by Alex Beam
Nabokov proved to be a crotchety collaborator indeed. He would insist that the made-up names “Stalin” (Josef Djugashvili) and “Stendhal” (Marie-Henri Beyle) appear between quotation marks. His draft index was aleatory, with the same book whimsically alphabetized by author, or by part of the title. Three years into the project, after McGuire had approached two Soviet institutions, the Pushkin Museum and the Pushkin House, for minor favors, Nabokov interposed a nyet! “I am afraid I object very strongly to any checking of queries in Russia,” he wrote to McGuire in March 1962,
because of the squeamish uncontrollable distaste I have for the Soviet regime. My book has been written in exile and is a triumph of exile. [I] would not like to be obliged directly or indirectly to any Soviet governmental institution….Please let us drop the entire question of contact with Soviet Russia. This letter may make the delight of some obscure scholiast circa 2062.
Nabokov’s penny-pinching became the stuff of legend in the Bollingen corridors. About a year before publication he asked the foundation to publish his ninety-two-page-long appendix to Onegin, “Notes on Prosody,” as a separate, advance offprint for scholars. He had gotten wind of a competing effort from a graduate student(!) and wanted to plant his flag first. The complaisant foundation published two hundred copies and mailed them to Russian studies experts in North America and Europe. In some business relating to this special edition, Nabokov sent Bollingen a ten-dollar invoice, for copying costs. “The former rings oddly,” McGuire wrote to Winer in May 1963, “in light of the Foundation’s having laid out well over $1,000 to oblige him with the offprint.”
Near the end of the editing cycle, the Bollingen editors flagged some potential legal problems in Nabokov’s merciless shredding of previous translators. On the advice of unnamed “libel lawyers”—the objection seems to have come from Bollingen’s editor in chief, John Barrett—Winer suggested “weeding out a few epithets that will not be missed” from the text. There followed a list of fourteen suggested deletions, for example, “Penguin Books English paraphrase (omitting ‘execrable’)”; “In his eagerness to (omitting ‘that Soviet toady’).” In his memoir of his years at Bollingen, McGuire wrote that “some of Nabokov’s epithets…might border on character assassination.”
Concerning the Onegin foreword, McGuire wrote to Nabokov suggesting “that the aspersions be diluted here, since your opinions are made amply clear in the commentary.” Nabokov scrawled “No!” in the left margin of McGuire’s letter, then added in the right margin: “Whatever aspersions appear in my foreword should not be diluted.” By return mail he elaborated: “Why on earth should I spare the feelings of [translators] Babette [Deutsch], Dorothea [Radin], Oliver [Elton], and the gallant Henry S[palding]—or of their publishers?”
Nabokov, apparently unfamiliar with the niceties of copyright, further bridled at Bollingen’s boilerplate note of “gratitude” to these translators’ publishers, and to Edmund Wilson’s publisher, for permission to quote from their works. “I also object to my being ‘grateful for permission to quote’ them and Edmund Wilson. Why can’t I quote if I like? It sounds awfully mawkish. To whom am I ‘grateful’? ‘Grateful’ is a big word.” In the end Bollingen merely “acknowledged permission for the use” of quotes from the earlier translators and Wilson, all of whom Nabokov disparaged in his “Commentary.”
On an Onegin typescript, Nabokov insisting that his many insults directed at rival translators remain—“stet”—in his text. (Library of Congress, Bollingen Collection)
Two months later Nabokov was still tangling with Bollingen, asserting his right to heap mud upon whomever he liked. “I would like those lawyers of theirs to give me a single instance when a literary critic’s describing a translator’s mistake as ‘ridiculous’ or ‘atrocious’ or ‘nonsensical’ ever led to legal action on the part of that translator or publisher, or of their associated shades.”
Bollingen eventually sought a legal opinion from the libel specialist Rene Wormser. He thought the chances of a defamation claim were “very slight.” Wormser wrote that Nabokov could characterize the previous translations as “inaccurate and faulty” as long as he stopped short “of characterizing the previous translators as intrinsically incompetent. The factor of malice is important, and, in sum total, we see ridicule but not malice.”4
In the end Nabokov made three of the requested fourteen deletions, and kept some lovely invective for his Onegin “Commentary.” The Pushkin scholar N. L. Brodsky remained “that Soviet toady, in his servile eagerness,” and Oliver Elton could “always be relied upon for triteness and awkwardness.”
