Dialogic Encounters, Verbal Vestiges: Vladimir Nabokov, Translation—and Dialogue
p. 87-98
Entrées d’index
Keywords : Nabokov, translation, allusiveness, Mikhail Bakhtin, dialogic encounter, verbal vestige
Texte intégral
1The phrase “Vladimir Nabokov and translation” denotes a problem, a conundrum, a paradox. A self-professed enemy of totalitarianism, a naturalized US citizen who traced his lineage to “a classless intelligentsia,” Nabokov the translation theorist has come to betoken elitist, dogmatic intolerance irreconcilable with pluralistic notions of truth. For far too many, his mature translation theory epitomizes a hierarchy with the abstract notion “literal meaning” at its sharp pinnacle and him as its self-appointed high priest and jealous warden.1 Assuming that he was drawing a line under “five years” during which he was engaged “in translating and annotating [Aleksandr] Pushkin’s [Eugenij] Onegin,” in 1955 he declared that “the term ‘free translation’ smacks of knavery and tyranny” and concluded: “[t]he term ‘literal translation’ is tautological since anything but that is not truly a translation but an imitation, an adaptation or a parody” (Nabokov 1955: 496, 504). Nabokov may have miscalculated how long it would take him to finish his Onegin, yet from 1955 until his death in 1977 he expressed no reservations about his literalist dogma and its application, taking every opportunity to reaffirm their efficacy as well as his allegiance to them. Is this where a line under Nabokov’s life-long passionate involvement with translation should be drawn?
2An applied craft, translation is a specialized field seldom rocked by high-profile debates the likes of which Nabokov’s “literalism” has engendered. The implications of that debate, however, refuse to be confined to discussions of its immediate subject matter. By placing translation at the center of his achievement—“I shall be remembered by Lolita and my work on Eugene Onegin” (Nabokov 1973: 106)—Nabokov leaves us with no choice but to contemplate the effect his work in this field has on his legacy as the backlash against his translation theory and praxis rivals the endurance of Lolita’s grip on its readers. Soon enough it becomes apparent that what is at stake here is not his stance on the issue of interlingual equivalence alone. It is Nabokov’s epistemology; it is his reputation as a champion of individual liberty and freedom of expression; it is our idea of him as a human being who reveals himself in his interactions with and treatment of others. Translation is Nabokov, and to understand his relation to it is tantamount to coming to terms with the man, the artist, the scientist, and the thinker.
3Since translation is so close to the core of Nabokov’s ambition, since it proves paramount to our understanding of his life and achievement, it deserves to be researched and reexamined, especially since some of its most influential assessments are cast in such categorical, irreversible terms. What follows, however, is not an attempt to vindicate and absolve Nabokov of his scholarly excesses and polemical transgressions, to defend him from his critics by deflecting their opprobrium. It is an attempt to confront Nabokov’s inconsistencies, to make sense of the disparity between Nabokov’s indurate rhetoric and flexible practice, between his dissatisfaction with the settled ideas regarding translation and his dependence on translation as a vital source of his creativity. The following assessment draws a line under some years of editorial work and archival research which compel me to conclude that neither deferential praise nor blanket denunciations do justice to Vladimir Nabokov’s life in translation. It is my working hypothesis that when properly assessed and contextualized, his legacy in translation may not only lead us to the disclosure of a unifying principle behind his protean stance on the issue, but also advance our understanding of his ethics. Moreover, it prompts to resolve the conundrum following from his mature stance on translation. It stands a good chance of contributing to our understanding of literary creativity.2
4Nabokov may have insisted that alongside Lolita, his work on Eugene Onegin is his greatest achievement; he may have “disowned” his translations executed in the “literary,” not “literal,” vein; he may have been unsparing in his verbal attacks on those translators whose work went against his principles, yet, as was ultimately the case with Pushkin, all his forays into translation answered the need to conduct a direct dialogue with the mind behind each given utterance. Since translation cuts so close to the core of Nabokov’s artistic enterprise, I would argue that the reason this desire was woven into his original compositions was that it sustained them in a number of crucial, indeed indispensable, ways. To arrive at a better understanding of this phenomenon, it may be profitable to turn to Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophy of language in general and his concept of the “alien word3” (čužoe slovo) in particular.
