account for his approach, or is it just name-calling?
14Like so many other authors, George Orwell was on the receiving end of Nabokov’s scorn.7 Regardless, Nabokov would no doubt have agreed with Orwell’s conviction that “every joke is a tiny revolution”: “A thing is funny,” Orwell argued, when “it upsets the established order” (Orwell 1945: 325), and as Brian Boyd notes, “Upsetting received opinions was always one of Nabokov’s great pleasures” (Boyd 1991: 213-214). “In the comic vision,” writes John Morreall, “authority and tradition are questioned and tested rather than blindly accepted”: “The comic mind looks for inconsistencies, blunders, phoniness, and other incongruities, and authorities and traditions are a rich source of them. So comedy is naturally iconoclastic” (Morreall 1999: 36). Add to this a point that is obvious, but often overlooked: moderate opinions simply wouldn’t have been as funny. As Edward L. Galligan observes, “Most of the best humorists are people with strong opinions” (Galligan 1984: 17). If Nabokov had presented his in a different manner, they would have been less likely to raise a laugh. Humour is also easier to achieve when discussing writers one dislikes, as David Rampton notes: “Nabokov was a master of invective and ‘good copy’ for the interviewers because he knew that vilification is always more fun than eulogy” (Rampton 1984: 145).8
15All of these motivations account, in part, for Nabokov’s approach in his Onegin. But there is a much more important, ideological basis to his humorous denunciations that offers, perhaps, a more persuasive rationale for his behaviour. As Alfred Appel Jr. notes, Nabokov’s “remarks on other writers, remarks which are variously thought to be arrogant, eccentric, outrageous, indefensible, funny but frivolous [...] rarely clarify his objections to them, or suggest the seriousness and consistency of his position or its source in the literary wars of Russia” (Appel 1982: 18). The source of Nabokov’s satirical and sarcastic swipes lies in his fervent opposition to the ideological edicts advocated by Nikolai Chernyshevsky that flowered (or rather, withered) into Socialist Realism:
Nabokov is never more Russian than when offering to journalists and interviewers those seemingly fripperous remarks about writers he deems short on style and/or long on argument and advice. Those remarks, hardly random, enable him to sustain his miraculous open-ended debate with Chernyshevsky, thereby fulfilling his own polemical responsibilities as the embodiment of the other great Russian tradition. (Appel 1982: 18-19)
16The foremost figure of this “other great Russian tradition” is Pushkin, and Nabokov saw himself as a kind of curator-cum-custodian where Pushkin was concerned, charged with guarding his work against translators or commentators who might be tempted to tamper with or disfigure his art by slipping under the velvet rope with un-stocked minds, unreceptive genes, and, most damaging of all, a theory of translation that, by eschewing literalism, distorts Pushkin’s meaning, which is synonymous with Pushkin’s truth. In his Lectures on Russian Literature Nabokov outlines the “polemical responsibilities” that come with this job. His words are directed at the Soviets, but he defines himself against everything that they stand for relative to the aforementioned “other great Russian tradition”:
It is difficult to refrain from the relief of irony, from the luxury of contempt, when surveying the mess that meek hands, obedient tentacles guided by the bloated octopus of the state, have managed to make out of that fiery, fanciful free thing—literature. Even more: I have learned to treasure my disgust, because I know that by feeling so strongly about it I am saving what I can of the spirit of Russian literature. Next to the right to create, the right to criticize is the richest gift that liberty of thought and speech can offer.9
17The right to laugh is as rich a gift, the significance of which is exemplified in the novel that bears that name—Nabokov’s last novel in Russian—where Chernyshevsky’s ideas and art are subjected to devastating ridicule, in much the same way as Pushkin’s translators are in Nabokov’s Commentary to Onegin, and where Pushkin is presented in comparison as a paragon of excellence to whom Fyodor—and all Russian authors—aspire. In his Onegin, as in The Gift, Nabokov exercises his right to laugh; by doing so, he believes that he is “saving what [he] can of the spirit of Russian literature.”
