A GARLAND FOR NABOKOV.

Every once in a while I get a notice from Half.com that something on my wish list has become available in the price range I set; rarely have I been happier to get such a notice than when they told me the Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (published at $65) was available for $20.98 from Labyrinth Books. (No longer, I’m afraid, but maybe another batch will come on the market.) I mention it here not to gloat, but to urge those of my readers who are Nabokov fans (I know there are more than a few) to seek it out at their local library. It’s an absolute treasure trove, almost 800 pages of scholarly articles on every imaginable subject: each of his major works, “Style,” “Teaching,” “Translation and Self-Translation,” and a series on “Nabokov and…” (Bely, Bergson, Blok, Chateaubriand, and over a dozen other writers). And there’s a comprehensive index, so that you can follow a single topic through all the articles, not to mention a detailed chronology and bibliography. Here’s a tidbit from the chapter on translation, by the wonderfully named Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour:

The translation [of Onegin] alone is almost useless to the monolingual reader of English. At most, it is a “version,” which the theoretician of translation André Lefevre argues must no more be called a “translation” than should a “free imitation.” What Nabokov has made is, as he himself boasted, a crib, a pony, an aid to less-than-complete bilinguals who need help in working with the original. Nabokov revised this pony several times to make it still more “ideally interlinear and unreadable” (SL, 482). Because it was not meant to stand alone, it should, as Boyd says, actually have been printed as an interlinear with the original Russian. For as George Steiner has observed, however faithful an “interlinear” may be in principle, in practice it is not a translation but “a contingent lexicon.”

Perfectly true, and I’ve never understood how people can take Nabokov’s later, extremist, theories on translation seriously. His example should be warning enough.

Comments

  1. Ha ha! Hi languagehat! Your blog came up just now on a google search of “Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour”, who will be attending the April 2005 PEN conference, and we might possibly interview her for inclusion within our Literary Anthology!

  2. How ’bout that? Well, you can tell her from me that I like her style. And now that I’ve googled her myself, I’ll have to read her book Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the “First” Emigration.

  3. The translation [of Onegin] alone is almost useless to the monolingual reader of English. At most, it is a “version,” which the theoretician of translation André Lefevre argues must no more be called a “translation” than should a “free imitation.” What Nabokov has made is, as he himself boasted, a crib, a pony, an aid to less-than-complete bilinguals who need help in working with the original. Nabokov revised this pony several times to make it still more “ideally interlinear and unreadable” (SL, 482).

    With this in mind, I present for your delectation the following letter to the TLS (Sept. 4, 2020):

    I was surprised to see in Stephanie Sandler’s review of recent Pushkin translations in English (August 21 & 28) no mention of Vladimir Nabokov’s surely definitive version of 1964, a work partly translated in her own university of Harvard. It is true that Nabokov’s rendering does not rhyme, but he hoped he had written a text of “humble fidelity”.

    I personally find the text the most readable of all English versions. The Commentary Nabokov provides alongside the poem is probably the most detailed of any major text in any language. This critique includes essays by Nabokov on the structure of the stanza and of the poem overall, the poem’s genesis, its publication history, […]. No one has been kinder, or more mindful, of those gods than Vladimir Nabokov, the most brilliant Russian ever to write in English.

    Sam Milne
    Claygate, Esher

    I have to accept that he actually believes what he’s saying, and that there are others who agree with him, but I feel as far from their mental world as from that of a bat. (I’ve clipped a long list of excellent things that Nabokov writes about in his notes but that are entirely irrelevant to the success of the translation.)

Speak Your Mind

*