5Bakhtin’s Word in the Novel (1934-5) focused on Fyodor Dostoevsky, but the drafts of this USSR-published treatise show that his ambition was to peer into the past with the goal of expounding the current state of the Russian novel. The scope of Bakhtin’s ambition places Nabokov’s Russian novels within the range of Bakhtin’s inquiry, and it is fascinating to see what implications his insight into what he called the “alien word” may have for our understanding of such a hallmark of Nabokovian style as his allusiveness (“intertextuality,” “referentiality”).
6Bakhtin’s discussion of the “alien word” is but an aspect of his contemplation of dialogue, in which he recognizes an aesthetically relevant manifestation of a universal linguistic principle. While no “speaker” may claim dominion over words in free circulation, the existence of linguistic diversity or stratification ensures that within the unity of one such “speaker’s” usage we can distinguish “kindred” (svoj) and “alien” (čuzhoj) items. In hermeneutics, our ability to make such distinctions expands our ability to observe how such universal linguistic principles manifest themselves in aesthetically significant utterances. Bakhtin may have been using the quaint term “influence,” but what he focused on was the commerce of images and ideas in their verbal incarnation that constitutes a major driving force that shapes evolutionary progress in literary creativity. The discourse-generating—“dialogic”—tension between the words one’s consciousness perceives as alien and those it recognizes as one’s own sets into motion literary innovation, allowing us a glimpse of a creative imagination in action:
Above all here are relevant all the instances where the alien word exerts powerful influence on a given author. Discovery of such influences specifically amounts to a disclosure of such half-concealed life of the alien word in the new context of a given author. When an influence is profound and productive, it precludes superficial imitation or simple reproduction, but presupposes further creative development of the alien (half-alien, more precisely) word in a new context and under new circumstances. (Bakhtin 1996-2003 III: 102)
7A mature project executed by a highly sophisticated craftsman, Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin may not be the most representative example of dialogic forces at work, yet again, when examined in the context of its evolution as one utterance among many concerning the same subject, it reveals itself as an utterance articulated in response to the challenge of the tantalizing aesthetic and philosophical viability of Pushkin’s statements. It is at this juncture that we begin to discern a thread that unites Eugene Onegin with Nabokov’s other translation experiments—many of them unpublished, some of them suppressed, still others suppressed with the sole purpose of elevating the Eugene Onegin project to unassailable heights. It is here where we begin to see how translation fits into the unity of Nabokov’s lifework while revealing its indispensability for him as writer.
8When seen in the context of Nabokov’s life-long work in translation, his most consequential compositions reveal themselves as dialogically-charged answers summoned into existence by his translating colloquies with other minds across linguistic and spatiotemporal boundaries. Nabokov certainly did not translate all the writers whose utterances compelled him to creativity, but the presence of an intriguing number of his translations across English, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Russian in close proximity to his original compositions suggests that, on the one hand, the texts he did translate played a special role in his creative process, and, on the other, that there was more to his need to translate others than his following a blind elemental momentum of intellectual “promiscuity.”4
9Where, how, and when does the privileged, stupendously well-read young man Vladimir Nabokov transform into a writer of global appeal—or even into a Russian writer capable of evolving from a phenomenon typical enough of his local element into a writer whose compositions could command the attention of the most varied of reading audiences? To ascribe this transformation to the influence of socio-cultural events (“history”) is to draw a blank, and not only because doing so would go against Nabokov’s eloquent and well-argued anti-determinism. Doing so does little by way of accounting for the singularity of Nabokov’s achievement and even less so by way of helping us understand what kind of intellectual equipment enabled him to transcend linguistic boundaries with efficacy unprecedented for his time, yet prescient of future developments in world literature.