18The critical response to Fyodor’s study of Chernyshevsky is largely negative, and resembles the complaints that Nabokov received at the hands of many of his own critics for his Onegin. While acknowledging that it is “dashingly written” (Nabokov 1963: 321) and full of “swaggering erudition” (Nabokov 1963: 318), Fyodor’s critics accuse him of “arrogant audacity” (Nabokov 1963: 317) and “swashbuckling brashness” (Nabokov 1963: 321). In Christopher Mortus’s opinion the book is the work of “a novice endowed with extreme self-confidence” (Nabokov 1963: 314), but she10 has grave misgivings:
at the bottom of Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s book there lies something which is in essence profoundly tactless, something jarring and offensive ... It is his right, of course (although even this could be questioned), to take this or that attitude towards the “men of the sixties”, but in “debunking” them he cannot but awake in any sensitive reader surprise and disgust. (Nabokov 1963: 315)
19Fyodor describes his approach to his biography of Chernyshevsky in the following way: “I want to keep everything as it were on the very brink of parody […]. And there must be on the other hand an abyss of seriousness, and I must make my way along this narrow ridge between my own truth and a caricature of it” (Nabokov 1963: 212). Walking that ridge is risky because it can result in ambiguity of intention and misinterpretation. Fyodor’s “truth” is of the utmost importance, yet he is at the mercy of his nature and compelled to treat his subject humorously, relying on readers to recognise the all-important truth that pulses beneath the parody. Fyodor follows his instincts, much as Nabokov followed his instincts in his Onegin, and is consequently misconstrued by many of his critics, as Nabokov was misconstrued. Such are the risks for those who surrender to their inner imp.
20Mortus was a thinly disguised version of émigré critic Georgy Adamovich, one of Nabokov’s most aggressive detractors, a man whom Vladislav Khodasevich felt had “a cavalier disregard for the truth” and whom Gleb Struve accused of “sinning against the truth” in his reviews of Nabokov’s work (Boyd 1990: 344). Compounding these sins against truth, Adamovich, who was overly fond of “airing the angoisse” that was so popular among artists in post-war Europe (Nabokov 1973: 39), had argued that “Pushkin’s mastery of form was something no longer adequate to a world grown so much more complicated” (Boyd 1990: 370). When friend Mark Aldanov complained to Nabokov about his satirical portrait, Nabokov defended his decision vociferously: “I was guided by an urge not to laugh at this or that person (although there would be no crime in that—we are not in class or in church), but solely by a desire to show a certain order of literary ideas, typical at a given time—which is what the whole novel is about (its main heroine is literature)” (Boyd 1990: 480). It is illuminating to read this explanation in relation to Nabokov’s castigation of Onegin’s translators and commentators, because we can clearly see that what seem like ad hominem attacks are made in defense of truth, of “that fiery, fanciful, free thing—literature,” and of their foremost Russian proponent, Pushkin. Nabokov makes no apology for joking at Adamovich’s expense; like Pushkin, he refuses to kneel at the altar of decorum. Laughter serves a greater purpose here than simply upsetting silly, conservative-minded critics: it represents freedom from falsehood and the tyranny of received opinion; in this iconoclastic mode, humour can expose such falsities, debunking those intent on prolonging a restrictive and deceitful status quo.
21Adamovich appears to achieve fictional form again in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and the episode is just as illuminating in relation to the humorous approach that Nabokov takes in his Onegin. We are told that in Sebastian’s first book, The Prismatic Bezel, “one of the minor characters is an extremely comic and cruel skit upon a certain living author whom Sebastian found necessary to chastise. Naturally the publisher knew it immediately and this fact made him so uncomfortable that he advised Sebastian to modify the whole passage, a thing which Sebastian flatly refused to do” (Nabokov 1941: 54). In a letter to his publisher, Sebastian explains his position:
No imminent punishment can be violent enough to make me abandon the pursuit of my pleasure, especially when this pleasure is the firm young bosom of truth. There are in fact not many things in life comparable to the delight of satire, and when I imagine the humbug’s face as he reads (and read he shall) that particular passage and knows as well as we do that it is the truth, then delight reaches its sweetest climax. (Nabokov 1941: 55)
22The stress that Sebastian places upon truth in his satirical skit recalls the emphasis that Fyodor places upon truth in his study of Chernyshevsky. Sebastian’s satire—an inherently moral form of humour—is a means of upholding this truth. In his interviews, Nabokov consistently mocks sincerity (Nabokov 1973: 32-33) and invites us to think of him as an arch deceiver (Nabokov 1973: 11); nevertheless, though he does dupe us in his fiction, he is very much concerned with truth, and this concern comes to the fore with particular force in the context of translation, in the form of linguistic and factual accuracy, fastidious attention to detail, precision of thought, fidelity to the source text.
