American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages
Nabokov, Onegin, and the Theory of Translation
Author(s): Judson Rosengrant
Source: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Spring, 1994), pp. 13-27
Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/308543
Accessed: 25-02-2019 19:51 UTC
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NABOKOV, ONEGIN, AND THE THEORY OF
TRANSLATION
Judson Rosengrant, Portland OR
The publication of Vladimir Nabokov's self-styled "literal" trans
Evgenij Onegin in four volumes by the Bollingen Foundation in
again in 1975 in a revised, even more insistently verbatim edition pr
a variety of reactions, from outrage and incredulity to cautious a
and even (from members of his claque) to fulsome praise.' Yet
their reaction, it would seem that few critics have been willing t
terms with Nabokov's reasons for rendering Pulkin the way he
been willing to evaluate his undertaking on the basis of its own d
theory rather than according to some preconceived notion of wh
translation should or should not be.2
The critical failure to engage Nabokov's theory is certainly not the result
of any reluctance on his part to make his position clear. He in fact took
great pains to do so, publishing a number of items both before and after the
appearance of Onegin that bore directly and indirectly on its form and
substance: "On Translating 'Eugene Onegin' (An Illustration of the
'Onegin' Stanza-Metre and Rhyme Pattern)" in The New Yorker (1955a),
"Problems of Translation: Onegin in English" in Partisan Review (1955b),
"Zametki perevoddika" in two parts in the 6migr6 journals Novyj 'urnal
(1957a) and Opyty (1957b), "The Servile Path" in the anthology On Transla-
tion (1959), and even a version of Canto 6, Stanza XXX, with partial
commentary in Esquire (1963). He also argued against the method of the
"paraphrast" Walter Arndt (and by implication for the superiority of his
own approach) in his notoriously brutal assessment of the latter's Onegin in
The New York Review of Books (1964a). And of course he reiterated and
elaborated his ideas in the foreword and commentary to Onegin itself. The
questions raised by Nabokov in these publications and in the polemical
broadsides (especially the summation in Encounter [1966c]) that he issued
in reply to the hostile reviews are, despite their occasional obfuscation in
overweening personal attack and disdainfully reductive argumentation,
worthy of full attention. In what follows I shall look at those questions with
SEEJ, Vol. 38, No. 1 (1994): p. 13-p. 27 13
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14 Slavic and East European Journal
a view to eliciting Nabokov's governing assumptions about the nature of
translation, and then consider a few representative instances of his practice
in order to determine their relation to his theory.
In the foreword to Eugene Onegin Nabokov identifies three modes of
verse translation. The first is "Paraphrastic: offering a free version of the
original with omissions and additions prompted by the exigencies of form,
the conventions attributed to the consumer, and the translator's ignorance.
Some paraphrases may possess the charm of stylish diction and idiomatic
conciseness, but no scholar should succumb to stylishness and no reader be
fooled by it." Examples of paraphrasis in Nabokov's sense if not his valuation might, in different degrees of fidelity and skill, be Zukovskij's first
translation of Gray's "Elegy" (1802), the interpretations of the lyrical verse
of Puskin, Lermontov, and Tjutcev contained in Nabokov's own Three
Russian Poets (1944b), and the versions of Onegin authored by Arndt
(1963) and Charles Johnston (1977). Nabokov's second mode is "Lexical
(or constructional): rendering the basic meaning of the words (and their
order). This a machine can do under the direction of an intelligent
bilinguist." Examples of lexical translation, though patently beyond any
machine, would be the interlinear version that follows the syntax of the
original or, to a lesser but more popular degree since the syntax is customarily adapted, the prose trot of the kind included in John Fennell's Penguin
anthology of Pu'kin (1964) or in the well-known collection of Russian verse
edited by Dimitri Obolensky (1965). Nabokov's third mode is "Literal:
rendering, as closely as the associative and syntactical capacities of another
language allow, the exact contextual meaning of the original. Only this is
true translation." This last definition is expanded in the commentary to
Canto 8, Stanzas XVII and XVIII (both editions): "A 'literal translation,'
as I understand it, is a somewhat tautological term, since only a literal
rendering of the text is, in the true sense, a translation. However, there are
certain shades of the epithet that may be worth while preserving. First of
all, 'literal translation' implies adherence not only to the direct sense of a
word or sentence, but to its implied sense; it is a semantically exact interpre-
tation, and not necessarily a lexical one (pertaining to the meaning of a
word out of context) or a constructional one (conforming to the grammati-
cal order of the words in the text). In other words, a translation may be,
and often is, both lexical and constructional, but it is only literal when it is
contextually correct, and when the precise nuance and intonation of the
text are rendered." Examples of literal translation in this maximal or even
maximalist sense would, at least in intention, be Nabokov's Song of Igor's
Campaign (1960), his own Onegin, and Charles Singleton's monumental
edition of La divina commedia (1970-1975).3
Although Nabokov himself does not explicitly do so, his three modes
may productively be regarded as stages in a continuum of shifting semantic
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NABOKOV, ONEGIN, AND THE THEORY OF TRANSLATION 15
and structural correlation.4 First comes lexical translation, or denotativ
correspondence, with no attempt to reproduce the aesthetic form of t
original, which is regarded as irrelevant to bare cognitive meaning. Nex
literal translation, or denotative and connotative correspondence (insof
as these may be combined), accompanied by aesthetic form to the exte
that it does not hinder the scrupulous representation of cognitive meaning.
