Stalking Nabokov
Page 27
But beyond the roles of the familiar dead in the lives of the living—a pattern that can be seen more overtly in other Nabokov fiction, such as “The Vane Sisters” and Transparent Things—stands a more remote source of creative energy, still personal, not yet ultimate. In Dar that source is identified with Pushkin. Fyodor’s father “took little interest in poetry, making an exception only for Pushkin: he knew him as some people know the liturgy, and liked to declaim him while out walking” (160). When he dismisses the modern poetry Fyodor once devoured, Count Godunov’s “mistake was not that he ran down all ‘modern poetry’ indiscriminately, but that he refused to detect in it the long, life-giving ray of his favorite poet” (161). On the last day of his mother’s visit, Fyodor reads some Pushkin prose—the Journey to Arzrum—“when suddenly he felt a sweet, strong stab from somewhere. Still not understanding, he put the book aside” (107). After his mother’s departure, he feels “vaguely tormented by the thought that somehow in his talks with his mother he had left the main thing unsaid” and again picks up his one-volume Pushkin. “Again that divine stab! And how it called, how it prompted him.…Thus did he hearken to the purest sound from Pushkin’s tuning fork—and he knew already what this sound required of him. Two weeks after his mother’s departure he wrote her about what he had conceived” (108): the plan of writing a life of his father. He cannot start immediately, and, “continuing his training program during the whole of the spring, he fed on Pushkin, inhaled Pushkin (the reader of Pushkin has the capacity of his lungs enlarged).…To strengthen the muscles of his muse he took on his rambles whole pages of Pugachyov learned by heart as a man using an iron bar instead of a walking stick.…Pushkin entered his blood. With Pushkin’s voice merged the voice of his father.…From Pushkin’s prose he passed to his life, so that in the beginning the rhythm of Pushkin’s era commingled with the rhythm of his father’s life” (109–10).1
Early in this chapter, Fyodor has been traveling to work on a Berlin tram and has been filled with the usual revulsion: “He was going to a lesson, was late as usual, and as usual there grew in him a vague, evil, heavy hatred for the clumsy sluggishness of this least gifted of all methods of transport”— “least gifted” (bezdarennyy): a strangely loaded word in a novel called The Gift (Dar)—“for the hopelessly familiar, hopelessly ugly streets going by the wet window, and most of all for the feet, sides and necks of the native passengers” (92). He knows that his Russian contempt for Germans is “a conviction unworthy of an artist,” but he cannot stop himself fixing his hatred on one archetypal German who bumps him as he makes his way to the seat in front, while Fyodor stares at him and silently ticks off all the reasons why he hates the Germany that this man so perfectly embodies. Then this passenger takes out a Russian émigré newspaper and coughs with a Russian intonation, and Fyodor thinks: “That’s wonderful.…How clever, how gracefully sly, and how essentially good life is!” (94). Here in miniature is the pattern of the whole novel: initial frustrations and vexations compensated for by the playfully deceptive generosity behind life.
That this reversal offers a paradigm for The Gift as a whole is indicated by the word “ungifted” oddly applied to tramcars. This passage, in a chapter so saturated with Pushkin, seems to confirm Alexander Dolinin’s suggestion that the very title of the novel comes from Pushkin, from his great lyric:
Dar naprasnyy, dar sluchayniy,
Zhizn’, zachem ty mne dana?
Il’ zachem sud’boyu taynoy
Ty na kazn’ osuzhdena?
Vain gift, chance gift,
Life, why were you given to me?
Or why by some secret fate
Were you sentenced to death?2
Just as Fyodor fuming at the “ungifted” tramcar system is then made to realize “how clever, how gracefully sly and how essentially good life is,” so Pushkin, desolately bemoaning life as a vain gift in this poem, answers himself in a poem that Fyodor soon quotes:
O, net, mne zhizn’ ne nadoela
Ya zhit’ hochu, ya zhit’ lyublyu.
Dusha ne vovse ohladela,
Utratya molodost’ svoyu.