10Nabokov’s poetic juvenilia testify to his being a focused young man whose commitment to literature may or may not lead to his becoming a man of letters. In no way can this pursuit—fairly typical of a young man of his milieu—be said to prefigure the writer he eventually became. The situation changes drastically as soon as we turn to his experiments in translation to realize that his interest in the other was not something he would develop in connection with his work on Romain Rolland’s Colas Breugnon5 and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the translations repeatedly mistaken as samples of the earliest stages of his development as translator. Even if we take his 1918 departure from Russia as a watershed moment full of implications for his self-determination, we find that prior to it he had already accumulated considerable experience as translator, rendering into Russian Louis Bouilhet, Byron, Heinrich Heine, Pierre Louÿs, Alfred de Musset, Francesco Petrarca, Henri de Régnier, Jean Richepin, and Émile Verhaeren among others. Impressive range, to be certain, even if the underdeveloped diction characteristic of Nabokov’s juvenilia as a whole prevents the majority of these translations from standing on their own. The intrinsic value of these forays into translation, however, lies not in their being an early testimony to the degree of Nabokov’s integration into an intricate network of intellectual influences, although that they certainly are. Close study of these artifacts shows that Nabokov the young man did not merely dabble in verse along with so many young people of his generation and background. The seemingly random array of names from no fewer than three literary traditions conceals an arrangement of texts each of which anticipates a different aspect of Nabokov the writer and thinker who would realize his potential only upon becoming an “extraterritorial” artist (as George Steiner would describe Nabokov the mature writer).6 Nabokov’s transcendental intuitions found their earliest formulations in his versions of Petrarca’s and Verhaeren’s poems; his paraphrases from Bouilhet, Louÿs, and Musset presaged the erotic subjects of his future works; his translations from Byron, Régnier, and Heine permitted him to explore a range of themes associated with liminal states of consciousness while indulging his fascination with the inner workings of the human mind; his early work on Byron and Musset testifies to the immutability of his life-long attention to memory, past, and loss; his translation from Richepin presented him with an opportunity to forge his identity as a poet untethered to a single civilization. Whether or not Nabokov would have evolved into the writer and thinker we know now without his encounters with these writers is a difficult—and largely speculative—question. All such encounters constituted significant events in his evolution, and left discernable marks on his art. This cannot be disputed once these texts are given the attention they deserve and reward—even if the price of doing so entails overcoming some of the strictest of Nabokovian proscriptions.
11Nabokov’s translating juvenilia represent a rich and promising subject for exploration. It is imperative, however, not to lose sight of the paramount linguistic aspect of its value to him as verbal artist. In concert with Bakhtin’s call to study the “half-concealed life of the alien word in the new context of a given author” it may be helpful to designate such discourse-generating events as Nabokovian “dialogic encounters,” whereas it may be profitable to nominate their linguistic residue as “verbal vestiges.” What follows is a demonstration of what can be gained from a close reading of Nabokov’s translation through the lens of this approach.
12In his article “Nabokov and Rupert Brooke,” D. Barton Johnson observed that “Nabokov’s first use of the term potustoronnost’, the ‘hereafter,’ occurs as a preliminary to his discussion of Brooke’s poem ‘The Life Beyond’” (Johnson 1999: 187). Introducing a line of interpretation that was to be developed later by others, Johnson surmised that “the ‘hereafter’ theme,” apparently missing from Nabokov’s juvenilia, was “launched” by the March 1919 death of Yuri Rausch von Traubenberg, a tragic event that suddenly rendered death a reality for the future writer. There is ground to believe, however, that Véra Nabokov’s retrospective disclosure of potustoronnost’ as the “main theme” with which her late husband’s oeuvre is shot through may turn out to be even more far-reaching in its scope than it was taken to mean initially (see Nabokov 1979: n.p.).7
13Conspicuously absent from his earliest published output, the first formulation of potustoronnost’—the hereafter, the otherworldly, the beyond or the otherworld, as it has been alternatively conveyed in English—does nonetheless occur in a poetic exercise that dates back to Nabokov’s pre-exilic—pre-Crimean even—days in his native Petersburg-Petrograd. Given that translation held the status of a deeply personal mode of expression for the future writer since the earliest stages in his artistic evolution,8 it should not come as a surprise that so important a theme must have found an initial outlet for itself in this and not any other medium or guise.
