by Alex Beam
That’s no crime. But this is:
Upon being challenged to read Eugene Onegin aloud, he started to do this with great gusto, garbling every second word and turning Pushkin’s iambic line into a kind of spastic anapest with a lot of jaw-twisting haws and rather endearing little barks that utterly jumbled the rhythm and soon had us both in stitches.
After promising to publish “a complete account of the bizarre views on the art of translation” shared among his critics, Nabokov said that Wilson’s critique “will then receive all the friendly attention it deserves.” Nabokov proceeded to unpack about a dozen of Wilson’s Russian-language errors, sarcastic commentary very much included. “I do not think Mr. Wilson should try to teach me how to pronounce this or any other Russian vowel….This is Mr. Wilson showing me how to translate properly,” and so on. Several of these points of contention will be revisited for the next several years: Is netu archaic? (Yes and no.) Is the card game “stuss” in the English dictionary? (Yes, in the OED.) Should Wilson have dialed back his gassy lecture on the gerund pochuya, that cursed “naggy” sniffing again? (Yes, he should have.)*1
Wilson sneaked two separate, thousand-word missives into the Review before the end of the year, adding little if anything to the discussion. He had, alas, been proved wrong on several points, which prompted a modest climbdown: “It is just as well that Mr. Nabokov should be able to tax me with these mistakes, for, in rereading my article, I felt that it sounded more damaging than I had meant it to be, and this has given him a chance to score.” Nonetheless, Wilson continued to argue fine points of prosody and pronunciation with his unseen adversary. He tried to hide behind distinctions between “U” and “non-U” Russian, which feels like reaching. Then he revisited Gerundistan, trying to dig himself out of his mistranslation of the sniffing “naggy”: “For the benefit of other strugglers with this expressive but preposterous language, it should be said that since pochuyat’ is a perfective verb…[it] can have only a past meaning.”
Nabokov was silent. Had he left the battlefield? No, the wily chess master had opened a second front.*2 And here it is: the nuclear option, a 4,500-word-long “Reply to My Critics,” published in London’s Encounter magazine.1 Encounter might be deemed home ground. Editor Spender was friendly with both Vladimir and his cousin Nicolas Nabokov—he was also quite friendly with Wilson—and the magazine had printed Anthony Burgess’s long, serious, and elegiac review of Nabokov’s Onegin a few months earlier. Burgess was no stranger to Russian wordplay and the trickeries of translation, having invented the proto-Russian language “nadsat’ ” for the violent marauders of his 1962 novel, A Clockwork Orange. He coined “Droog” for the Russian droug, or “friend”; the Korova (“Cow”) Milk Bar; and the like.
In his review Burgess tried his own hand at translating Onegin and decided that it was difficult indeed. “These four volumes…represent the very perfection of scholarship,” he concluded. Nabokov’s Onegin, he wrote, “itself approaches great art.”
Now, a few months later, in his “Reply to My Critics,” Nabokov quickly cleared out some underbrush. Professor Guy Daniels’s bitchy New Republic review was “prompted by a sordid little grudge,” he insisted.*3 A Noviy Zhurnal critic was an idiot who can’t speak Russian, and didn’t read my book anyway. The Los Angeles Times reviewer fails utterly, etc. But “the longest, most ambitious, most captious, and, alas, most reckless article is Mr. Edmund Wilson’s in The New York Review of Books and this I now select for a special examination.”
So this is the comprehensive, “friendly attention” that Nabokov had previously promised. Nabokov recycled some earlier insults, for example, Wilson’s “turning Pushkin’s iambic line into a kind of spastic anapest” into this latest article. He again derided Wilson’s knowledge of Russian, revisiting the pronunciation of the vowel yo, looking in on the gerund pochuya for now the fourth time, and cruelly mocked Wilson’s assertion that Nabokov had said that there is only one one-syllable adjective in Russian: “Every time Mr. Wilson starts examining a Russian phrase he makes some ludicrous slip.”
It is an inconvenient truth that there are several one-syllable adjectives in Russian, but we move on.
There follow about a thousand words of (one-sided) debate over the accusation that Nabokov is “[addicted] to rare and unfamiliar words.” What this boils down to is Nabokov’s championing of Webster’s Third International Dictionary, Unabridged, “which I really must urge Mr. Wilson to acquire,” and Wilson’s reliance on the Oxford English Dictionary. Words like “curvate,” “habitude,” “rememorate,” “familistic,” “scrab,” “loaden,” and yes, “mollitude,” are in my dictionary, so bugger off, Nabokov wrote.*4 Then he twice revisited the issue of Pushkin’s knowledge of English, insisting that “my demonstration remains unassailable” and that “Mr. Wilson knows nothing about the question.”