Oh, no, life has not grown tedious to me,
I want to live, I love to live.
My soul, although its youth has vanished,
Has not become completely chill.
So far it has been genuine Pushkin, but now comes an addition that Pushkin is supposed to have added in an album and that a memoirist whom Fyodor reads has recalled:
Eshchyo sud’ba menya sogreet,
Romanom geniya upyus’,
Mitskevich pust’ eshchyo sozreet,
Koy chem ya sam eshchyo zaymus’—
Fate yet will comfort me; a novel
Of genius I shall yet enjoy,
I’ll see yet a mature Mickiéwicz,
With something I myself may toy—3
Just as Fyodor finds himself fostered rather than frustrated by fate, and even finds that fate has bestowed on him the gift of a novel of genius, so Pushkin himself continues to toy with life, perhaps by, for instance, becoming in part the fate that helps Fyodor to his gift, his life neither in vain, nor chance, nor sentenced to death.
When at last Fyodor introduces Zina into the novel, by way of a poem in her honor that he composes as he waits for her, he comments: “And not only was Zina cleverly and elegantly made to measure for him by a very painstaking fate, but both of them, forming a single shadow, were made to the measure of something not quite comprehensible, but wonderful and benevolent and continuously surrounding them” (189). Fyodor turns that sense of a very painstaking and benevolent fate into the structure of The Gift itself and saturates the sense of life’s and art’s gifts with the implied presence of his father and of Pushkin behind him as the source of all that flowed from him in Russian literature, as an example of creative perfection, as a font of personal inspiration, flowing all the way from the “Pushkin Avenue” of the first apartment, through which fate hoped to bring Fyodor and Zina together and in which Fyodor writes his Pushkinesque Journey to Asia, to the “Gogol Street” of the second apartment, in which Zina actually lives and into which they are about to enter together when the story breaks off with a final Eugene Onegin stanza.4
As John Shade nears the end of his poem, he announces as if offhandedly: “this transparent thingum does require/Some moondrop title. Help me, Will! Pale Fire.” Kinbote glosses: “Paraphrased, this evidently means: Let me look in Shakespeare for something I might use for a title. And the find is ‘pale fire.’ But in which of the Bard’s works did our poet cull it? My readers must make their own research. All I have with me is a tiny vest pocket edition of Timon of Athens—in Zemblan! It certainly contains nothing that could be regarded as an equivalent of ‘pale fire’ (if it had, my luck would have been a statistical monster).” If Kinbote does not know or bother to find out, Nabokov’s alert readers have already been given many clues, pointing in the same direction as this one: the phrase indeed comes from Timon of Athens, from the disenchanted Timon’s hysterical denunciation of the cosmos as a chain of theft:
I’ll example you with thievery:
The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moon’s an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;
The sea’s a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears.
(4.3.438–43)
A few lines later in his poem, Shade, who has tried all his life to probe the riddle of death and who has centered his poem on the death of his daughter Hazel, writes:
I’m reasonably sure that we survive
And that my darling somewhere is alive,
As I am reasonably sure that I
980 Shall wake at six tomorrow, on July
The twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine,
And that the day will probably be fine.
But instead he is killed that very evening by a madman, killed before he can write the thousan
dth line he had probably planned for his poem. Like Fyodor he has trusted in the ultimate benevolence of things, despite the losses we mortals must endure, but his trust seems to be shattered and even mocked as if by some malevolent fate.
But as I have already intimated, as we reread we can discover the evidence for both Hazel’s and then her father’s survival after death—evidence I do not have time even to summarize here, although Nabokov prepares it with all his usual exactness (see NPFMAD, part 3). Hazel dies in 1957, and a year later, apparently under her influence, although not knowing the source of his inspiration, her father writes a poem, “The Nature of Electricity,” that suggests playfully how the dead may light up the lives of the living:
The dead, the gentle dead—who knows?—
In tungsten filaments abide,
And on my bedside table glows
Another man’s departed bride.