14Among other unpublished, uncollected poems and translations penned in the period between September/October–November 1917, and dedicated to Ewa Lubrzińska, “Stihotvorenija” (manuscript Album B)9 preserves Nabokov’s translation of “Les Voyageurs” by Émile Verhaeren (1855-1916). First published in the collection Les Soirs (1887), “Les Voyageurs” is a short narrative poem that encompasses eleven quatrains of enclosed rhymes. In full agreement with the principles of Verhaeren’s brand of Symbolism, “Les Voyageurs” is a travel narrative that is highly allegorical in nature. It tells the tale of the unnamed wanderers who part with their nondescript homeland as they respond to “the strange echo of pensive horizons” and heed “the ancient call of distant sibyls.” The poem’s opening quatrain reads:
Et par l’étrange écho des horizons songeurs,
Et par l’antique appel des sybilles lointaines,
Et par les au-delà mystérieux des plaines,
Un soir, se sont sentis hélés, les voyageurs.
15Having visited a number of ancient, enigmatic lands, the poem’s protagonists, the voyagers—much like the anthropomorphized “drunken boat” of Rimbaud’s eponymous poem (1871)—must return home, yet they will never be the same as every fiber of their existence has now been irreversibly altered by their encounter with “other firmaments.” The poem’s concluding quatrain reads:
Car les soirs leur seront de tourmenteurs aimants,
Les soirs et les soleils ouverts, comme des portes,
Sur leurs rêves défunts et leurs visions mortes
Et leurs amours nimbés par d’autres firmaments.
(Verhaeren 1911: 51-54)
16In his equilinear Russian version of this poem, Nabokov saw it fit to translate its opening quatrain’s third line “[p]ar les au-delà mystérieux des plaines” as “tajn plenitel′nyh ravnin potustoronnih”:10
И дали грезящей, и странныхъ голосовъ
сибиллъ загадочныхъ, извѣчно-отдаленныхъ,
и тайнъ плѣнительныхъ равнинъ потустороннихъ
они—въ вечерній часъ—почувствовали зовъ.
17While on the superficial level this choice of an epithet may be interpreted as a mere manifestation of the asymmetry inevitable in a poetic foreign-language rendition, its significance is amplified manifold by the role allotted to its nominal variant as the centerpiece of Nabokovian mythopoetics, the writer’s personal denomination of his intuition of a plane of being ostensibly located beyond the divide separating life from death.
18A verbal vestige of Nabokov’s dialogic encounter with Verhaeren, his verbalization of such a closely-held individual metaphysical concept explicates the reasoning behind his choice to initiate a dialogue with the Belgian poet. One dialogic encounter among many, it also suggests that Nabokov actively sought out such like-minded interlocutors among the writers he read. What elevates translation above mere reading, however, is its singularly potent power to foster further discourse, to generate conversion of alien words—words in the expansive Bakhtinian sense of verbal images—into kindred, “native,” terminology, an individual vocabulary of descriptors uniquely suited to denominate personally relevant notions and concepts with the aim of communicating them to others. A network of similar verbal images extant in Nabokov’s translating juvenilia emerges as a bedrock of his verbal creativity, a foundation upon which an edifice of his original design could be raised. Not immediately visible to an outside observer, such and similar verbal vestiges continue to live their lives, concealed, or rather half-concealed, within some of the most intricately devised and most consequential of Nabokov’s creations.