And last is paraphrastic translation, or what might for the sake of termino
logical symmetry be called recreative correspondence, wherein cognitiv
meaning is subordinated either to the replication of such formal features of
the text as meter and rhyme (which are now regarded as crucial to it
identity), or to the reproduction of its "spirit"-its tone and gestureswith a commensurate reduction in formal mimesis.
Of the three modes, lexical translation is naturally the easiest to accomplish. It involves merely the establishment of the basic denotative or dictionary meaning of a text in one language and the production of a homologous
text in another (using calques and other borrowings wherever concepts are
lacking and terminology is absent). Homology here means lexical and grammatical correspondence in the crudest sense-the words of the translation
will have the same primary designation and arrangement as those of the
original; they will be interlingual synonyms placed in comparable syntactic
units, even to the point of violating the conventions of the new language.
Of course, such a rendering will have to sacrifice a great deal-it will be a
mere skeleton or armature-but that is acceptable. Within the limits of its
special purpose, it will be accurate; it will provide a functional outline, a
metaphrase (as Dryden would have called it), to assist the novice in deciphering the original at the brute linguistic level.
The next mode, literal translation, retains lexical equivalence but understands it in a vastly more complex way-as including, in addition to bare
denotative correspondence, both contextual and connotative meaning, or
meaning at once modified by the intrinsic relations of the work as a unique
verbal artifact, by the extrinsic relations of the historical, social, and literary milieu from which the work necessarily derives, and by the circumstances of the work's socially and historically removed apprehension by the
new reader-translator and the audience he ostensibly serves. Textual semantics for the Nabokovian literalist thus consists of three interactive dimen-
sions: 1) the range of association potential in the original language at the
moment the work came into being, 2) the range of association delimited by
the text as a self-consistent aesthetic structure, and 3) the new associations
that, for good or ill, subsequent readers bring to the text-the socially and
historically conditioned responses that constitute their apperception of it.
Given the wealth of associative, contextual, and connotative meaning
present in any text so defined (and increasing as the text becomes more
literary and the reader more skillful), it is clear that the task of the literal
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16 Slavic and East European Journal
translator is immensely more difficult than that of the lexical translator. He
will have to have, if he is to approach anything like adequacy, not only an
extraordinary comprehension of his original language but also a thorough
grasp of the cultural and literary traditions attending it. If the text he is
translating comes from a period remote in time and is written in a tongue
no longer spoken and in reference to cultural traditions long fallen into
desuetude, then he will have to bring to bear not only exceptional linguistic
skill and literary sensitivity but also enormous philological and historical
knowledge-he will have to know not only what the words of the text mean
now but also what they meant then, and not merely what they meant then
but what they meant to the particular author who used them. In short, he
will have to understand the substance and character of the author's relation
to his own language and text and even, in some cases, to other languages
and texts whose conventions, literary or semantic, that author may be
introducing into his own.
All these requirements, of course, pertain only to the first language. Yet
there is the no less important and refractory problem of rendering the
complexities of the original in a second tongue whose conventions and
traditions may be very different, whose lexicon may correspond to that of
the first only at the simplest level. Indeed, one begins to wonder how, in a
mere translation, it will be possible to convey all, or if not all, then even the
more important meanings of the original. 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.5
Nabokov's third mode, paraphrastic translation, goes beyond literal
translation in the direction away from denotative equivalence, just as literal
translation itself moved beyond the constraints of the plain lexical render-
ing. Paraphrastic translation, however, does not merely show a pragmatic
willingness to suspend where necessary the strict provisions of denotative
and connotative, of referential and contextual, correspondence for the
sake of some more probabilistic construction of meaning. Much more than
that, it is often ready to dispense with those provisions altogether in favor
either of the formal equivalence of the translation and the original or of a
subjective reading that attempts to discover and recreate, often with en-
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NABOKOV, ONEGIN, AND THE THEORY OF TRANSLATION 17
tirely different, even alien means, the original's rather elusory spiritintonation or voice, its psychological, emotional, or intellectual gesture
In the case of formal equivalence, the translator strives to reproduce, as we
have already seen, a set of material features (meter, rhyme, and soun
instrumentation), believing these to involve the poetic essence of the work.