And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole
Town with innumerable lights,…
After Botkin arrives as her father’s neighbor in early 1959, Hazel sees in him a kindred spirit, a desperate man on the brink of suicide. Recognizing his troubles, she offers him a consolation in the visions of Zembla that she develops in his mind, a fantasy in which he is a deposed king who escapes from his former castle, carrying with him a tiny volume of Timon of Athens, and emerges near the Royal Onhava Theater, then into Timon Alley and Coriolanus Lane, a fantasy, in other words, where Shakespeare pervades, as he does already in New Wye, where a landscaper of genius has planted an avenue of all the trees mentioned by Shakespeare (a wonderful echo, in this context, of the “Pushkin Avenue” in The Gift). Hazel devises the Zemblan fantasy to soothe Kinbote’s disturbed mind, to express her own new radiant confidence, and to stimulate her father to write a verse autobiography that will commemorate his lifelong attempt to see past the mirror world of death.
Curiously, even Shade’s dead parents seem to join with his dead daughter in influencing the poet. I do not have room to explain, but part of the evidence is a famous passage in Hamlet—one Nabokov translated into Russian—where the Ghost of King Hamlet declares to his son, “The glow-worm shows the matin to be near, And ’gins to pale his ineffectual fire.” Alongside Shade’s dead parents Hazel seems to stand, and alongside her, after his death, stands Shade himself, adding his own contributions to Kinbote’s commentary. And behind them seems to stand the Shakespeare who pervades this whole world.
Let me quote from one of my earliers books, Nabokov’s Pale Fire:
From start to finish of Pale Fire Shakespeare recurs as an image of stupendous fecundity, someone from whom we continually borrow and through whom we can continually pass on our experience of the unending bounty of things, as Shade’s parents and his daughter pass on the Timon in the tunnel to Kinbote and then to Shade himself. In this novel of worlds within worlds, this “system of cells interlinked within / Cells interlinked within cells interlinked/Within one stem,” death borrows endlessly from life and life from death, one level of creativity takes from another and endlessly gives. “I’ll example you with thievery,” Timon says,…but Nabokov steals from this speech to express not Timon’s contempt for universal thievery but his own vision of an unfathomable creative generosity behind our origins and ends.
(NPFMAD 245–46)
In both The Gift and Pale Fire, Nabokov creates artists who despite their frustrations and losses sense the ultimate bountifulness of things. As readers we are eventually allowed to see, even more clearly than the writers themselves, how they have been influenced by the spirits of their beloved dead, and, beyond them, by the colossal creative energies radiating out from a Pushkin or a Shakespeare, and, beyond them, in a sense, by the Nabokov who creates Fyodor’s and Shade’s worlds—and who suspects the role in his own work and life of his father’s spirit, of forces he can best imagine in terms of the creative radiance of a Pushkin or a Shakespeare, and of still more unfathomable sources of energy and design beyond them in nature, in the design of life itself. Readers who know Nabokov will know that one of his main examples of the playful creative design behind nature is natural mimicry. In the “Second Addendum to ‘The Gift,’ ” Nabokov’s afterthought to the work where he invokes Pushkin with the deepest metaphysical resonance, he refers again to natural mimicry and links it with Shakespeare, when he writes “of the fantastic refinement of ‘protective mimicry,’ which, in a world lacking an appointed observer endowed with artistic sensitivity, imagination, and humor, would simply be useless (lost upon the world), like a small volume of Shakespeare lying open in the dust of a boundless desert” (N’sBs 219).