19Knowing firsthand that the explication of well-wrought texts constitutes “rude prying” into the most intimate aspects of their creators’ inner life, their creativity itself, Nabokov has ensured that the sanctity of his “workshop” could not be easily violated.11 How much do we stand to gain from bringing Bakhtin’s insights into the interactive constituents of literary innovation to bear on this notoriously elusive, theory-resistant writer?12
20Setting aside the Nabokov-Dostoevsky nexus as a topic worthy of a special study, we must acknowledge that some of Nabokov’s convictions regarding literature come teasingly close to those espoused by his compatriot and contemporary Bakhtin. Both believed that literature is subject to evolution, and even though Nabokov claimed that his characters are “galley slaves” who “cringe” when he, their creator, comes “near [them] with [his] whip” (see Quennell 1979: 124-25), Timofey Pnin’s escape from the fate allotted him in the authorial summaries of the novel featuring his agonistic skirmishes with an author-like narrator is the perfect snapshot of what happens when an author and a protagonist engage in aesthetic activity.13 The promise of a dialogue-driven approach to Nabokov’s compositions is not exhausted by such and similar correspondences.
21“A good reader is bound to make fierce efforts when wrestling with a difficult author, but those efforts can be most rewarding after the bright dust has settled,” Nabokov once observed, and his interpreters have seized upon this pronouncement to elucidate his relationship with his reader (see Nabokov 1996 II: 610 and also Nabokov 1973: 183).14 It retains its value if we apply it to his engagement with the authors whose words he conducted across the linguistic divides within his own sextalingual domain. We have every reason to suspect this observation of possessing the power of an admission to the effect that his own compositions owe some, perhaps much, of their brilliance to the vestigial “bright dust” settling on them in the aftermath of his dialogic encounters with his interlocutors. When approached from this perspective, Nabokov’s understudied and undervalued translations become the evidential basis from which hard-data-driven investigations of his allusivity—or referentiality, or intertextuality—can and should be launched.
22Like the “beautiful, complex and sterile” art of chess problem composition, Nabokov’s fiction teems with “false scents” and “delusive moves” “astutely and lovingly prepared to lead the would-be solver astray” (Nabokov 1996 II: 610). The ontology of translation, however, is antithetical to self-expression, suffering no unreliable narrators. Shifting and contradictory as they may be, Nabokov’s pronouncements on translation feature his own voice, manifest his own thinking on the matter at a given stage of his evolution. The same is true of his forays into literary translation themselves, except perhaps to a still greater degree. All Nabokov’s translations feature his sovereign choices, but unlike his intralingual recreations of his own compositions, his translations of others present his solutions to riddles posed by minds accessible to him only partially. If one may catch a glimpse of perfection executing a design of one’s own invention, no such satisfaction can be derived from attempts to solve a riddle with a philosophical unknown at its core.15 Hence Nabokov’s belated dissatisfaction with translation as “pathetic” and “queer” business some aspects of which do resemble “the profanation of the dead”;16 hence his desire to purge translation of all pretense at artistic creativity with the aid of his obdurate literalist dogma. Utopian as this program must seem today in the aftermath of Nabokov’s skirmishes with his critics and detractors, one cannot help but feel grateful to him for pursuing this lead to its limits.
23Those disinclined to consider Nabokov’s literalism against the backdrop of the evolution of his experience in and with translation may not appreciate the extent to which it determined this transition. To examine this overlooked evolution, however, is to understand that Nabokov the literalist was not on a mission to overcome his inadequacy as a poet, as has been suggested (see Emerson 1994: 86 and Bellos 2011: 141-2), but to overcome the complexities inherent to translation as a medium of interpersonal communication.