Yet to the extent that he retains those features, he must inevitably sacrific
cognitive meaning, for meaning and form, just as they verge on unity in t
original, obviously cannot, because of the different semantic and structural
dynamics of the second language and of its literary and cultural traditions,
be conjoined in the same way in the translation-if, indeed, they may
conjoined at all. In the case of the subjective reading, the original wo
serves to inspire the translator-poet's own invention. He is "stimulated"
it, his mind and sensibility "resonate" with it (either directly or, in
increasingly common practice, through an informant), and in varying
grees of latitude he "recasts" it as he imagines the original author "wo
have done" had he been writing in the translator's own idiom and in
time and place. Examples of the first type of paraphrasis would be th
above-mentioned academic versions of Onegin by Arndt and Johnston
Examples of the second, albeit at a distance that may weaken their claim
be translations at all, would be any of Ezra Pound's poetic adaptations
(such as his influential versions of Chinese poetry in Cathay [1915]), th
various Imitations contrived by Robert Lowell (1961), or Christoph
Logue's anachronistic excerpts from the Iliad: War Music (1981) and Kin
(1991).6
Each of Nabokov's three modes has its own measure of accuracy, its own
hierarchy of textual and cultural values to which it refers all decisions about
what may be included in or omitted from the final product. Each, in fact, is
ultimately a strategy for dealing with the fundamental and inescapable
circumstance that pure translation, translation in which every feature of the
original survives in all its formal integrity and semantic resonance, is simply
impossible. But of the three modes, it is "literal translation" that has the
best chance, indeed, the only chance in Nabokov's opinion, of carrying
over full literary meaning from one language to another.
With the theoretical principles extrapolated here as a background, let us
now look at some typical examples of Nabokov's practice in Onegin, using
for that purpose first Canto 3, Stanza XVII, in a lexical version by myself
and a literal rendering by Nabokov, and then Canto 1, Stanza XXXIII, in
both literal and paraphrastic renderings by Nabokov. 3:XVII reads:
"He CIIHTCI, HIHAI: 3AeCb TaK yIymHO!
OTKpoti OKHO ja cHJb KO MHe."
-"7TO, TaHRI, 1TO C TOGOfi?"-"MHe CKyMHO,
oOrOBOpMU o cTapuHe."
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18 Slavic and East European Journal
-"O xieM e, TaHAr! , 6blBaJIo,
XpaHHJIa B aMTH He ManJIO
CTapHHHblX 6blJuIe, He6bJIHq
lIpo n3JIb yXOB H lpo AeBH;
A HbIHe BCCe MHe TeMHO, TaH.i:
NTO 3Haia, TO 3a6bIia. 8a,
IpHmJaa xylaai iepega!
3am6nJo. . ." -"PaccKaxcH MHe, HAIH,
Ipo sBamH cTapbre roaa:
BbIna TMI BJIO6JIeHa TorJa?"7
A syntactically normalized lexical rendering of this might be:
"[I] can't sleep, nurse: here [it's] so stuffy!
Open [the] window and sit down by me."
"What, Tanja, what [is wrong] with thee?" "I'm bored.
Let's talk of olden times."
"About what, then, Tanja? I used
to keep in [my] memory not [a] few
old tales, fables
about evil spirits and about maidens;
but now all to me [is] dark, Tanja:
what [I] knew, that [I] have forgotten. Yes,
[things have come to a sorry turn]!
[I'm] fuddled ... .""Tell me, nurse,
about your old years:
were you in love then?"
I trust we can agree that while this strict linear version does give an idea
of the basic cognitive meaning of the passage, as well as a notion of its
syntax (in spite of the interpolations required by English grammar), it does
very little beyond that. It contains nothing, for example, of the tone, of the
lively interplay between Tanja and her old nurse that accounts for much of
the stanza's charm, nor does it convey anything of the formal patterns (the
meter or the celebrated rhyme scheme) that counterpoint the speakers'
colloquial diction and syntax and hold them in an evolving aesthetic tension. But lexical translation is not in fact intended to convey any of that
"secondary" detail; its only purpose is to give a basic semantic outline of
the original: speaker(s), subject matter, temporal situation, and order of
presentation.
Nabokov's literal translation of this passage in the 1964 edition has:
"I can't sleep, nurse: 'tis here so stuffy!
Open the window and sit down by me."
"Why, Tanya, what's the matter with you?" "I am dull.
Let's talk about old days."
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NABOKOV, ONEGIN, AND THE THEORY OF TRANSLATION 19
"Well, what about them, Tanya? Time was, I
Stored in my memory no dearth
of ancient haps and never-haps
about dire spirits and about maidens;
but everything to me is dark now, Tanya:
I have forgotten what I knew. Yes, things
have come now to a sorry pass!