23Nabokov’s uncompromising approach to textual truth in his translation of Onegin puts me in mind of a scene from Margaret Edson’s wonderful play Wit (1999). The play concerns Vivian Bearing, a professor of poetry who specialises in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne. Vivian studies under E.M. Ashford, whom Edson modeled on the famous (and famously formidable) Donne scholar Helen Gardner. In an early scene, Ashford, a stickler for accuracy and the use of proper textual sources, upbraids Vivian for using an “inauthentically punctuated” edition of the Holy Sonnets which has resulted in a skewed analysis of “Death Be Not Proud.”11 Vivian has misunderstood the final lines of the poem, the correct interpretation of which rests upon a comma. Ashford tries to explain to Vivian that such seemingly inconsequential details are crucial to the poem’s meaning, but Vivian misses the point: “It’s wit!” she cries, pleased to have cracked Donne’s metaphysical conceit. “It is not wit, Miss Bearing. It is truth,” Ashford replies with a sigh. Vivian ponders her words: “Simple human truth, uncompromising scholarly standards? They’re connected?” (Edson 1999: 15). They are, of course, and she grows to understand that connection as her career continues.
24Nabokov, for his part, emphasized the ethical aspect of his undertaking in Onegin in his “Reply To My Critics”: “Unlike my novels, [my] E[ugene]O[negin] possesses an ethical side, moral and human elements. It reflects the compiler’s honesty or dishonesty, skill or sloppiness” (Nabokov 1973: 241). Clarence Brown notes that “Nabokov has a very Tolstoyan passion for the truth” (Brown 1967: 199). In fact, in his lecture on Tolstoy (a member of the “other great Russian Tradition” examined earlier), Nabokov distinguishes between two types of truth, pravda and istina, the former being lower case, the latter, to his mind, capitalised and personified (rather like Donne’s “Death,” but much prouder and far more formidable), a Truth that brooks no compromise and is not open to degrees:
Old Russian Truth was never a comfortable companion; it had a violent temper and a heavy tread. It was not simply truth, not merely everyday pravda but immortal istina—not truth but the inner light of truth. […] Most Russian writers have been tremendously interested in Truth’s exact whereabouts and essential properties. To Pushkin it was of marble under a noble sun. (Nabokov 1981: 141)
25In Nabokov’s Onegin humour is at the service of this Truth, and mistranslation is a betrayal of it. Nabokov’s literal translation of Onegin is a show of allegiance to this fundamental, elemental Russian Truth, or, as he phrased it, mimicking the words of those placed under oath before God in courts of Law: “to reproduce with absolute exactitude the whole text and nothing but the text” (Nabokov 2006: 121). Pushkin is no plaster idol, but Nabokov felt that it was his responsibility to carefully and truthfully transmit Pushkin’s poem from age to age, East to West, posthouse to posthouse: via his cracks at Onegin’s mis-translators and commentators, Nabokov, with violent temper and heavy tread, but an abundance of winning wit, was keeping that marble monument intact.
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RICKS Christopher, 1964, « Nabokov’s Pushkin », [review of Nabokov’s Onegin] New Statesman, 25 December 1964, p. 995. Reprint: PAGE Norman (éd.), 1982, Nabokov: The Critical Heritage, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, p. 167-170.
RIVERS J.E. and NICOL Charles (eds.), 1982, Nabokov’s Fifth Arc: Nabokov and Others on His Life’s Work, Austin, University of Texas Press.
STEGNER Page, 1966, Escape Into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokov, New York, Dial Press.
UHLMANN Anthony, 2011, Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov, New York, Continuum.
UPDIKE John, 1964, « Grandmaster Nabokov » [review of Nabokov’s The Defense], New Republic CLI, 26 September 1964, p. 15-18. Reprint: PAGE Norman, 1982, Nabokov: The Critical Heritage, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, p. 154-158.
WAIN John, 1965, « Poet and Doppelgänger » [review of Nabokov’s Onegin], Listener, 29 April 1965, 628. Reprint: PAGE Norman (éd.), 1982, Nabokov: The Critical Heritage, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, p. 32.