24A translator’s French can be impeccable, but it will be of limited use to them if they were to attempt to render Arthur Rimbaud’s “les yeux horribles des pontons” as “horrible eyes of the bridges” (užasnye glaza mostov), as Nabokov did in his take on “Le Bateau ivre” (1928). What appears to be a metaphor for the way quotidian existence tramples the unbridled fantasy of the boy-poet whose imaginary journey has to come to an end, proves to be a reference to Rimbaud’s day and age: the fates of the Communards imprisoned in converted ships (un ponton) in the aftermath of the semaine sanglante of 1871. As good a mistranslation as any other, Nabokov’s apparently surrealistic image is additional piece of evidence to be examined in connection with our ongoing explorations of his metaphysical intuitions, a testimony to his involuntary effort to imagine Rimbaud on his, Nabokovian, terms, and an eloquent value judgement concerning what he prioritized as a key to so enigmatic a text. Nabokov may not have succeeded in his mature attempts not to be an artist in his translations, but with his literalist theory he ventured further than anybody else before and after him in his attempt to resolve a conflict of interest that weighed on him as he was preparing not to do to Pushkin what he had done to Rimbaud.17
25If the risk of misunderstanding must come with attempts to transcend one’s own self to conduct dialogue with others, Nabokov the translator ranks among the most intrepid of risk-takers. In the course of his career in translation he experimented with nearly every possible way to approach and approximate the imperishable thought of those minds whose creativity quickened his. He did not stop exploring the possibilities of literary translation even after he had proclaimed that literal translation alone can be called translation.18 The array of methodologies—from willful adaptation to most exacting literalism and everything else in between—he espoused, promulgated, and indulged in throughout his career in letters does yield its unifying principle once we focus on the teleology of his search. As far as Nabokov was concerned, the baffling ability of thought to escape the physical limits of space and time in the medium of literature justified the energy he invested in the refinement of the intellectual wherewithal required to come into contact with the unique individual experience that is literature’s essence. Whatever intentions guided Robert Lowell’s adaptations of foreign poets, to Nabokov they resembled an ever-narrowing one-way street that promised a passage from one mind to another but proved a vicious circle with no escape from the solitary confinement of Lowell’s designs. In this sense translation provides a vantage point on Nabokov’s ethics from which we can corroborate the intelligence gathered in the course of our contemplation of his deliberately challenging fictional works. Freedom of expression matters, to be certain, yet it is checked at the boundaries of the other’s autonomy, and that was the pathos of Nabokov’s disagreement with Lowell’s treatment of Osip Mandel′štam. With its ability to foster creation, dialogue proves the only way to overcome the conundrum inherent to the need to seek contact and elicit response while respecting the fact that a dialogue cannot be concluded, that not all mysteries of the other’s mind can be accessed and verbalized. His firsthand acquaintance with the vivifying effect of the dialogic constituent of translation on his creativity transformed him into its beneficiary and champion.
26Once told, the story of Vladimir Nabokov’s life in translation will have to expound a number of complexities and contradictions. The insights it offers into his art and thought, into the practice and theory of translation, and into literary creativity are too valuable not to be considered in the context of their evolution. Nabokov’s compositions teem with verbal vestiges of his wrestles with the words of his interlocutors—sometimes by design, sometimes due to the fact that the ontology of creativity ensures that one’s words come into being in response to such encounters. The dynamic and the drama of their continued coexistence within his compositions constitute one of the least familiar, least studied aspects of Nabokov’s legacy.
Bibliographie
Corpus
BAKHTIN Mikhail, 1996-2003, Sobranie sočinenij, Moscow, Izdatel′stvo Russkie slovari, 7 vols.
NABOKOV Vladimir, 1931, « “O Pushkine.” “O Bloke” ». Reprint: SHVABRIN Stanislav (éd.), 2014, Novyj zhurnal, no 277, p. 189-217.