I'm all befuddled." "Nurse,
tell me about your old times. Were you then
in love?"8
Compared to the rude lexical version offered above, this text seems
both a moderate improvement and a disappointment. The lines have been
set out in rough iambics of variable length, thus placing the speech of the
characters in rhythmic patterns and giving the version some semblance of
poetically organized structure (although at the expense of the naturalness
that is the hallmark of Pu'kin's verse: " 'tis here so stuffy" instead of
"zdes' tak dusno," for example). Furthermore, the Russian distinction
between second-person singular and plural that is so difficult to convey in
English has simply been dropped in favor of the modern "you" (in the
commentary to 8:XVII-XVIII mentioned above, for example, Nabokov
argues that the English second singular does not render the "idiomatic
simplicity" of the Russian and so is contextually inaccurate), and the
Russian idioms have likewise been largely rendered with comparable English expressions rather than translated verbum pro verbo, as in the lexical
version. Even so, there are a few locutions that fairly demand explana-
tion. One wonders, for example, about the pseudo-Elizabethan "'tis,"
especially since there is no equivalent in the Russian, or about the use of
the Victorian "I am dull," meaning "I feel bored," for the neutral and
completely modern "mne skucno," or about the archaic but incorrectly
used "haps" and the extremely queer "never-haps" (which appears to be a
neologism, although Nabokov claims it is merely "scarce"9) for Puskin's
"byl' " and "nebylica," which are, in keeping with the vividly drawn character of the simple speaker using them, much more ordinary terms. One
wonders, too, about Nabokov's oddly stilted English and his erratic collocations: "time was" and "stored in my memory no dearth," for example.
But before drawing any conclusions here, we shall want to consult the
commentary, since theoretically it is an integral part of the text, and the
peculiar diction and other apparently unmotivated departures from decorum will be explained there-will be shown to have important associative
or contextual meaning.
Nabokov's notes for 3:XVII are as follows (using his own system of
transliteration):
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20 Slavic and East European Journal
3/ The diminutive appears here for the first time in the novel, after
eleven "Tatiana"s. The nurse breaks the ice, addressing the girl as
"Tanya" three times in XVII, once in XVIII, and once in XXXV. Henceforth, Pushkin will call her "Tanya" thirty-three times, thus thirty-eight
in all, which is one-third of the "Tatiana" frequency rate (see Index).
3/ I am dull/ Mne skuchno [skushno]: "I am ennuied," as an English miss
of the time would have said. Tatiana's provincial pronounciation of ch as
sh (a maternal Moscovism, no doubt) allows Pushkin to rhyme skuchno
with dushno ("stuffy") of 1. 1.
4/ about old days/ o starine: the "ancientry" I have tried to use consistently does not ring true here.
5/ Well, what about them/ O chyom zhe?: the sense idiomatically compressed here is "Exactly about what [do you want to talk]?"
7/ Starinnih biley, nebilits: another rendering: "of ancient facts and
fables."
12/ Zashiblo: "[Age] has stunned me," or "I'm blundered"-to use a
provincial transitive. Cf. otshiblo pamyat', "my memory is knocked off."
13/ your/ vashi: This is the plural, implying "the past years of yourself
and your likes."
These curious glosses are very far from conveying anything of the complexity of the original-either its cognitive meaning or its formal patterns,
let alone the way in which the two uniquely interact-nor do they attempt
to defend or even explain the diction noted above, diction that can only
strike the native ear as strange, if not downright bizarre. There is, moreover, the matter of Nabokov's evident desire to concoct out of a hybrid of
modern British and American English (with Gallic and archaic admixtures)
a pastiche of Pugkin's early nineteenth-century Russian, a desire that very
likely led to the above-mentioned " 'tis," "dull," "haps," and "never-
haps," as well as "dearth" (for the pedestrian "nemalo") and "dire" (for the
much more common "zloj"). While pastiche may be a useful way of suggest-
ing the temporal placement of the original (thereby contributing to the
reader's awareness of the importance of that placement), it must, if it is to
be truly effective, if it is ultimately to rise above mere pastiche, have at
least a certain accessibility and inner resonance. That is, if it combines
usages of different national, social, and historical provenance as Nabokov's
strangely seasoned olio does, then it must not merely be justified in that
procedure by a comparable stylistic distribution in the original; it must
also, either aesthetically in the from of the translation itself or discursively
in the compensatory explications of the commentary, bind those disparate
usages together in a structure that is not merely parallel to the semantic
structure of the original in some cold mathematical sense but that is actu-
ally revelatory of it in a way that invests the host culture with new
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NABOKOV, ONEGIN, AND THE THEORY OF TRANSLATION 21
meaning-with new cognitive or aesthetic insight or even, as that insight
extended, with a new structuring of experience. Only then can the transla-
tion be said to approach "the exact contextual meaning of the original," i
Nabokov's own severe formulation.
Nabokov has obviously satisfied none of these requirements in his version of this stanza (or in his treatment of a great many like it). The original
and translation have neither the same kind nor the same degree of lexical
distribution and stylistic coloration. Pugkin's diction, as Nabokov well
knew, is a historically representative and individually vital mixture of collo-
quial and standard Russian (and not simply an arbitrary assemblage of
culturally and temporally diverse verbal counters), and furthermore it is a
mixture that, thanks to its canonical status in Russian culture, still has
strong links to modern usage. When Pugkin's language does diverge from
literary or colloquial norms, it invariably does so with an intelligible artistic
purpose, whether the delineation of character through the use of an appropriately individual idiom (as in the speech of the nurse) or the orchestration
of prosodic or phonological effects that contribute to aesthetic order and
cognitive meaning at some other level. Nabokov's diction, by contrast,
verges on mere idiosyncrasy and obscurity, so much does it lack apparent
cognitive or stylistic motivation.10 Indeed, it would seem to be used more as
a means of plotting the loci of his own metalanguage, his own private
collation of Russian and English, than as an instrument of viable public
communication. It appears quite heedless of the fact that the vocabulary of
English, especially at this historical remove, has an entirely different
culturo-semantic structure from Pugkin's Russian-that the semantic and
stylistic interrelation of English lexemes is very different from that of the
more or less collateral terms they are called upon to translate. And because
of the fiercely heterodox nature of that diction, it has an altogether different effect on the native reader than Nabokov seems to have reckoned. To
put the matter baldly, it is as if he were operating here in a kind of solipsistic wilderness, deploying a verbal construct of his own esoteric invention
to address an audience of no particular reality, all in fatal
language's shared, communal character and of poetry's (and
celebration of that enduring human fact. As Nabokov's near
Auden once put the larger issue, "It is both the glory and
disregard of
translation's)
contemporary
the shame of
poetry that its medium is not its private property, that a poet cannot invent
his words and that words are products, not of nature, but of a human
society which uses them for a thousand different purposes.""
Since it is the avowed social function of translation, the well-known but
specious counterargument of Benjamin notwithstanding,12 to convey infor-
mation (whether cognitive or aesthetic or, in the rarest of instances, some
miraculous integration of the two), and of literal translation in Nabokov's
own rigorous sense to convey as much as possible, the reader can only feel
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22 Slavic and East European Journal
that he has been, if not actually betrayed, then at least let down. He cannot
help asking if Nabokov has in the translation and the commentary in fact
always met the requirements he has set himself. Is the passage we have
been looking at "literal translation" in Nabokov's own demanding sense, or
is it merely a more eccentric version of the lexical rendering with iambics
thrown in for good measure? The answer is self-evident, I think, and there
is reason to believe Nabokov himself may have agreed-at least in part.
Comparison of the 1964 translation with the revised 1975 edition shows a
general tightening in lexical correspondence (beyond that entailed in the
addition of the "correlative lexicon"), as well as an abandonment of the
attempt to reproduce, however laxly, Pu'kin's meter. It is as if Nabokov
were moving the translation back toward the lexical mode and relying even
more on the commentary to provide what is lacking. Examination of the
second edition, however, reveals that the commentary is largely unchanged
(and, as far as this stanza is concerned, entirely unchanged), so that if
Nabokov did wish to place greater emphasis on it, he failed to augment it
accordingly.
But before yielding to the temptation to reject Nabokov's practice in
Eugene Onegin out of hand, we shall want to look at the translations of the
other passage-at the literal and paraphrastic versions of 1:XXXIII. The
Russian has:
I HOMHIO Mope npeg rpo3soo:
KaK R 3aBHJJOBaJI BOJIHaM,
BeryuHMn 6ypHoii 'epeaoio
C Jmo6oBbsOi neb K ee HOraM!
KaK q KeIaJIa TorAa C BOHaMH
KoCHyTbCM MnJIbIX HOr ycTaMH!
HeT, HHKOrga cpeAb nbIJInKX JHHe
KHnnsIei4 MinaaocTH Moei
I1 He )KeIaa c TaKHM MyieHbeM
JIo63aTb ycra MJIagaix ApMlug,
IJIbn pos3bI naMMeHbIX JIaHHT,
HJIb nepciH, HOJIHbIe TOMieHbeM;
HeT, HHKorAa nIIOpIB CTpaCTre
TaK He Tep3an AymIIi MoeCi!