WILSON Edmund, 1965, « The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov » [review of Nabokov’s Onegin], New York Review of Books, 15 July 1965, p. 3-6. Reprint: PAGE Norman, 1982, Nabokov: The Critical Heritage, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, p. 175-180.
WILSON Edmund, 1966, « A Letter to the Editor ». Encounter 26:4, April 1966, 92.
Notes de bas de page
1 For more on Nabokov’s translation of Onegin, see also Shvabrin’s article in this volume (editors’ note).
2 In Nabokov’s Foreword to Invitation to a Beheading he champions pedantry in relation to the novel’s translation into English: “My son proved to be a marvelously congenial translator, and it was settled between us that fidelity to one’s author comes first, no matter how bizarre the result. Vive le pédant, and down with the simpletons who think that all is well if the ‘spirit’ is rendered” (Nabokov 1959: 7).
3 See Anthony Uhlmann: “the problem posed for interpretation by Nabokov’s use of irony is something a reader becomes aware of in Nabokov’s published interviews as much as in his fiction. When you read or listen to interviews with Nabokov you are immediately struck by the tone of his comments, which seem to be both categorical and heavily ironic. Surely some of these comments are too outrageous to be taken seriously?” (Uhlmann 2011: 119).
4 John Updike applauded Nabokov’s bravura: “The translation itself, so laconic compared to the footnotes, with its breathtaking gaps, pages long, of omitted stanzas whose lines are eerily numbered as if they were there, ranks with Horace Gregory’s Catallus and Richmond Lattimore’s Iliad as superb, quirky, and definitive” (Updike 1964: 155). Of the gap in Chapter One, XXXIX, XL, XLI, Nabokov offers the following explanation: “It is not unthinkable that this gap is a fictitious one, with some musical value—the artifice of a wistful pause, the imitation of a missed heartbeat, the mirage of an emotional horizon, false asterisks of false suspense” (Nabokov in Pushkin 1964 II: 164). To which one might respond: thanks for clearing that one up.
5 Many critics have compared Nabokov’s Commentary to Onegin with the annotations of Kinbote. See, e.g., John Wain’s review of Nabokov’s Onegin and Clarence Brown’s splendid essay on the same. Brown sees the poem-and-commentary form as the “essential structure” of other novels like The Defense, The Gift and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (Brown 1967: 205).
6 In response to Wilson’s review, Nabokov humorously highlighted the latter’s deficiencies in Russian: “As late as 1957, at one of our last meetings […] 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” (Nabokov 1973: 248). Wilson responded by ridiculing Nabokov’s vocabulary: some of his words, Wilson said, “double me up with mirth [and cause] me to roll on the floor exsufflicate with cachinnation” (Wilson 1966: 92).
7 In his Foreword to Invitation to a Beheading Nabokov cites Orwell as an example of “popular purveyors of illustrated ideas and publicistic fiction” (Nabokov 1959: 7), and in his Introduction to Bend Sinister he calls him a “mediocre” writer of “clichés” (Nabokov 1973: 6).
8 Despite appreciating Nabokov’s humour, Rampton thinks that his judgments do not stand up to scrutiny: “Nabokov is always more amusing as a polemicist than he is convincing, especially when he is trying to make a case for his estimations of other writers” (Rampton 1984: 145).
9 From Nabokov’s introductory survey of Soviet literature, printed on the flyleaf of Lectures on Russian Literature.
10 Many critics miss the fact that Mortus is the pseudonym of a female critic, “a woman of middle age, the mother of a family, who in her youth had published excellent poems in the St. Petersburg review Apollo and who now lived modestly two steps from the grave of Marie Bashkirtsev, suffering from an incurable eye illness which endowed Mortus’ every line with a kind of tragic value” (Nabokov 1963: 181). Mortus’s ailment is as figurative as it is literal, and as significant as her surname: she cannot see well enough to recognise what Fyodor has accomplished, so she is dead to his talent.
11 In Pale Fire Sybil Shade translates Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud” into French, but Kinbote is unimpressed: “one deplores the superfluous ejaculation in the second line introduced there only to coagulate the caesura” (Nabokov 1962: 240-241).
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