Vladimir Nabokov - Strong opinions

«The character called yo», Mr. Wilson continues, «is pronounced . . . more like 'yaw' than like the 'yo' in 'yonder.'« Mr. Wilson should not try to teach me how to pronounce this, or any other, Russian vowel. My «yo» is the standard rendering of the sound. The «yaw» sound he suggests is grotesque and quite wrong. I can hear Mr. Wilson — whose accent in Russian I know so well — asking that bookseller of his for «Miertvye Dushi» («Dead Souls»). No wonder he did not get it.

«Vse», according to Mr. Wilson (explaining two varieties of the Russian for «all»), «is applied to people, and vsyo to things». This is a meaningless pronouncement. Vse is merely the plural of ves' (masculine), vsya (feminine), and vsyo (neuter).

Mr. Wilson is puzzled by my assertion that the adjective zloy is the only one-syllable adjective in Russian. «How about the one-syllable predicative adjectives?» he asks. The answer is simple: I am not talking of predicative adjectives. Why drag them in? Such forms as mudr («is wise»), glup («is stupid»), ploh («is very sick indeed») are not adjectives at all, but adverbish mongrels which may differ in sense from the related adjectives.

In discussing the word pochuya Mr. Wilson confuses it with chuya («sensing») (see my letter about this word in the New Statesman, April 23, 1965) and says that had Pushkin used pochuyav, only then should I have been entitled to put «having sensed». «Where», queries Mr. Wilson, «is our scrupulous literalness?» Right here. My friend is unaware that despite the different endings, pochuyav and pochuya happen to be interchangeable, both being «past gerunds», and both meaning exactly the same thing.

All this is rather extraordinary. Every time Mr. Wilson starts examining a Russian phrase he makes some ludicrous slip. His didactic purpose is defeated by such errors, as it is also by the strange tone of his article. Its mixture of pompous aplomb and peevish ignorance is hardly conducive to a sensible discussion of Pushkin's language and mine — or indeed any language, for, as we shall presently see, Mr. Wilson's use of English is also singularly imprecise and misleading.

First of all it is simply not true to say, as he does, that in my review of Professor Arndt's translation (The New York Review of Books, August 30, 1964) «Nabokov dwelt especially on what he regarded as Professor Arndt's Germanisms and other infelicities of phrasing, without apparently being aware of how vulnerable he himself was». I dwelled especially on Arndt's mistranslations. What Mr. Wilson regards as my infelicities may be more repellent to him for psychological reasons than «anything in Arndt», but they belong to another class of error than Arndt's or any other paraphrases casual blunders, and what is more Mr. Wilson knows it. I dare him to deny that he deliberately confuses the issue by applying the term «niggling attack» to an indignant examination of the insults dealt out to Pushkin's masterpiece in yet another arty translation. Mr. Wilson affirms that «the only characteristic Nabokov trait» in my translation (aside from an innate «sadomasochistic» urge «to torture both the reader and himself», as Mr. Wilson puts it in a clumsy attempt to stick a particularly thick and rusty pin into my effigy) is my «addiction to rare and unfamiliar words». It does not occur to him that I may have rare and unfamiliar things to convey; that is his loss. He goes on, however, to say that in view of my declared intention to provide students with a trot such words are «entirely inappropriate» here, since it would be more to the point for the student to look up the Russian word than the English one. I shall stop only one moment to consider Mr. Wilson's pathetic assumption that a student can read Pushkin, or any other kussian poet, by «looking up» every word (atter all, the result of this simple method is far too apparent in Mr. Wilson's own mistranslations and misconceptions), or that a reliable and complete Russko-angliyskiy slovar'not only exists (it does not) but is more easily available to the student than, say, the second unabridged edition (1960) of Webster's, which I really must urge Mr. Wilson to acquire. Even if that miraculous slovar' did exist, there would still be the difficulty of choosing, without my help, the right shade between two near synonyms and avoiding, without my guidance, the trapfalls of idiomatic phrases no longer in use.

Edmund Wilson sees himself (not quite candidly, 1 am afraid, and certainly quite erroneously) as a common sensical, artless, average reader with a natural vocabulary of, say, six hundred basic words. No doubt such an imaginary reader may be sometimes puzzled and upset by the tricky terms 1 find it necessary to use here and there — very much here and there. But how many such innocents will tackle KO anyway? And what does Mr. Wilson mean by implying I should not use words that in the process of lexicographic evolution begin to occur only at the level of a «fairly comprehensive dictionary»? When does a dictionary cease being an abridged one and start growing «fairly» and then «extremely» comprehensive? Is the sequence: vest-pocket, coat-pocket, great-coat-pocket, my three book shelves, Mr. Wilson's rich library? And should the translator simply omit any reference to an idea or an object if the only right word — a word he happens to know as a teacher or a naturalist, or an inventor of words — is discoverable in the revised edition of a standard dictionary but not m its earlier edition or vice versa? Disturbing possibilities! Nightmarish doubts! And how does the harassed translator know that somewhere on the library ladder he has just stopped short of Wilson's Fairly Comprehensive and may safely use «polyhedral» but not «lingonberry»? (Incidentally, the percentage ot what Mr. Wilson calls «dictionary words» in my translation is really so absurdly small that I have difficulty in finding examples.)

Mr. Wilson can hardly be unaware that once a writer chooses to youthen or resurrect a word, it lives again, sobs again, stumbles all over the cemetery in doublet and trunk hose, and will keep annoying stodgy gravediggers as long as that writer's book endures. In several instances, English archaisms have been used in my EO not merely to match Russian antiquated words but to revive a nuance of meaning present in the ordinary Russian term but lost in the English one. Such terms are not meant to be idiomatic. The phrases 1 decide upon aspire towards literality, not readability. They are steps in the ice, pitons in the sheer rock of fidelity. Some are mere signal words whose only purpose is to suggest or indicate that a certain pet term of Pushkin's has recurred at that point. Others have been chosen for their Gallic touch implicit in this or that Russian attempt to imitate a French turn of phrase. All have pedigrees of agony and rejection and reinstatement, and should be treated as convalescents and ancient orphans, and not hooted at as impostors by a critic who says he admires some of my books. I do not care if a word is «archaic» or «dialect» or «slang»; I am an eclectic democrat in this matter, and whatever suits me, goes. My method may be wrong but it is a method, and a genuine critic's job should have been to examine the method itself instead of crossly fishing out of my pond some of the oddities with which I had deliberately stocked it.

Let me now turn to what Mr. Wilson calls my «infelicities» and «aberrations» and explain to him why I use the words he does not like or does not know.

In referring to Onegin's not being attracted by the picture of family life, Pushkin in Four: xm: 5 uses the phrase semeystvennoy kartinoy . The modern term is semeynoy kartinoy and had Pushkin chosen it, I might have put «family picture». But I had to indicate the presence of Pushkin's rarer word and used therefore the rarer «familistic» as a signal word.