{"id":26914,"date":"2012-02-29T08:00:11","date_gmt":"2012-02-29T13:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=26914"},"modified":"2012-02-28T18:34:49","modified_gmt":"2012-02-28T23:34:49","slug":"document-nabokov%e2%80%99s-notes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/02\/29\/document-nabokov%e2%80%99s-notes\/","title":{"rendered":"Document: Nabokov\u2019s Notes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When Vladimir Nabokov started teaching Russian literature at Wellesley College in 1944, he was frustrated by the lack of an adequate literal translation of Eugene Onegin<\/em>, which he referred to as \u201cthe first and fundamental Russian novel.\u201d He prepared his own extracts for class use and invited Edmund Wilson to work with him on a full translation.<\/p>\n

Wilson had nurtured Nabokov\u2019s early career in the States, and Nabokov had reciprocated with many generous hours of patient tutorial\u2014often via letter\u2014on the finer points of Russian literature, history, politics, and scansion. The two had grown to be great friends but never collaborated on a full-length work. The 1964 publication of Nabokov\u2019s solo translation of Onegin<\/em> effectively ended their friendship and sparked one of the best-known intellectual debates of the last century.<\/p>\n

The project began promisingly enough for Nabokov, though Wilson had misgivings from the get-go. When Nabokov first decided to prepare a prose translation of Onegin<\/em>, \u201cwith notes giving associations and other explanations for every line,\u201d Wilson and Nabokov had been exchanging letters about Russian poetics for a decade, often with barely masked stridency on both sides. In 1950 Wilson expressed fatigue: \u201cI am getting rather tired of all these topics and think we ought to start something new.\u201d When he learned that Nabokov has decided to devote his Guggenheim Fellowship\u2014achieved, in part, through Wilson\u2019s recommendation\u2014to the Onegin <\/em>project, he complained: \u201cI wish you had given them some other project\u2014it seems to me a pity for you to spend a lot of time on Onegin <\/em>when you ought to be writing your own books.\u201d Nabokov, however, wasn\u2019t worried: in his application he wrote that it would take \u201ca year or so,\u201d and told Wilson the work could be \u201cquite smoothly combined with other pleasures.\u201d<\/p>\n

A year later he wrote how much more arduous a project it had turned out to be: \u201cI was \u2026 on the verge of a breakdown and not fit for company. For two months in Cambridge I did nothing (from 9 A.M.<\/small> to 2 A.M.<\/small>) but work on my commentaries to EO<\/em>.\u201d Still later, it seemed he had met his whale. He wrote to Katharine White, his friend and New Yorker <\/em>editor, that the \u201cmonster\u201d had \u201cgrown far beyond whatever I planned originally.\u201d He told Wilson, \u201cI have at last discovered the right way to translate Onegin<\/em>. This is the fifth or sixth complete version I have made.\u201d At the end of the summer of 1957 he admitted more confidentially to his sister, \u201cI hope that I can finally, finally finish my monstrous Pushkin \u2026 I am tired of this \u2018bookish exploit\u2019.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

His translation was published, at last, in 1964, in the four-volume edition pictured here and including Nabokov\u2019s word-by-word literal translation, his commentary (explaining content, context, and impact), two appendices (including a discussion of Russian prosody), an index, and a facsimile reproduction of the 1837 second edition (which was the final text Pushkin saw through the press).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You\u2019d think that after planning and working on the project on and off for more than twenty years, Nabokov would have been pleased with the result. Why, then, did he overwrite so much of the text in this copy, further revising his translation? Why are there annotations here stretching into the early 1970s? His new alterations were in response to Wilson\u2019s damning review in The New York Review of Books<\/em>\u2014and they were designed to play up the aspects of the translation Wilson hated most.<\/p>\n

Nabokov\u2019s publisher, Bollingen, had been eager to send the work, before publication, to Wilson, then a perceived authority, to allow him ample time to compose a strong review. Nabokov warned them that Wilson was an \u201cenvious ass,\u201d and that his Russian was \u201cprimitive, and his knowledge of Russian literature gappy and grotesque\u201d\u2014and all this was before they parted ways.<\/p>\n

Wilson, predictably, shattered whatever relief Nabokov experienced at publication with his caustic review in the July 15, 1965, issue of The New York Review of Books<\/em>. In \u201cThe Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov,\u201d he wrote that the translation<\/p>\n

\n

produced a bald and awkward language which has nothing in common with Pushkin or with the usual writing of Nabokov. One knows Mr. Nabokov\u2019s virtuosity in juggling with the English language, the prettiness and wit of his verbal inventions. One knows also the perversity of his tricks to startle or stick pins in the reader; and one suspects that his perversity here has been exercised in curbing his brilliance; that\u2014with his sado-masochistic Dostoevskian tendencies so acutely noted by Sartre\u2014he seeks to torture both the reader and himself by flattening Pushkin out \u2026 It would be more to the point for the student to look up the Russian word than to have to have recourse to the OED<\/em> for an English word he has never seen and which he will never have occasion to use. To inflict on the reader such words is not really to translate at all, for it is not to write idiomatic and recognizable English.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There\u2019s a compliment in there somewhere, but you have to dig for it. This commentary engendered a series of rebuttals, qualified retractions, and counterattacks that effectively terminated the quarter-century friendship. Rather than collaborate, Wilson had critiqued, and in August 1965 the NYRB<\/em> printed Nabokov\u2019s first response (in the form of a letter), in which he noted seven errors in Wilson\u2019s review and asserted that \u201cWilson\u2019s didactic purpose is defeated by the presence of such errors (and there are many more to be listed later) as it is also by the strange tone of his article. Its mixture of pompous aplomb and peevish ignorance is certainly not conducive to a sensible discussion of Pushkin\u2019s language and mine.\u201d<\/p>\n