The Bollingen editors spooked easily, and Nabokov seemed to enjoy tormenting them. In October 1962, he advised, ominously: “It so happens that I have some free time this fall….I intend to project myself into the Index.” He then explained: “An index to a work like this should reflect its virtues and its shortcomings, its tone and personality (as I have proved in Pale Fire). It should be an afterglow and not a yawn.”
The Pale Fire index, a characteristically Nabokovian mashup of erudition, brilliance, and obscurantism (“Urban the Last, emperor of Zembla, an incredibly brilliant, luxurious, and cruel monarch whose whistling whip made Zembla spin like a rainbow top”), was well known to Bollingen. McGuire divined the emanations of a “trick index” from Montreux, and hoped to snuff them out quickly. “If, as you fear, Nabokov has a trick index in mind for EO,” Winer wrote to McGuire, “I think he should be discouraged at the very start. EO is not a novel, but a work of scholarship, and VN is not entitled to having a joke on those who buy the work, not to say on Bollingen.”
McGuire dispatched Winer to Switzerland to talk Nabokov out of his funky indexing fantasy. Nabokov proved receptive to one-on-one handholding, and decided not to “project himself” into the index.
Bollingen’s seven-year-long forced march shepherding Onegin into print, complete with coddling its demanding celebrity author, might have been more than they bargained for. But they wouldn’t have begrudged the massive investment of editors’ time, and huge printing costs, for their elegant edition. As Nabokov’s friend Morris Bishop, the literature professor who recruited him to Cornell, sardonically observed: “Bollingen loves to lose money.”5
Nabokov showed Alvin Toffler the Onegin raw materials in January 1964. The finished volumes were supposed to appear in April, when Bollingen hosted a reception for the Nabokovs in New York. Paul Mellon did not attend; The New Yorker’s William Maxwell and Saul Steinberg, an artist whom Nabokov admired, did attend. Hugh Hefner was on the guest list—Nabokov read Playboy and would become a contributor—but it’s unclear if he showed up. Edmund and Elena Wilson were invited, but they were traveling in Italy and Hungary at the time.
The Nabokovs’ monthlong visit was the last trip the couple made to America. Nabokov read from his work at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, and at the Sanders Theatre at Harvard. He plugged Pale Fire but never mentioned Onegin, which wouldn’t go on sale until June.
Mirabile dictu, the book appeared, six years after completion, all four volumes and 1,895 pages of it. What had Nabokov wrought? A doorstop composed of unequal parts hubris, genius, philological research carried to proctological extremes, heedless and needless provocation, often but not always informed by an exquisite literary sensibility. The translation itself took up only 257 pages. The amazing, relentless “Commentary” stretched into two volumes, covering 930 pages. Prefatory materials totaled 88 pages, and the index 107 pages. The Bollingen edition had two appendixes, the 92-page “Notes on Prosody,” and a 60-page biography of Avram Gannibal,*2 the African hostage-turned-czarist-general who was Pushkin’s great-grandfather. When Princeton University Press republished Nabokov’s Onegin in 1975, they dropped the appendixes.
A photocopy of the 1837 edition of Eugene Onegin, printed in unreadably tiny Cyrillic type, occupied the final 310 pages of volume 4.
I don’t like Nabokov’s translation, which has provoked a panoply of reactions from adoration t
o horror. I would not go so far as Douglas Hofstadter to condemn “the implacably Nazistic Nabokov” for his “catastrophic” rendering of Onegin,6 but it simply does not speak to me.*3 Having said that, I’ll rescue a well-worn Pushkinism from my tenth-grade memory: Nabokov’s is a translation “to which one cannot remain indifferent.”