Then there is the charge of infelicity. Wilson had accused Nabokov of mimicking computer translations with phrases like “Very nicely did our pal act” (4.18). The English seems indefensible, but Nabokov insisted that “the corresponding Russian was also trite and trivial.” As for “Farewell, pacific sites!/Farewell, secluded refuge!/Shall I see you?” Nabokov insisted that Tatiana is speaking “in a stilted and old-fashioned idiom” and he was merely following her lead.
In the end it was more—and yet more—of the same. Nabokov summarized Wilson’s article as “entirely consisting, as I have shown, of quibbles and blunders, can be damaging only to his own reputation—and that is the last look I shall ever take at the dismal scene.”
Even Wilson sounded fatigued in an uncharacteristically brief rejoinder: “Mr. Nabokov is hissing and shrieking again…” Wilson didn’t quite understand Nabokov’s brusque venue shifting; I answered these questions in The New York Review, he wrote, and “I don’t propose to recapitulate here….There is no need to discuss the absurd justifications for the absurdities of the Nabokov translation.” Schoolboy Wilson cannot resist a final dig. “The word ‘byre,’ by the way, is not American, but British,” he writes. “This error has not only doubled me up with mirth, it has caused me to roll on the floor exsufficate with cachinnation.”
At an academic conference I learned the old adage that everything has been said, but not everyone has said it. And so it was here. A raft of opinionated if not well-informed literary types crawled forth from the woodwork to support either Wilson or Nabokov. Robert Lowell, who would have been America’s poet laureate, if America had had such a thing in 1966, decided to dip his patrician paw in the barrel. Although self-avowedly “a reader with no Russian,” Lowell was not a reader with no point of view, and his was decidedly anti-Nabokov. Calling him a “zany genius,” Lowell said that what he “has written is a weirdly eccentric minor English poem, one that suggests that Pushkin’s Onegin is not, as everyone claims, a national classic, but some wildly queer miscarriage….Both commonsense and intuition tell us that Edmund Wilson must be nine-tenths unanswerable and right in his criticism of Nabokov,” Lowell wrote. “The long arguments about Russian gerunds, the devious dictionary meanings of Russian and English words, etc., cannot conceal what is obvious, that Nabokov’s Onegin is really, and perhaps only half intentionally, a spoof at its readers, rival translators, Pushkin, and Nabokov himself.”
Eight years’ worth of work and five thousand index cards…a spoof?! Hold that thought.
Spender gave Nabokov some space to kiss off Lowell: “He does not know Pushkin’s language and is not equipped to tackle the special problems of translation discussed.” Nabokov voiced his wish that Lowell “would stop mutilating defenceless dead poets—Mandelshtam, Rimbaud and others.” This referred to Lowell’s celebrated “imitations,” in which he recast a famous poem based on a literal translation by a native language speaker. Lowell’s collection Imitations won, yes, the Bollingen Poetry Translation Prize in 1962.*5
The eminent novelist, poet, and translator Robert Graves found his way into Encounter’s pages, expressing his admiration for Nabokov
, “a precisian in the rich Russian language and…a precisian in the equally rich and even more widely dispersed English language.” Graves voiced “regret to see him quarreling with Mr. Edmund Wilson, one of the ablest prose writers in the United States, however gross the provocation.”
In a nutshell Graves agreed with Wilson that Nabokov was guilty of using crackpot vocabulary, for example, “dit” for “ditty” or “song”; “loaden” for “laden”; and “curvate,” which Graves huffed “is not in the O.E.D., and we do not know Noah Webster’s source for its use.” It’s far from clear which end of the proverbial stick Graves is brandishing, however, because he misunderstood Wilson’s (and Nabokov’s editors’) objection to the use of “pal.” Graves thought the pal was a woman: “Maybe ‘miss’ is the right word for the Eugene Onegin context.” Not exactly.