NABOKOV Vladimir, 1955, « Problems of Translation: “Onegin” in English », Partisan Review, vol. 22, no 4, p. 496-512.
NABOKOV Vladimir, 1963, The Gift, translated by Michael Scammell and Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author. Reprint: New York, Vintage International, 1991.
NABOKOV Vladimir, 1966, « The Servile Path », BROWER Reuben A. (éd.), On Translation, New York, Oxford University Press, p. 97-110.
NABOKOV Vladimir, 1973, Strong Opinions. Reprint: New York, Vintage International, 1990.
NABOKOV Vladimir, 1979, Stihi, Ann Arbor, Ardis.
NABOKOV Vladimir, 1980, BOWERS Fredson (éd.), Lectures on Literature, introduction by John Updike, New York and London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Bruccoli Clark.
NABOKOV Vladimir, 1996, BOYD Brian (éd.), Novels and Memoirs 1941-1951; Novels 1955-1962; Novels 1969-1974, New York, Library of America.
NABOKOV Vladimir, 2008, BOYD Brian and SHVABRIN Stanislav (éd.), Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian Poetry Selected and Translated by Vladimir Nabokov, Orlando, Harcourt Houghton Mifflin.
PUSHKIN Aleksandr, 1964, Eugene Onegin. A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin. Translated from the Russian, with a Commentary, by Vladimir Nabokov. Reprint: London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 4 vols, 1975.
QUENNELL Peter (éd.), 1979, Vladimir Nabokov, His Life, His Work, His World: A Tribute, London, Weidenfield and Nicolson.
SHVABRIN Stanislav, 2019, Between Rhyme and Reason: Vladimir Nabokov, Translation, and Dialogue, Toronto, University of Toronto Press.
VERHAEREN Émile, 1911, Poèmes, Paris, Mercure de France.
References
ARNDT Walter, 1964, « Goading the Pony », New York Review of Books, vol. 11, no 5, p. 16
BELLOS David, 2011, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, New York, Faber and Faber.
EMERSON Caryl, « Perevodimost′ », 1994, Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 38, no 1, 84-9.
JOHNSON Donald Barton, 1999, « Vladimir Nabokov and Rupert Brooke », CONNOLLY Julian (éd.), Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 177-196.
NAIMAN Eric, 2001, « Review of Delicate Markers: Subtexts in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Invitation to a Beheading,” by Gavriel Shapiro », Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 45, no 2, p. 359-360.
STEINER George, 1971, Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and Language Revolution, New York, Atheneum.
Notes de bas de page
1 About Nabokov’s translation of Evgenij Onegin, especially his use of humour, see the chapter by Paul B. Grant in this volume (editors’ note).
2 For a more evolved, textual-evidence enhanced substantiation of this position, along with its theoretical underpinnings, see Shvabrin 2019.
3 The “alien word” is different from the “foreign word.” On foreign words in Nabokov’s work, see the chapter by Julie Loison-Charles in this volume (editors’ note).
4 Eric Naiman has called Nabokov “the most promiscuously allusive author of our time” (Naiman 2001: 360). Tempting as it may be to accept this metaphor as a designator uniquely suited for Nabokov’s playful allusiveness, a closer study of his translation suggests that instead of being compulsively random, his allusions are integrated into his dialogically-motivated search for meaning and significance in his encounters with other creative minds.
5 For this translation, read Alexia Gassin’s article in this volume (editors’ note).
6 Steiner cited Nabokov’s case as an exponent of a writer whose multilingual achievement throws into doubt “[t]he equation of a single pivot of language, of native deep rootedness, with poetic authority” (Steiner 1971: 6). For Nabokov’s dismissal of Steiner’s attempt to qualify him as an “extraterritorial” writer, see Nabokov 1973: 288.
7 See her laconic preamble to her husband’s Stihi.
8 In connection with which one is reminded of his first published work, an appropriative Russian rendition of Alfred de Musset’s “La Nuit de décembre,” 1914, the relevance of which has been persuasively demonstrated by Jane Grayson (see Grayson 1995).