Edmund Wilson will be carpet-bombing this translation soon enough. For now here are some examples of Nabokov’s hyperliteralism placed at the nominal service of his hero Pushkin. Throughout, Nabokov cultivates an odd and off-putting vocabulary, which he generally defends on the grounds of accuracy. But why are Eugene’s nail scissors “curvate” and not “curved”? Why does “the tomcat…wash his muzzlet with his paw”? What kind of word is “rememorate,” which Nabokov uses as a synonym for “remember”? Why is nega, a very common word in Onegin and arguably even embedded in Evgeny’s surname, which means “comfort” or “bliss,” translated as “mollitude”? What is “ancientry”? What are “shandrydans”? What are “agrestic views”? I’ll stop there.
Or not. How can Tatiana’s plaint to her old nurse, “Mnye skuchno,” possibly be translated “I am dull,” when it translates very simply to “I am bored”?*4 Nabokov insists that derevnya always means “county seat,” but it also means “village,” and so on. He mocks four translators*5 for writing that the season’s first snow fell in 5.1 “on the night of the third,” but as a literalist he could surely appreciate that na tret’ye v noch’ actually does means “on the night of the third.” He may be right that Pushkin meant “on January second, after midnight,” or not.
Nabokov had to maneuver Onegin through several editors at the Bollingen Foundation, which published the first edition in 1964. None of the editors could match Nabokov’s Russian erudition, but they were excellent stylists who generally tried to save their wayward charge from himself. Ruth Mathewson, for instance, tried to steer Nabokov clear of “pal,” a word that feels wrong standing in for the Russian priyatel’, or “friend.” “Pal” is “a class word,” Mathewson informed Nabokov, “identifying the speaker as a bum, a slob, a barroom hanger-on; or on a more sentimental and slightly more conscious level, a hick or a Rotarian.”
“Pal” remained, although Mathewson did not; Bollingen shunted her aside in favor of Winer. In Nabokov’s edition “pal” dis-graces the novel’s famous envoi, where Pushkin bids the reader farewell: “Whoever you be, O my reader/Friend, foe—I wish with you/To part at present as a pal.”
Ugh. It fell to Winer, who worked tirelessly on the Onegin manuscript, to point out that words such as “philologism,” “indignated,” and “stylopygian” occurred in neither the Oxford English Dictionary nor Webster’s International Dictionary. “Philologism” stayed; “good little word,” Nabokov scrawled on his galley sheet. The others vanished.
Ghastly syntax abounds. I opened Nabokov’s Onegin at random to chapter 5, stanza 33, which begins: “Tragiconervous scenes/The fainting fits of maidens, tears/Long since Eugene could not abide.”
Even Brian Boyd, who mounted an informed and assertive defense of Nabokov’s translation in his two-volume biography, bridled at the writer’s “frequent wrenchings of English word order.” A case in point, from chapter 8, stanza 28:
Of a constricting rank
The ways how fast she has adopted!…
About him in the gloom of night,
as long as Morpheus had not flown down,
time was, she virginally brooded.
“When a great stylist produces such ungainly English,” Boyd wrote, “he has evidently decided on awkwardness for awkwardness’ sake.”
But the translation isn’t what occupied Nabokov’s eight years of intermittent drudge work in Harvard’s Widener and Houghton Libraries, and in the New York Public Library. The 930-page “Commentary” enveloped the four volumes like a thick, dense smoke, although for a work supposedly aimed at the general public it’s far from clear who could possibly get through it. The “Commentary” has its own brief foreword, repeating verbatim some of Nabokov’s earlier 1955 animus toward previous translators (“The four ‘English,’ ‘metrical’ ‘translations’…unfortunately available to students…“). Now in 1964 he piped a new member into their Hall of Shame: “Walter Arndt’s…paraphrase, in burlesque English, with preposterous mistranslation.”*6
One stands in awe before the seemingly endless notes, which admix genius and madness in uneven proportions. There seems to have been no proverbial stone unturned, each one triggering a tiny, predictable landslide that one would have wished, in retrospect, to have avoided. There is score-settling right and left. Who could possibly imagine, or care, that a 1928 commentator misidentified the make of the pistol that killed our favorite author? (It’s “LePage,” not “Lgiage,” Nabokov pedantifies.) Who is surprised that Stalin-era commentators, such as “the incredible Brodksi…who spells the title of Rousseau’s work Le Contrat Sociale…” (Contrat is masculine, thus Social takes no e) see dialectical materialism under every couplet? Who expected anything less?