Nabokov's 1964 literal version of this stanza is:
I recollect the sea before a tempest:
how I envied the waves
running in turbulent succession
with love to lie down at her feet!
How much I wished then with the waves
to touch the dear feet with my lips!
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NABOKOV, ONEGIN, AND THE THEORY OF TRANSLATION 23
No, never midst the fiery days
of my ebullient youth
did I long with such anguish
to kiss the lips of young Armidas,
or the roses of flaming cheeks,
or bosoms full of languorno, never did the surge of passions
thus rive my soul!
Not only is this rendering extremely faithful, but it has a number of wh
a translator, providing he were not too fussy about correspondence at t
level of register, might regard as valuable finds ("turbulent," "ebullien
"surge," and "rive"). Indeed, the stanza remains virtually unchanged in t
revised edition, Nabokov's only alterations being the replacement of "a
guish" by "torment" and "or bosoms full of languor" by the more artificial
but no more accurate "or the breasts full of languishment." Turning to
commentary, we find a hefty twenty-one pages of notes, which may
summarized as follows. First, a discussion (overlapping that accompany
Stanza XXXII) of Pugkin's use of a prosodic technique similar to pyrr
substitution in English (idiosyncratically termed "scudding" by Nabok
and involving the omission of stressed syllables where the paradigm wo
lead one to expect them), with the useful, if unoriginal, remark that t
technique is employed to modulate the tempo of the verse. Second, an
extremely long, rambling, ultimately irrelevant, but quite delightful digres
sion on the "historically real lady, whose foot the glass shoe of this sta
would fit." After looking at a number of candidates, Nabokov drolly co
cludes that "if the pair of feet chanted in XXXIII does belong to a
particular person, one foot should be assigned to Ekaterina Raevski an
the other to Elizaveta Vorontsov." Third, a note on the "complex of beau
fully onomatopoeic alliterations" in lines three and four, and a brief survey
of poetry from Ben Jonson to Pugkin in which the motif of "feet-kiss
waves" has figured. Fourth, a gratuitous attack on Babette Deutsch
competence as a translator (both her paraphrastic rendering of Onegin
her verse translations for the English version of Henri Troyat's Pushkin are
called to account). Fifth, a discussion of Pu'kin's debt in this stanza to
Bogdanovic's Dusen'ka. And sixth, some observations on Pugkin's adap
tion of French cliches and other formulas (a favorite theme in Naboko
reading of Onegin). This farrago of metrics, biography, criticism, paro
(in its Menippean mockery), wit, and gossip, aside from its inherent int
est, for Nabokov is at his brilliant best here, does in fact manage to convey
a great deal of the texture and context of Pugkin's stanza and of the co
mentator's virtuosic, if highly individual, apprehension of them-it d
indeed engage in a circumstantial and convincing way the three interact
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24 Slavic and East European Journal
dimensions of Nabokovian textual semantics. In combination with the trans-
lation, it is a thus very good illustration, if not a complete vindication, of
the literalist theory outlined above.
Now let us look at the paraphrastic version of the same stanza as it was
published by Nabokov in The Russian Review in 1945:
I see the surf, the storm-rack flying. ..
Oh, how I wanted to compete
with the tumultuous breakers dying
in adoration at her feet!
Together with those waves-how much
I wished to kiss what they could touch!
No-even when my youth would burn
its fiercest-never did I yearn
with such a suffering sensation
to kiss the lips of nymphs, the rose
that on the cheek of beauty glows
or breasts in mellow palpitationno, never did a passion roll
such billows in my bursting soul.
Although certainly a tour de force-the Russian meter and rhyme are
reproduced almost exactly, and the sense has a recognizable relation to the
original-there are a number of things that leave one dissatisfied. The
stanza's most serious flaw is that it makes Pugkin sound rather like an
epigone of Tennyson, if not (in the tasteless concluding couplet) like a disciple of Rossetti. The tenderness, clarity, delicate irony, and wit of the origina
are overwhelmed by the translation's turgid rhetoric, facile rhymes, and
mechanical alliterations. And while Pugkin's stanza keeps our attention on
the object of its interest, the translation allows the feelings elicited by that
object to dominate. Pugkin's subjective stance is, after all, a rhetorical gambit, a literary device reinforced by the traditional diction, allowing him and
his readers to indulge in lofty, exquisite play (play not unlike Nabokov's own
in the pedal commentary discussed abovel3), whereas in Nabokov's render
ing that stance has acquired a tediously hackneyed literality replete with
"suffering sensations" and heart "palipitations," so that our contemplation is
deflected from the transcendently artful manipulation of language to the
dully egocentric "envy" that serves as its pretext-a most un-Nabokovian
situation, given the superbly ludic character of his own prose at its best
Surely he was right to abandon this mode of translation. Its result, had h
attempted to keep it up in a rendering of the entire work, could only hav
been that falsification and mediocrity that he would later ridicule so mercilessly in other paraphrastic versions of Onegin.