9 The Vladimir Nabokov Archive with the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library.
10 “[of] enthralling/captivating mysteries of otherworldly plains”.
11 It is instructive to see that Nabokov uses the phrase “rude prying” in connection with his effort to detect the presence of “alien” constituents within the unity of Pushkin’s style: “Some rude prying into Pushkin’s workshop is inevitable, nor can one help being surprised at a great man’s stealing from lesser men” (Nabokov 1966: 109).
12 Renate Lachmann’s Gedächtnis und Literatur. Intertextualität in der russischen Moderne (1990) presents a cautionary tale on the perils of connecting Bakhtin and Nabokov while presenting little textual evidence in which to ground this parallel, John Burt Foster Jr. Nabokov’s Art of Memory and European Modernism (1993) shows that Bakhtin-enlightened approach to Nabokov advances our understanding of the writer’s relationship with his peers. Among recent studies of the Bakhtin-Nabokov nexus stands out Francisco Javier Picon’s PhD dissertation “Bakhtin and Nabokov: The Dialogue That Never Was” (Columbia, 2016).
13 Bakhtin’s “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” (ca. 1920-23) may be among his earlier works, yet it retains its relevance to the analysis of the dialogic aspects of Nabokov’s creativity.
14 Brian Boyd’s Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery (1999) demonstrates the potential of an interpretative strategy rooted in the interactive, indeed dialogic, implications of this pronouncement.
15 In and of itself Nabokov’s 1941-43 translation of Fëdor Tjutchev’s poetic meditation on the limits of interpersonal communication and understanding “Silentium” (ca. 1825-29) supplies us with much valuable information on the centrality of this philosophical conundrum to Nabokov’s thought. Tjutchev’s “Silentium” also provides an excellent example of a literary phenomenon deeply integrated into the texture of Nabokov’s original compositions according to the scenario of Bakhtin’s understanding of the dialogic aspect of creativity. “Cloud, Castle, Lake” (1937) is one example among many of how “Silentium” motivates Nabokov to grapple with its implications in his own work.
16 It is no accident that such modifiers begin to proliferate in Nabokov’s translation-centered discourse on the eve of his conversion to the literalist creed in the late nineteen-forties and thereafter in anticipation of his programmatic “On Translating Eugene Onegin” (1955), the purpose of which was to prepare the ground for the upcoming publication of the Eugene Onegin project. The direction of Nabokov’s evolution as translator and translation theorist is encapsulated in the shifts in his translation-centered rhetoric. In 1925, he privately equated creativity with translation as a way to communicate with God, no less: “[w]e are translators of God’s creations” (see Boyd 1990: 245). If in 1941 his programmatic statement on the subject was unambiguously titled “The Art of Translation,” its revised version opened “this pathetic business of translating” and qualified translation as “a controversial subject” (see Nabokov 2008: 2), foreshadowing “Rimes” (“Pity the elderly gray translator,” 1952) and “On Translating Eugene Onegin” (1955), with its “profanation of the dead” and “dove-droppings on your monument.”
17 An important facet behind Nabokov’s conversion to literalism was the fact that the accumulation of such and similar compromises he had accrued in the course of his life in translation weighed on him. Understanding that the only logical solution was to disown his poetic translations after arriving at literalism, Nabokov did just that after Walter Arndt had used them in an attempt to expose Nabokov’s position as hypocritical (see Arndt 1964: 16).
18 Attentive readers of the Eugene Onegin commentary know that it features a number of poetic and literary, not literal, translations. Nabokov continued to translate poetry as poetry even after Eugene Onegin (or as he worked on its last edition of 1975); it often escapes the attention of his critics that “On Adaptation” takes issue with Robert Lowell’s ignorance of Russian first and foremost, without insisting on literalism as the only way to translate Mandel′štam.
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