As early as the notes for chapter 1, Nabokov makes an unbrief detour to assure us that the “boredom of reading through the English, German, Polish, etc., ‘translations’ of our poem was much too great even to be contemplated.” Then he quotes liberally from three substandard (by his lights) German Onegins, and from two Polish ones. “These violet and corn-poppy extracts”—he means the Polish ones—“are superior in circus value” to the German ones, he informs us.
But really, Vladimir. We thought we were buying an English translation of a Russian masterpiece. Understandably, perhaps a little French might wander in. But German? Polish? To which he responds: You ain’t seen nothing yet. How about a page and a half on the lingonberry, disambiguated from the bilberry, the cowberry, the windberry, the German Preiselbeere, Thoreau’s mountain cranberry, from Linnaeus’s Vaccinium myrtillus and twenty other kinds of berries? “I expect some acknowledgement for all this information from future translators of Russian classics,” Nabokov writes.
Some of this is charming, in its lucky-we-have-hours-to-burn-on-this-kind-of-thing way. Nabokov devotes at least a hundred pages of commentary to lines that Pushkin never published—variants, drafts, and stanzas either cut by the censor or cut by Pushkin in anticipation of official displeasure. A part of me admires Nabokov for translating Tatiana’s famous letter to Eugene (3.31) into French, the language in which it was (fictionally) written. But Pushkin chose to publish the letter in Russian, in what he called his “weak translation” of the seventy-nine gorgeous lines. Nabokov offers us the hypothetical French version alluded to but ignored by Pushkin. Why?
Better: Why not?
A favorite moment, although it is a long moment indeed: The “Pedal Digression,” Nabokov’s name for forty lines of Onegin, starting at 1:30:8—
I like their little feet…
Ah me, I long could not forget
two little feet!…
I still remember them, and in my sleep
They disturb my heart.
and ending with the famous image at 1:33—
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 longed then with the waves
to touch the dear feet with my lips!
What takes Pushkin 140 iambs to express takes Nabokov fifteen pages of dense analysis. The “Pedal Digression,” Nabokov writes, “is one of the wonders of the work.” “Neither Ovid, nor Brantôme, nor Casanova has put much grace or originality into his favorable comment on women’s feet.”
Nabokov quickly dismissed the banal suggestion that Pushkin may have been a foot fetishist (or ankle? or calf?):*7 “The passion for a pretty instep that Pushkin shared with Goethe would have been called ‘foot-fetishism’ by a modern student of the psychology of sex,” a remark he doesn’t bother to dignify with further explanation.*8 To hell with “the Viennese quack” and his epigon
es, and while we are at it, to hell with those idiot translators he’s been telling us about. This stretch of the “Commentary” is particularly brutal on “bluff Spalding,” “Solecistic Prof. Elton,” and “Helpless Miss Radin” and includes what we would call today an unprovoked drive-by on Henri Troyat’s 1946 Pushkin biography (“tritely written and teeming with errors”), which I recall reading with immense pleasure on a beach, as it happens (albeit a very cold beach), outside Riga, with waves licking at my feet. But I digress.*9
The heart of Nabokov’s divagation, however, is a whodunit: Whose footprints are these, he asks, flitting so gracefully across Onegin’s pages? “The search for a historically real lady, whose foot the glass shoe*10 of this stanza [33] would fit, has taxed the ingeniousness or revealed the simplicity of numerous Pushkinists,” he writes.
It is an interesting question because Pushkin had many, many lady friends, at least two of whom left memoirs of gamboling with the mutton-chopped young poet-exile at the seashore. The prime suspect is the beautiful Maria Rayevskaya, one of four children of Gen. Nikolai Rayevsky, a hero of the Napoleonic Wars. Pushkin knew the family intimately, and of course admired the general’s attractive young daughters. Maria left a memoir (“remarkably banal and naïve”—Nabokov) in which she recalled playing in the waves with Pushkin at Taganrog, on the shore of the Azov Sea. The poet had hitched a ride south with the Rayevskys on his way to the Caucasus.