In \u201cReply to My Critics,\u201d published in the February 1966 issue of Encounter<\/em>, Nabokov singled Wilson out for writing \u201cthe longest, most ambitious, most captious, and, alas, most reckless, article.\u201d He began somewhat gently: \u201cUnlike my novels, EO possesses an ethical side, moral and human elements. It reflects the compiler\u2019s honesty or dishonesty, skill or sloppiness. If told I am a bad poet, I smile; but if told I am a poor scholar, I reach for my heaviest dictionary.\u201d He then launched a frontal attack:<\/p>\n

\n

The mistakes and misstatements in [Wilson\u2019s review] form an uninterrupted series so complete as to seem artistic in reverse, making one wonder if, perhaps, it had not been woven that way on purpose to be turned into something pertinent and coherent when reflected in a looking glass \u2026 A patient confidant of his long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian language and literature, I have invariably done my best to explain to him his monstrous mistakes of pronunciation, grammar, and interpretation \u2026 From our conversations and correspondence in former years I well know that, like Onegin, he is incapable of comprehending the mechanism of verse\u2014either Russian or English \u2026 In his rejoinder to my letter of August 26, 1965, in The New York Review<\/em>, Mr. Wilson says that on rereading his article he felt it sounded \u201cmore damaging\u201d than he had meant it to be. His article, entirely consisting, as I have shown, of quibbles and blunders, can be damaging only to his own reputation\u2014and that is the last look I shall ever take at the dismal scene.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Even as he rigorously defended his translation, Nabokov was assiduously revising it, in an attempt to bring it ever closer to the ideal form of translation he advocated in his critical writing.<\/p>\n

Nabokov stated that he had begun work on a second, revised edition, to be \u201ceven more gloriously and monstrously literal than the first\u201d; he felt that his first edition was \u201cstill not close enough and not ugly enough. In future editions … I think I shall turn it entirely into utilitarian prose, with a still bumpier brand of English, rebarbative barricades of square brackets and tattered banners of reprobate words, in order to eliminate the last vestiges of bourgeois poesy and concession to rhythm. This is something to look forward to. For the moment, all I wish is merely to put on record my utter disgust with the general attitude, amoral and Philistine, towards literalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Pictured above is the copy he used for the task. Nearly every page of the poem has been revised in this uncompromising spirit, with entire stanzas at times retranslated in the margins.<\/p>\n

By the end of 1966, the new translation was almost complete\u2014he labeled this copy Corrected 1967<\/em>. In fall 1969, he wrote of the translation, \u201cI am now through with that diabolical task forever. I feel that I have done for Pushkin at least as much as he has done for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

But he was not yet done; he had to wait for Princeton University Press\u2014who had taken over Bollingen\u2014to get their new edition out, a task that, somewhat inexplicably, took them six years. (Nabokov enumerated a few of the hold-ups including strikes and manufacturing errors.) The task expanded to fill the space he had: he kept revising. An additional note in this copy reads, \u201cAdded corrections 1971 in red to be included in proof.\u201d Ironically, it might have been not the labor but the layout that held back Nabokov\u2019s edition of Onegin <\/em>from a place of honor. His biographer Brian Boyd writes<\/a>,<\/p>\n

\n

Even this revised version fails to provide an interlinear, transliterated, accented Russian text. When someday Nabokov\u2019s translation is published in this fashion, I expect every reviewer who knows Pushkin in the original and who has preferred verse translations over Nabokov\u2019s uncompromising literalism will recant.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

For a man about whom John Updike would write, in his New York Times<\/em> obituary, \u201cFew who had lost so much have complained so little,\u201d Nabokov certainly complained plenty about the public reception of his Onegin<\/em>, and he lost, at least temporarily, a great friend. In 1971, upon rereading his twenty-year correspondence with Wilson, he reached out to him: \u201cIt was such a pleasure to feel again the warmth of your many kindnesses, the various thrills of our friendship, that constant excitement of art and intellectual discovery.\u201d He added, \u201cPlease believe that I have long ceased to bear you a grudge for your incomprehensible incomprehension of Pushkin\u2019s and Nabokov\u2019s Onegin<\/em>.\u201d Wilson died on June 12, 1972, three years before Princeton issued Nabokov\u2019s revised version; Nabokov himself died two years after.<\/p>\n

Sarah Funke Butler is a literary archivist and agent at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, Inc<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Vladimir Nabokov started teaching Russian literature at Wellesley College in 1944, he was frustrated by the lack of an adequate literal translation of Eugene Onegin, which he referred to as \u201cthe first and fundamental Russian novel.\u201d He prepared his own extracts for class use and invited Edmund Wilson to work with him on a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":216,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[807],"tags":[6361,6365,6359,1474,6364,6357,6358,615,504,112,6366,6360,6363,447,4638,6362,530,967,1458],"class_list":["post-26914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-translation","tag-bollingen","tag-brian-boyd","tag-cambridge","tag-edmund-wilson","tag-encounter","tag-eugene-onegin","tag-guggenheim-fellowship","tag-john-updike","tag-literature","tag-novel","tag-pinceton-university-press","tag-pushkin","tag-reply-to-my-critics","tag-russia","tag-the-new-york-review-of-books","tag-the-strange-case-of-pushkin-and-nabokov","tag-translation","tag-vladimir-nabokov","tag-wellesley-college"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDocument: Nabokov\u2019s Notes by Sarah Funke Butler<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"February 29, 2012 \u2013 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