In an unpublished lecture Nabokov distinguishes the toska running through Pushkin’s poetry from Oneginesque spleen and defines it as “a feeling of aimless longing permeating one’s whole being,” “an acute dissatisfaction with one’s surroundings”; it “presupposes a high goal, contempt for compromise, and that irrational sense of worlds beyond worlds which is so characteristic of true mysticism.”5 Nabokov, too, can express a sense of dissatisfaction with his surroundings, but he expresses much more deeply a sense of endless gratitude for the generosity of the world that he finds in nature, in a butterfly or a bird, or in art, in Shakespeare or Pushkin. Fyodor on a bus feels exasperated that he is “wasting his youth on a boring and empty task, on the mediocre teaching of foreign languages—when he has his own language, out of which he can make anything he likes—a midge, a mammoth, a thousand different clouds. What he should really be teaching was…the constant feeling that our days here are only pocket money, farthings clinking in the dark, and that somewhere is stocked the real wealth, from which life should know how to get dividends in the shape of dreams, tears of happiness, distant mountains” (Gift 175). For Nabokov, the most accessible account, the most tangible tally, the most concrete image of that “real wealth” beyond the pocket money of the here and now is the legacy of Shakespeare or Pushkin—and perhaps, he hopes, the legacy they have helped him, too, to bequeath.
16. Nabokov as Verse Translator
Introduction to Verses and Versions
I was always touched by Véra Nabokov’s enthusiasm for overlooked aspects of her husband’s literary art. Since she was particularly eager to assemble a volume of his verse translations, I made a point of noting down every one I came across as I catalogued the Montreux archives. But she was too busy with other things, as I was, until it was too late for her to complete the task. In 2004 Dmitri Nabokov referred to me a request from Stanislav Shvabrin, then working on a Ph.D. at UCLA. Shvabrin had found at Harvard some unpublished Nabokov translations of Tyutchev and others and had asked Dmitri could he publish them. I suggested that we should combine forces, using the material I had gathered over the years with Véra in mind. Stas patiently identified and transcribed the texts Nabokov had used and transliterated them for our website for the book, http://www.nabokovversesandversions.ac.nz/. I introduced the volume, explaining the surprises of Nabokov’s changing attitudes to translating Russian verse.
Translation, like politics, is an art of compromise: inevitable compromise between the resources of From-ish and those of To-ish.1 When the unique riches of From-ish—all the accidents of its associations and accidence— have been exploited to the full by a poet of genius, the compromise must be all the greater.
“Vladimir Adamant Nabokov,” as he once signed himself, was a man singularly averse to compromise. Artists usually are: within the work, as nowhere else in life, they can choose their own conditions. Nabokov notoriously eschewed compromise by translating the unquestioned masterpiece of Russian verse, Aleksandr Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, into an English version that allows readers to understand the exact sense of Pushkin’s lines, especially through notes eight times as long as the poem, but renounces any attempt to provide an equivalent of Pushkin’s poetry, his perfect placement of words, his seemingly effortless mastery of rhythm and rhyme. Rather than trying to replicate Pushkin’s landscape in another medium, another place, Nabokov provides detailed signpos
ts to Pushkin’s precise terrain.
But before 1951, when he arrived at this austerely unpoetic method of translating Eugene Onegin, Nabokov had been a brilliant translator of verse into verse, always with a strong loyalty to accuracy of sense but accepting in this one instance the compromises that must be made to find some match for the verse of From in the linguistic resources and verse conventions of To. He translated from French and English—and even German, of which he knew little—into Russian, from Russian and French into English, and from Russian into French.
Fluently trilingual by the age of seven, he translated at twelve Mayne Reid’s Wild West novel, The Headless Horseman, into French alexandrines. That translation does not survive, but much of his prolific early verse and verse translation does, although neither Nabokov himself nor his son Dmitri has judged this juvenilia worth publishing. In his last years Nabokov was ruthless in selecting his early verse for his collection Stikhi (Poems), published two years after his death. His first nine years as a poet are represented there by only slightly more poems than the single year of 1923, his last year as predominantly a poet, his first year of real poetic maturity. That year, therefore, provides the starting point for this collection of Nabokov’s verse translations.
There is another reason for choosing 1923. That was the year Nabokov met Véra Slonim, whom he married two years later. Fluent in Nabokov’s three languages, and also in German, an avid reader of his verse before they met, and already herself translating and publishing in Rul’, the Russian émigré newspaper where Nabokov had published most of his early work, Véra remained particularly attached sixty years later to the notion of assembling a volume of her husband’s verse translations and would have edited it herself in her eighties had she had the strength and time.