To Nabokov’s great delight—and to Wilson’s apparent chagrin—Onegin-related brushfires kept flaring up in unexpected places. The thirty-one-year-old Christopher Ricks, Oxford’s future Professor of Poetry, praised the new Onegin in the New Statesman. Ricks clearly warmed to Nabokov’s “crotchety, superbly opinionated, humiliatingly erudite” translation, which he compared favorably to that of Babette Deutsch. Ms. Deutsch was a favorite Nabokov punching bag, whose translations Wilson had praised.
A seemingly innocent reader wrote a letter to the Statesman, questioning Ricks’s preference. That did not go unnoticed on the sixth floor of the Montreux Palace Hotel. Nabokov made short shrift of Deutsch’s hapless “paraphrase” of Pushkin, which in turn prompted a response to the New Statesman from Deutsch herself. In a brief note Deutsch demurely suggested that the reader compare her mellifluous lines about the peasant’s horse sniffing the new snow with Nabokov’s ham-handed account of the shambling “naggy.” That odd word, she explained, did indeed appear in The Shorter OED, and it means “given to nagging.”
What could have delighted Nabokov more? Not only had Deutsch not sued him for libel, as the skittish Bollingen editors had fretted she might, but she had emerged onto open ground to do battle.
Yet again Nabokov defended his naggy, not bothering to plump the obvious superiority of his elephantine Webster’s dictionary over the puny OED. He derided her pleasant, lilting line (Deutsch was a poet of some renown) “His mare scents snow upon the pleasant/Keen air.” There is no pleasant keen air in the original, Nabokov wrote; it has been piped in by Ms. Deutsch. And there’s no mare there, he pointed out. In Russian the horse’s gender was undetermined. There was a pun to be had, though: “Miss Deutsch’s version is little more than a nightmare.”
For whatever reason the novelist and critic V. S. Pritchett decided he wanted a piece of this action. At the end of a review of David Magarshack’s biography Pushkin, Pritchett alluded to the “diverting dispute between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson,” and wondered out loud why Magarshack didn’t address the burning question of Pushkin’s knowledge of English: “Is it true that he could have read Byron only in French?”
More raw meat for Nabokov, who believed he had resolved this question once and for all in his Onegin “Commentary”: “I suggest [Pritchett] consult the pages…wherein I explain, quite clearly, that most Russians of Pushkin’s time, including Pushkin himself, read English authors in French versions.”
But Wilson hadn’t let his Statesman subscription lapse. “Mr. Nabokov’s insolently imperious tone seems sometimes to impress readers who know nothing of the subject in dispute,” he wrote in a letter to the magazine, and then trotted out, again, the considerable evidence that Pushkin had a working knowledge of Byron’s English. “Mr. Nabokov, as I have often noticed, seems to be determined to ‘demonstrate’…that he is the only Russian writer who has ever mastered English.”
Wilson repeated Nabokov’s statement that Pushkin, “like most Russians…was poor at languages,” and mocked it. How, he asked, would Nabokov know? He hadn’t been to Russia in decades, and was apparently unaware that “since the Revolution there have been a good many young Russians who, without ever having left their country, have learned to speak English or French almost as fluently…as Mr. Nabokov himself.”2
Magarshack was living in London, so his magazine arrived promptly. “Reluctant as I am to intervene in the dispute between two such redoubtable opponents as Mr. Vladimir Nabokov and Mr. Edmund Wilson…” Then intervene he did. Citing “my recently published biography of Pushkin,” Magarshack dredged up a Russian army officer “said to have perfect knowledge of English,” who heard Pushkin read and translate Shakespeare. The poet’s pronunciation “was somewhat eccentric, and when challenged on that point he laughed and said he read English as if it were Latin.”
Pushkin’s translation, the officer reported, was “absolutely correct and his understanding of the language irreproachable.”
Nabokov, who was losing ground on this point, wrote in that he wasn’t so interested in fighting after all: “Sir: I do not intend to continue my chats with Mr. Edmund Wilson, in private or in print, but let me humbly concede before ending them, that Pushkin had almost as much English in the 1830s as Mr. Edmund Wilson has Russian today. That should satisfy everybody.”3
Are we done? Not quite. An interesting character shambles into our drama, a personage of almost Gogolian gravamen: the Harvard professor Alexander Gerschenkron, like Nabokov an émigré intellectual from the upper stratum of pre-Revolutionary Russia. Gerschenkron’s nominal field was economic history, but he was an omnididact of gargantuan reach, known around Harvard as “the Great Gerschenkron.” At a university where self-regard flows like mother’s milk through the hallways, Gerschenkron was a mythic figure. He purported to have wooed Marlene Dietrich (quite possibly), to have played chess with Marcel Duchamp (true—he lost), and boasted of an apparently fictional friendship with the Boston Red Sox left fielder Ted Williams—who, we can safely assume, was unaware of his existence. Gerschenkron famously feared no one. Not the Bolsheviks, not the Nazis, not his liberal sparring partner John Kenneth Galbraith, and certainly not Vladimir Nabokov.