One must therefore disagree with those who lamented the "Gogolian
conversion," as Sidney Monas called it (1965c), that led Nabokov to aban
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NABOKOV, ONEGIN, AND THE THEORY OF TRANSLATION 25
don the more tolerant aesthetics of paraphrase for the utilitarian rigor o
literalism. Or, to put it more accurately, one must disagree insofar as
Eugene Onegin is concerned, for Nabokov's paraphrastic versions of the
lyrics of Pu'kin, Lermontov, and Tjutiev in Three Russian Poets are more
successful. If independent generalization about the different value of th
modes of translation that have been discussed here is needed, then it wil
have to be made with a clear sense of the nature of the text being trans
lated. For it may be there are monuments of great lyrical compression that,
because of their self-enclosed fusion of form and meaning, their relativ
isolation within and subjective reflection upon the resources of a particula
language (what Jakobson meant, in part, by the poetry of grammar and
regarded as untranslatable by definition14), are, Nabokov notwithstanding
best represented by the semantically less ambitious and formally more
autonomous verbal analogues offered by the paraphrase, whereas other
works, generally longer ones with developed narrative structures whos
meaning depends on nonnegotiable details of character, situation, and
event requiring detailed contextualization, are better suited to literal translation as he conceived it.
In any case, one must acknowledge that Nabokov's theory of translation
does have genuine sophistication and value, even if his own application of
it was erratic, and even if that theory in its literalist mode may require more
literary skill and scholarly insight than most translators are capable of
providing. The conflicting evidence of his treatment of 3: XVII and 1:
XXXIII suggests, in other words, not so much that Nabokov's literalist
endeavor was flawed in some fundamental way but that he himself, for
whatever reasons, was not able to sustain it at a consistently high level, that
he himself was not always able to reach his own austere but noble standard.
His Eugene Onegin must therefore be accounted a partial failure of transla
tion not because he carried his literalist theory too far (as many have
suggested) but because he did not carry it far enough.
NOTES
1 See the following bibliography for references and other information concernin
kov's theory and practice of translation and their critical reception, beginning w
first efforts in English to the publication of the second edition of his Onegin.
2 Exceptions are Jane Grayson, Nabokov Translated: A Comparison of Nabokov's R
and English Prose (Oxford, 1977), 13-22; J. Douglas Clayton, "The Theory and P
of Poetic Translation in Pushkin and Nabokov," Canadian Slavonic Papers 25, 1
1983): 90-100; Bryan Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton,
318-335; and Lauren G. Leighton, Two Worlds, One Art: Literary Translation in
and America (DeKalb, 1991), 179-192. None of these authors, however, is ac
concerned with the underlying implications of Nabokov's theory.
3 "What triumphant joy it is to see the honest light of literality take over again, afte
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26 Slavic and East European Journal
meretricious paraphrase!" Nabokov wrote to his editor at Bollingen after their publication of the six robust volumes of Singleton's edition. See William McGuire, Bollingen: An
Adventure in Collecting the Past (Princeton, 1982), 226. This book contains valuable
information about the background and sequence of work on the Igor Tale and the two
editions of Onegin (258-266).
4 Despite their different terminology and ranking, Nabokov's modes owe a great deal to
the tripartite generic typology outlined by John Dryden in the "Preface to Ovid's Epistles" (1680), just as they do, in a different way, to the categories of cultural function
described by Goethe in his Noten to the West6stlichen Divan (1819). See my "Shifting
Taxonomies: Dryden, Goethe, Jakobson, Nabokov, and the Theory of Translation," in
Oregon Studies in Chinese and Russian Culture, ed. Albert Leong, American University
Studies Series 12, Slavic Languages and Literatures, vol. 13 (New York, Bern, Frankfurt
am Main, and Paris, 1990), 151-166. For a brief discussion of the affinities between
Nabokov's theory and that of Chateaubriand, see Clayton, "Theory and Practice of
Translation in Pushkin and Nabokov," 94-96.
5 As Nabokov described the literalist task in an early article, "I want translations with
copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so
as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity. I want
such footnotes and the absolutely literal sense, with no emasculation and no padding-I
want such sense and such notes for all the poetry in other tongues that still languishes in
'poetical' versions, begrimed and beslimed by rhyme" (1955b). The two volumes of
commentary and appendices published with the translation do, in fact, attain this standard of copiousness, even to the point of an interesting convergence with what Northrop
Frye calls the "encyclopedic compilations" of the tradition of Menippean satire: "The
novelist shows his exuberance either by exhaustive analysis of human relationships, as in
Henry James, or of social phenomena, as in Tolstoy. The Menippean satirist, dealing with
intellectual themes and attitudes, shows his exuberance in intellectual ways, by piling up
an enormous mass of erudition about his theme or in overwhelming his pedantic targets
with an avalanche of their own jargon" (Anatomy of Criticism [Princeton, 1957], 311).
6 Nabokov's views on contemporary adaptation and imitation were as vivid as they were
unambiguous: "What, then, is there especially adaptive or adaptational in an obvious
travesty? This I wish to be told, this I wish to comprehend. 'Adapted' to what? To the
needs of an idiot audience? To the demands of good taste? To the level of one's own
genius? But one's audience is the most varied and gifted in the world; no arbiter of
genteel arts tells us what we can or can't say; and, as to genius, nowhere in those
paraphrases is the height of fancy made to fuse with the depth of erudition. . . . What we
do have are crude limitations, with hops and flutters of irresponsible invention weighed
down by blunders of ignorance" (1969). It is interesting to compare Nabokov's rough
treatment of modern practitioners of this mode with his discussion, at once so astute and
gently forbearing, of Zukovskij's "talented adaptations" of English and German poets
(1964c, 1975).
7 The text is the 1837 redaction of Onegin, the last published under Puvkin's supervision. It
is photographically reproduced by Nabokov in the fourth volume of both his editions.
8 The revised 1975 edition substitutes "what ails you" for "what's the matter with you," and
"I'm dull" for "I am dull" in line 3; "kept" for "stored" in line 4, "all" for "everything" in
line 9; "what I knew I've forgotten" for "I have forgotten what I knew" in line 10; changes
the break from "yes, things/" to "yes,/ things" in lines 10 and 11; replaces "I'm all
befuddled" with "my mind is fuddled," and "nurse" with "tell me, nurse" in line 12;
substitutes "years of old" for "old times" in line 13; and transfers the phrase "were you
then" from line 13 to line 14.
9 See the brief discussion of nebylica in the "correlative lexicon" (or cross listing of
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NABOKOV, ONEGIN, AND THE THEORY OF TRANSLATION 27
Pugkinian diction and the systematically employed English "signal" words used to repr
sent it) that Nabokov added to his 1975 edition.
10 Nabokov's revealing ex post facto justification notwithstanding: "In several instanc
English archaisms have been used in my EO not merely to match Russian antiquat
words but to revive a nuance of meaning present in the ordinary Russian term but lost
the English one. Such terms are not meant to be idiomatic. The phrases I decide up
aspire towards literality, not readability. They are steps in the ice, pitons in the sheer r
of fidelity. Some are signal words whose only purpose is to suggest or indicate th
certain pet term of Pushkin's has recurred at that point. Others have been chosen
their Gallic touch implicit in this or that Russian attempt to imitate a French turn
phrase. .... I do not care if a word is 'archaic' or 'dialect' or 'slang'; I am an eclec
democrat in this matter, and whatever suits me, goes" (1966c).
11 See W. H. Auden, The Dryer's Hand, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York, 1962), 23. On
might observe in passing that Nabokov's somewhat embattled linguistic position in
translation of Onegin, his apparent rejection of the community of English in favor of
self-invented simulacrum of Russian, bears a striking resemblance to a crucial dou
theme of his fiction: the pathology, the moral reflexivity (Hermann, Humbert, Kinbo
or, alternatively, the heroism, the proud integrity (Cincinnatus, Pnin) of psychic a
social isolation. The protracted struggle to render Onegin (Nabokov worked on
project for well over ten years) arguably brought the personal biographical and psycho
logical issue of cultural and linguistic disjunction, of the fatal separateness of the Russ
and Anglo-American moieties of his creative identity, into a condition of irritated
unstable tension that could only be resolved by doing violence to one moiety in th
process of giving allegiance to the other-a paradigm on the psychological level of
situation of translation itself.
12 "For what does a literary work 'say'? What does it communicate? It 'tells' very little to
those who understand it. Its essential quality is not statement or the imparting of information. Yet any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit
anything but information-hence, something inessential ... " (Walter Benjamin, "The
Task of the Translator" ["Die Aufgabe des Ubersetzers" (1923)], in his Illuminations, ed.
Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn [New York, 1969], 69).
13 Edward J. Brown, among others, made a similar point in his review of Onegin: "What
[Nabokov] immolates to literalness in the text . . . he recovers . . . in the Commentary:
elegance, wit, euphony, style, irony, and satire; but now they are his own"; and again:
"The most important achievement of the Commentary is that in it . . . Nabokov has
restored the poetry he systematically drained from Pushkin's poem in the translation"
(1965n).
14 See "Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry" and "On Linguistic Aspects of Transla-
tion" in his Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), esp. 121-122 and 434.
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