1 About Nabokov’s commentary, see Paul G. Grant’s article in this volume (note of the editors).

2 See, for example: Lyons 1967; Brown 1967; Johnson 1971; Dolinin 1995; Tammi 1995; Boyd 1999; and Trubikhina 2008.

3 Reading Pale Fire as a parody of Nabokov’s commentary to Onegin ultimately leads Trubikhina to claim that “just as Kinbote’s Commentary is not reliable, Nabokov’s Commentary should not be trusted. It serves too many purposes at once: it is a serious philological study; it serves the less serious purpose of self-parody; and it settles scores with critics, literary enemies—past and present—and former friends” (Trubikhina 2008: 63).

4 As Rosengrant notes in his discussion of Nabokov’s translation of Onegin, “Either the translator will have to jettison a great deal along the way (the unavoidable practice in verse renderings made to stand on their own) or he will have to provide some sort of compensatory apparatus—a massive scholarly and linguistic commentary, for example—in order to ensure the carrying over into the second language of as much as possible of the original text and context. And if he opts for that apparatus, then he will properly have to include everything in it, for everything, from the most objective and general fact to the most subjective and personal opinion, conceivably has a bearing on the text as he reads it, his traditional replicatory role as translator now hypertrophied to that of circumstantial intellectual (auto)biographer and exuberant literary anatomist of almost Promethean scale and ambition” (Rosengrant 1994: 16).

5 Hence, it is not surprising that Kinbote praises “those wonderful new translating machines that can do it so much faster than a man or an animal” (Nabokov 1989: 281).

6 Conmal’s macaronic name is in keeping with the Zemblan language as a whole. As Meyer notes, one of the features of the Zemblan language is that it is “composed of Slavic and Germanic roots often combined within a single word” (Meyer 1987: 433). An even harsher assessment of Conmal’s activities may be found in his name if one stays within a single language, French, in which “con” translates as “asshole.” In contrast, and in support of my central claim that it is Conmal, not Kinbote, who is the novel’s most brutal betrayer, Meyer offers the following etymology of Kinbote’s name: “In Old Icelandic bot means (1) a bettering, a remedy, (2) atonement, compensation, especially in the sense of manboetr, or weregeld, that is, compensation for a murdered man. […] The name Kin-bote should therefore be read as ‘the payment, atonement, compensation for the murder of a relative’” (Meyer 1987: 438). No such positive valence can be found in the name Con-mal.

7 For a comprehensive analysis of the links between The Song of Igor’s Campaign and Pale Fire see Meyer 1988.

8 Sybil Shade is also a paraphrast, having produced rhyming translations of Marvell and Donne in French. Kinbote devotes three pages of his commentary to chronicling the “blurrings and blunders” she has committed (Nabokov 1989: 241).

9 Weld convincingly argues for the centrality of the theme of forgery in Nabokov’s oeuvre as a whole and focuses specifically on how forgery relates to his “creation and counterfeiting of northern kingdoms,” of which Zembla is one example (Weld 2013: 187). Moreover, she directly equates forgery and plagiarism with betrayal in her discussion of how, at the end of Glory, “Martin’s initial imaginings about Zoorlandia have become a work of art, or fiction, though not in Martin’s hand”: “The invented northern kingdom, which began as an intimate imaginative exercise between two individuals, here reveals an act of betrayal by Martin’s love interest and the plagiarism of her lover. This Zoorlandia is then, in some sense, a forgery—one illuminated oddly by an intruder’s imagination” (Weld 2013: 191). Finally, she views “translation, interpretation,” and “inspired forgery” as “deeply related arts” for Nabokov (Weld 2013: 201).

10 Similarly, misprints also mislead, as seen in the misprint of “mountain” for “fountain” in the magazine story of Mrs. Z.’s account of “The Land Beyond the Veil” that misleads Shade to believe that someone else has had the same experience of the afterlife that he has had (Nabokov 1989: 60-62). Kinbote links this misprint to translation in his notes: “Translators of Shade’s poem are bound to have trouble with the transformation, at one stroke, of ‘mountain’ into ‘fountain’: it cannot be rendered into French or German, or Russian, or Zemblan; so the translator will have to put it into one of those footnotes that are the rogue’s galleries of words” (Nabokov 1989: 260).