An intellectual of the old school, Gerschenkron knew Pushkin inside and out. Like many Russians, he could recite massive swatches of Onegin by heart. Nabokov was a known quantity at Harvard. He had worked as a research fellow at the Museum of Comparative Zoology from 1942 to 1948, helping to catalog the university’s considerable collections of rare butterflies. Visiting from Cornell, Nabokov haunted Harvard’s superb libraries, researching the Onegin “Commentary,” and he guest-taught several times, sitting in for his friends, the Slavic scholar Mikhail Karpovich and Harry Levin. Gerschenkron didn’t much like Nabokov, and he especially disliked what Nabokov had done to Onegin. And, unlike Wilson, this was not an away game for Gerschenkron. The gallicisms, the prosody, the archaic Slavic roots of Pushkin’s vocabulary were as familiar to him as they were to Nabokov.
Gerschenkron’s ten-thousand-word critique in Modern Philology began at a deceptively slow pace:
Vladimir Nabokov’s monumental edition of Eugene Onegin is the strangest blend, fascinating and exasperating. It has everything: artistic intuition and dogmatic stubbornness; great ingenuity and amazing folly; acute observations and sterile pedantry; unnecessary modesty and inexcusable arrogance. It is a labor of love and a work of hate.
Clearing his throat, Gerschenkron attacked several of Nabokov’s by-now-better-known solecisms: translating “monkey” as “sapajou”; tsvetky, or “little flowers,” as “flowerets”; rosy lips became “vermeil lips”; and so on. Because Nabokov was seeking approximations for Pushkin’s rolling iambs, Gerschenkron wrote, “Russian fur coats become ‘pelisses,’ ‘curses’ become imprecations and old peasant women have acquired the vocabulary of college students.”
Gerschenkron admired a few of Nabokov’s lines, but warned that “such lovely flowers are surrounded, if not smothered, by much less fragrant weeds.” There was a malodorous infestation of malapropisms in this Onegin. Gerschenkron cited this one (6.3), among others:
With his un-looked-for apparition,
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the momentary softness of his eyes
and odd conduct with Olga,
to the depth of her soul
she’s penetrated.
Gerschenkron’s preliminary conclusion: “Nabokov’s translation can and should be studied, but…it cannot be read.”
Finding his stride, Gerschenkron offered examples of “the author’s uncontrolled anger, his lack of generosity, his narrow prejudices, eccentricities, inconsistencies and irrelevancies.” To wit: “Insipid Vergil and his pale pederasts”; “Voltaire’s abominably pedestrian verses”; “the well-meaning but talentlos August Wilhelm Schlegel”—and fourteen more such examples. “This, no doubt, was great stuff pour épater la coed at Cornell,” Gerschenkron noted, adding that “it has no bearing at all on Eugene Onegin or Pushkin in general….Nabokov is out to cut throats.”
Gerschenkron praised the “probable” accuracy of the “Commentary,” then let slip that he had bothered to check only one of Nabokov’s references. It proved to be a mis-citation of Juvenal, which Nabokov was forced to correct in the 1975 edition. That the one footnote he checked proved to be wrong, Gerschenkron ascribed to “just my own bad luck.” He also cited many other errors, for example, a wrong date; German grammar contorted; a city was east, not west, of Odessa. Trivial slips to be sure, the professor noted, yet these are precisely the motes that Nabokov so gleefully exposed in the eyes of his rivals.
There were other gems along the way. When Gerschenkron wanted to cite a more euphonic translation, he turned to Walter Arndt. Hacking through the underbrush of the “Pedal Digression,” he drolly noted that “it is, incidentally, odd that Lolita’s bard, a nymphet’s singer,” should rule out the possibility of an affair between Pushkin and the thirteen-and-a-half-year-old Maria Rayevskaya, “since Pushkin had some proclivities in that direction.” He then cited and footnoted two instances of Pushkin dallying with twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls.