Vladimir Nabokov - Strong opinions

In order to indicate the archaic note in vospomnya (used by Pushkin in One: xlvii: 67 instead of vspomnya, or vspomniv, or vspominaya), as well as to suggest the deep sonorous diction of both lines (vospomnya prezhnih let romany; vospomnya, etc.), I had to find something more reverberating and evocative than «recalling intrigues of past years», etc., and whether Mr. Wilson (or Mr. N. for that matter) likes it or not, nothing more suitable than «rememorating» for vospomnya can be turned up.*

* For reasons having nothing to do with the subject of this essay I subsequently changed the translation, exact in tone but not in syntax, of those two lines (see the epigraph to my Mary, McGrawHill, New York, 1970).

Mr. Wilson also dislikes «curvate», a perfectly plain and technically appropriate word which I have used to render kriyye hecause I felt that «curved» or «crooked» did not quite do justice to Onegin's regularly bent manicure scissors.

Similarly, not a passing whim but the considerations of prolonged thought led me to render hour: ix: 5, prtvychkoy zhizni izbalovan, as «spoiled by a habitude of life». I needed the Gallic touch and found it preferable in allusive indefinitude — Pushkin's line is elegantly ambiguous — to «habit of life» or «life's habit». «Habitude» is the right and good word here. It is not labeled «dialect» or «obsolete» in Webster's great dictionary.

Another perfectly acceptable word is «rummer», which I befriended because of its kinship with ryumka , and because I wished to find for the ryumki of Five: xxix: 4 a more generalized wineglass than the champagne flutes of xxxii: 89, which are also ryumki. If Mr. Wilson consults my notes, he will see that on second thought I demoted the nonobsolete but rather oversized cups of xxix to jiggers of vodka tossed down before the first course.

I cannot understand why Mr. Wilson is puzzled by «dit» (Five: vm: 13) which I chose instead of «ditty» to parallel «kit» instead of «kitty» in the next line, and which will now,

I hope, enter or reenter the language. Possibly, the masculine rhyme I needed here may have led me a little astray from the servile path of literalism (Pushkin has simply pesnya — «song»). But it is not incomprehensible; after all, anybody who knows what, say, «titty» means («in nailmaking the part that ejects the half-finished nail») can readily understand what «tit» means («the part that ejects the finished nail»).

Next on Mr. Wilson's list of inappropriate words is «gloam». It is a poetic word, and Keats has used it. It renders perfectly the mgla of the gathering evening shadows in Four: xlvii: 8, as well as the soft darkness of trees in Three: xvi: 11. It is better than «murk», a dialect word that Mr. Wilson uses for mgla, with my sanction, in another passage — the description of a wintry dawn.

In the same passage which both I and Mr. Wilson have translated, my «shippon» is as familiar to anyone who knows the English countryside as Mr. Wilson's «byre» should be to a New England farmer. Both «shippon» and «byre» are unknown to pocketdictionary readers; both are listed in the threecentimeterthick Penguin (1965). But I prefer «shippon» for hlev because I see its shape as clearly as that of the Russian cowhouse it resembles, but see only a Vermont barn when I try to visualize «byre».

Then there is «scrab»: «he scrabs the poor thing up», bednyazhku tsaptsarap (One: xiv: 8). This tsap-tsarap — a «verbal interjection» presupposing (as Pushkin notes when employing it in another poem) the existence of the artificial verb tsaptsarapat', jocular and onomatopoeic — combines tsapat' («to snatch») with tsarapat («to scratch»). I rendered Pushkin's uncommon word by the uncommon «scrab up», which combines «grab» and «scratch», and am proud of it. It is in fact a wonderful find.

I shall not analyze the phrase «in his lunes» that Mr. Wilson for good measure has included among my «aberrations». It occurs not in my translation, which he is discussing, but in the flow of my ordinary comfortable descriptive prose which we can discuss another time.

We now come to one of the chief offenders: «mollitude». For Pushkin's Gallic nega I needed an English counterpart of mollesse as commonly used in such phrases as il perdit ses jeunes anntes dans la mollesse et la volupte or son coeur nage dans la mollesse. It is incorrect to say, as Mr. Wilson does, that readers can never have encountered «mollitude». Readers of Browning have. In this connection Mr. Wilson wonders how I would have translated chistyh neg in one of Pushkin's last elegies — would I have said «pure mollitudes»? It so happens that I translated that little poem thirty years ago, and when Mr. Wilson locates my version (in the Introduction to one of my novels*) he will note that the genitive plural of nega is a jot different in sense from the singular.

[* Despair. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 302303, 1966]

In Mr. Wilson's collection of betes noires my favorite is «sapajou». He wonders why I render dostoyno staryh obez'yan as «worthy of old sapajous» and not as «worthy of old monkeys». True, obez'yana means any kind of monkey but it so happens that neither «monkey» nor «ape» is good enough in the context.

«Sapajou» (which technically is applied to two genera of neotropical monkeys) has in French a colloquial sense of «ruffian», «lecher», «ridiculous chap». Now, in lines 12 and 911 of Four: vii («the less we love a woman, the easier 'tis to be liked by her . . . but that grand game is worthy of old sapajous of our forefathers' vaunted times») Pushkin echoes a moralistic passage in his own letter written in French from Kishinev to his young brother in Moscow in the autumn of 1822, that is seven months before beginning Eugene Onegin and two years before reaching Canto Four. The passage, well known to readers of Pushkin, goes: «Moins on aime une femme et plus on est sur de I'avoir . . . mats cettepuissance est digne d'un vieux sapajou du dixhuittemesiicle».

Not only could I not resist the temptation of retranslating the obez'yan of the canto into the AngloFrench «sapajous» of the letter, but I was also looking forward to somebody's pouncing on that word and allowing me to retaliate with that wonderfully satisfying reference. Mr. Wilson obliged — and here it is.

«There are also actual errors of English», continued Mr. Wilson, and gives three examples: «dwelled» which I prefer to «dwelt»; «about me», which in Two: xxxix: 14 is used to render obo mne instead of the better «of me»; and the word «loaden», which Mr. Wilson «had never heard before». But «dwelled» is marked in my dictionary only «less usual» — not «incorrect»; «remind about» is not quite impossible (e.g., «remind me about it tomorrow»); as to «loaden», which Mr. Wilson suggests replacing by «loadened», his English wobbles, not mine, since «loaden» is the correct past participle and participial adjective of «load».

In the course of his strange defense of Arndt's version — in which, according to Mr. Wilson, I had been assiduously tracking down Germanisms — he asserts that «it is not difficult to find Russianisms in Nabokov» and turns up one, or the shadow of one («left us» should be «has left us» in a passage that I cannot trace). Surely there must be more than one such slip in a work fifteen hundred pages long devoted by a Russian to a Russian poem; however, the two other Russianisms Mr. Wilson lists are the figments of his own ignorance:

In translating slushat' shum morskoy (Eight: iv: 11) I chose the archaic and poetic transitive turn «to listen the sound of the sea» because the relevant passage has in Pushkin a stylized archaic tone. Mr. Wilson may not care for this turn — I do not much care for it either — but it is silly of him to assume that I lapsed into a naive Russianism not being really aware that, as he tells me, «in English you have to listen to something». First, it is Mr. Wilson who is not aware of the fact that there exists an analogous construction in Russian prislushivat'sya k zvuku , «to listen closely to the sound» — which, of course, makes nonsense of the exclusive Russianism imagined by him, and secondly, had he happcned to leaf through a certain canto of Don Juan, written in the year Pushkin was beginning his poem, or a certain Ode to Memory, written when Pushkin's poem was being finished, my learned friend would have concluded that Byron («Listening debates not very wise or witty») and Tennyson («Listening rhe lordly music») must have had quite as much Russian blood as Pushkin and I.