Stalking Nabokov

by Brian Boyd

  Nabokov, too, had often thought of collecting his verse translations, even after he had insisted so firmly in Eugene Onegin on the need for unyielding literality. In November 1958 the young Jason Epstein, who had eagerly published Pnin and Nabokov’s Dozen for Doubleday, flew from New York to Ithaca to secure Nabokov for the firm he had just joined, Random House, and proposed publishing three books: Eugene Onegin; an anthology of Russian poetry, including the masterpiece of Russian medieval poetry, the Song of Igor’s Campaign, and “some Pushkin, some Lermontov, Tyutchev, possibly Blok & Hodasevich”; and Nabokov’s greatest Russian novel, The Gift.2 Nabokov signed an agreement for an “Anthology of Russian Verse in translation,”3 which he expected to include, apart from the Igor epic, “three short dramas by Pushkin and poems from Lomonosov (XVIII century), through Zhukovski, Batyushkov, Tyutchev, Pushkin, Lermontov, Fet, to Blok.”4

  But after spending a productive spring in Arizona, Nabokov realized by June 1959 that The Song of Igor’s Campaign had become “a book in itself which cannot be combined with the kind of second half we had planned. That second half…would throw the book completely out of balance because it would necessarily lack the copious notes the first half has.” Since the second half was “supposed to cover the entire century of Russia’s renaissance in poetry, the commentary should have taken at least twice as many pages as that on The Song.”5 Nabokov realized he did not have the time, and Random House happily published The Song of Igor’s Campaign on its own.

  In the wake of Lolita’s triumph, Nabokov was kept busy both writing new novels and translating or supervising translations of his old Russian work. In 1968, dissatisfied with Putnam, the publisher of Lolita, he was ready to move to McGraw-Hill, which offered a large advance for a multibook contract that included Ada. Late in the year he proposed delivering a translation of his first novel, Mary, and “An Anthology of Russian Poets” by mid-January 1970.6 Other books, however, replaced that proposed anthology, and when a second multibook contract was being negotiated with McGraw-Hill late in 1973, Nabokov proposed delivering an “Anthology of Russian Poetry in English” in 1978. By 1975 he had become too weak to advance the project, and by 1977 he was dead. When Véra recovered from the shock of his death, she wanted to compile the volume herself but did not know where to locate all she had in mind or how to find the time.

  Verses and Versions contains the anthology of Russian poets Nabokov proposed to McGraw-Hill and more. It also includes some of Nabokov’s discussions of translation (others are readily available in Eugene Onegin and Strong Opinions); the entire texts, both notes and translations, from his first anthologies of Russian verse (Three Russian Poets [1944], expanded in the British edition of 1947 into Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev); and selections of notes and verses from the Eugene Onegin commentary, talks to fellow Russian émigrés, his still-unpublished Cornell lectures on Russian verse, and his translations of verse by Mandelshtam and Okudzhava, which are more recent than the translations he originally intended to include. Still left in the archives are Nabokov’s Russian translations, early and late, from English, French, and German (Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Goethe, and others) and his translations from Russian (Pushkin, Tyutchev) into French.

  This volume therefore serves three linked purposes: as a treasury of Russian verse, as a workshop in translation, and as another showcase in the library of Nabokov’s literary diversity. First, it is an introduction to the classics of Russian lyric verse—an anthology of texts, translations, and pointed pen portraits of poets—by the person who has already done more than anyone else to introduce to the Anglophone world the narrative masterpieces of medieval and modern Russian verse, The Song of Igor’s Campaign and Eugene Onegin. Russia’s prose and drama have been readily enjoyed and admired outside her borders, but it has taken the greatest writer working in both Russian and English to convince the English-speaking world through his translation and commentary that Pushkin is, as all Russians know, central to the Russian literary pantheon. As Korney Chukvosky writes, thanks to Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin, “Pushkin, whose genius has until recently been concealed from a ‘proud foreign gaze,’ has at last become for readers abroad an established classic.”7

  In Verses and Versions we can see other sides of Pushkin: his incomparable love lyrics, his verse dramas, his pungent epigrams, and his range of emotions, forms, and themes. As translator and commentator, Nabokov places Pushkin in time and space, introducing first the origins of the Russian iamb in Lomonosov, then Pushkin’s great predecessor Derzhavin, then Pushkin himself amid his contemporaries, and the successors he inspired even as they established new directions over the century that followed his early death.

  To offer the reader maximum access to poems in another language and script, Nabokov first intended his Eugene Onegin translation to be published interlinearly, with each line of the translation beneath its transliterated and stress-marked Russian counterpart. He abandoned the idea when he correctly foresaw that the sheer bulk of his text—it turned out to be four printed volumes—would make publication difficult enough even without the extra expense of such an expanse of transliteration. But within the 1,200 pages of his commentary, Nabokov always transliterates and stress marks any Russian verse. And in 1966, for the last Russian verse translation he attempted (and failed) to publish, by the youngish Soviet poet Bulat Okudzhava, he carefully prepared a transliterated and stressed Russian text.

  I had intended to follow Nabokov’s practice in Eugene Onegin, but he himself found that for the sake of readers who know some Russian, from students to native speakers, the publisher of Poems and Problems required the originals of his own Russian poems that he translated for the volume to be printed in Cyrillic. For the same reason, we also present the originals of all Russian texts in Cyrillic. For those without Russian but an interest in the placement of the original words and sounds, the Verses and Versions website contains transliterated and stress-marked texts of all the Russian poems here. Written Russian does not normally indicate stress, but stressed syllables are marked on the transliteration since even for intermediate students of Russian syllabic stress can often be difficult. Readers with little or no Russian can therefore engage with the originals, in print and on screen, with a reliable sense of the music and magic of their sound.

  Had Nabokov lived to complete the anthology of Russian poetry, he would no doubt have affixed to each poet an introductory sketch as pithy and witty as those he wrote on Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tyutchev for Three Russian Poets in his first years in America. Those introductions are printed in Verses and Versions, along with other astute commentaries, sometimes directed at fellow Russians for whom nothing needs to be explained, sometimes at Anglo-American readers or students of whom nothing can be assumed, sometimes to Anglo-American or Russian scholars.

  The selection of poems is also more accidental than it would have been had it been entirely Nabokov’s own. Nevertheless, it includes the range of poets he intended for his Russian anthology, like Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, Fet, and Hodasevich, whom he had already published, and other literary peaks. Nabokov translated poetry over many years, for many reasons and many different audiences: to introduce a new enthusiasm to a wider audience; as a personal tribute or an exercise in the possibilities of translation because he thought the model a masterpiece and a challenge (Shakespeare, Goethe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud); to have work to sell to periodical and book publishers in the early 1940s, when he still had no widespread American reputation and, despite his command of English, found it painful to write fiction other than in Russian; to introduce Russian literature to a wider audience; to teach Russian literature, from 1947 to 1958; to establish his scholarly credentials during his academic years, in his copiously annotated and exact Eugene Onegin and The Song of Igor’s Campaign; and as part of a polemic critique of other translators in the 1950s and 1960s (Pushkin, Mandelstam, Okudzhava).

  Verses and Versions is not, therefore, Nabokov’s selection of the top third or so of the three hundred perfect poems he
believed had been written in Russian. He had selected more than thirty of those in the poems from Pushkin to Hodasevich that he translated in 1940s. About as many again in Verses and Versions might also sit in his top tier. Others are included simply because he translated them, especially as part of his vast Eugene Onegin apparatus. Pushkin’s predecessors and contemporaries, and fragments of Pushkin’s own minor poetry that merely happen to have some strong association with this or that part of Eugene Onegin, are all slightly overrepresented yet allow invaluable views of the context, life, and personality of Russia’s greatest poet. And throughout the selection of the Pushkin poems we can see Nabokov’s particular interest—evident also in his still-unpublished lectures on Russian poetry—in Pushkin’s poems about art and the artist, about freedom, and about the freedom of art and artist.

  Not included are poems by four older Russian contemporaries Nabokov preferred not to translate but to parody, as he parodied T. S. Eliot in Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada: Vladimir Mayakovsky, whom he thought “fatally corrupted by the regime he faithfully served”; Boris Pasternak, whose early poetry he respected but thought marred by clumsy lapses; Marina Tsvetaeva, whom he considered a flawed genius and compromised in her relationship to Stalin’s Soviet Union;8 and Anna Akhmatova, whom he rated, along with Ezra Pound, as “definitely B-grade,” and parodies in Pnin.

  Second, Verses and Versions is a master class in the possibilities and problems of literary translation. Nabokov became not only one of the most renowned writers of the twentieth century but also the most celebrated translator— even though he ended up not translating Ulysses into Russian or Anna Karenina into English, as he had at various times intended. His Eugene Onegin provoked “what can be called the great debate on translation norms of the 1960s,”9 which embroiled Edmund Wilson, Robert Lowell, George Steiner, and Anthony Burgess and caused more uproar than anything on the subject since the famous polemics of Matthew Arnold and Francis Newman on translating the Iliad a hundred years earlier. Nabokov’s extreme position on translating Eugene Onegin with unflinching literalism still polarizes. The Pushkinist Alexander Dolinin writes that “everyone who has tried to teach Eugene Onegin in rhymed translations knows all too well that they make it a futile enterprise to convince even the most gullible students that Pushkin, to quote Edmund Wilson, ‘is the only modern poet in the class of Shakespeare and Dante.’ ”10 But Douglas Hofstadter, writing two years later in his Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language, saw the eschewal of rhyme in translating rhymed verse as a betrayal, and he demonizes “the rabid Nabokov,” “the devil,” “the implacably Nazistic Nabokov,” for his “unrelenting verbal sadism” and “hardball savaging” that “goes way beyond bad taste.”11 Nabokov in reply might have quoted his “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English”: “To translate an Onegin stanza does not mean to rig up fourteen lines with alternate beats and affix to them seven jingle rhymes starting with pleasure-love-leisure-dove. Granted that rhymes can be found, they should be raised to the level of Onegin’s harmonies”—but no ukulele can ever replicate a Stradivarius.

  Although he developed an uncompromising literalism in teaching American students of Russian literature at Cornell and Harvard, in order to allow them to appreciate great originals directly, not via pseudosurrogates, Nabokov had been a superb translator of verse into verse, from four and into three languages. At Cornell he began translating Onegin in rhyme (no text survives) before deciding at the beginning of the 1950s that this was “sinful” and hopelessly misleading. Yet even in the Eugene Onegin commentary, he offers rhymed translations of short poems by Lomonosov, Karamzin, Zhukovski, Batyushkov, and Pushkin. As late as 1959 and 1962, after completing his unversified Onegin, he entered Sunday Times poetry competitions, translating formally intricate French verse into formally intricate English verse (he also signed the later submission “Sybil Shade”: in Pale Fire, published that year, Sybil, the wife of the poet John Shade, translates English verse into French). Nabokov’s early verse translations attain rare heights of fidelity. In a comparative and strictly quantitative study of nineteen translations of Eugene Onegin, Ljuba Tarvi assesses Nabokov’s verbal accuracy at between 98 and 100 percent, well ahead of the competition, but even in her sole example of his other translations from Russian (Tyutchev’s “Silentium”) she assigns him an unmatched combined score for combined verbal and formal equivalence of 97 percent.

  But Verses and Versions does not pretend to be a collection of perfect or near-perfect translations. Some of Nabokov’s translations come close: some of the poems of Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, Fet, and perhaps especially Hodasevich, which he translated for publication in the 1940s, before the needs of teaching students drove him to total fidelity to sense even at the cost of style. His others translations work as ideal cribs for accessing the originals. But the tribulations of translation, even for a writer with such a command of prose and verse style and history in three languages, are as fascinating as the triumphs. Nabokov’s successive tries at translating a particular poem, with and without rhyme, show the sheer magnitude of the task, the impossibility of perfection, the possibility only of offering improved access to the original but not of creating its image and equal.

  Nabokov painstakingly worked and reworked his fiction to a state of serene finality. His translations were different. As he writes in an unpublished note, “translations fade much more rapidly than the originals, and every time I re-read my versions I tend to touch them up here and there.”12 So Verses and Versions is not only an anthology of two centuries of Russian poetry but also a sampler of the problems and possibilities of literary translation, as demonstrated by someone who wrote and translated in three languages for over sixty years. The prose essays and talks that begin the volume articulate Nabokov’s theory of translation, first in the 1940s, before he developed his provocative literalism, then in the 1950s, when he first began to formulate his new principles. Because the poems are arranged chronologically not by the date of Nabokov’s translations but according to the poet’s date of birth and the poem’s dates of composition, readers will find themselves moving from a poem translated into melodious verse, in Nabokov’s own early manner, to another in his later exact but unpoetic manner, or vice versa. Sometimes the translation shifts to another version of the same poem, the gains and the losses of each method bright on the page. Readers should therefore take note of the date of Nabokov’s translation: anything after 1950 is likely to display the unrhymed literalism of his later style.

  Having concluded that it was impossible to translate poetry as poetry with total fidelity to both sense and verse form, Nabokov at the end of the 1960s decided to show the exception that proved the rule by composing a short poem simultaneously in English and Russian with the same complex stanza structure: a poem about the very act of walking simultaneously on these two separate linguistic tightropes, each swinging to its own time. Even he found he could write only stiltedly under these disconcerting conditions, and he wisely abandoned the effort.

  Much more successful was his earlier attempt to create in English two stanzas in the strict form that Pushkin created for Eugene Onegin, in a poem about his translating Onegin. Pushkin’s fourteen-line Onegin stanza ingeniously reworks the pattern of the sonnet so that, as Nabokov notes, “its first twelve lines include the greatest variation in rhyme sequence possible within a three-quatrain frame: alternate, paired, and closed.”13 The stanza offers an internal variety of pace, direction, and duration that forms part of the poem’s magic for Russian readers. To show non-Russian readers the variability of this variety, Nabokov composes two stanzas in English that, like Pushkin’s, modulate tone, pace, subject, imagery, and rhyme quality within the stanza and from stanza to stanza, so that the stanzas are both self-contained and internally changeable and, in the movement from one to another, both continuous and contrasting. The first quatrain of stanza 1 stops and starts, with question and answer after abrupt dismissive imagistic answer; the first quatrain of stanza 2 skims o
n unstopped, like a camera zooming through a fast-forward nightscape. Nabokov knows he cannot combine Pushkin’s sense and pattern while exactly transposing Pushkin’s precise thought into the different structures and associations of English, but at least he can impart to Anglophone readers a sense of the coruscating enchantment of Pushkin’s stanza form.

  On Translating “Eugene Onegin”

  1

  What is translation? On a platter

  A poet’s pale and glaring head,

  A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter,

  And profanation of the dead.

  The parasites you were so hard on

  Are pardoned if I have your pardon,

  O, Pushkin, for my stratagem:

  I traveled down your secret stem,

  And reached the root, and fed upon it;

  Then, in a language newly learned,

  I grew another stalk and turned

  Your stanza patterned on a sonnet,

  Into my honest roadside prose—

  All thorn, but cousin to your rose.

  2

  Reflected words can only shiver

  Like elongated lights that twist

  In the black mirror of a river

  Between the city and the mist.

  Elusive Pushkin! Persevering,

  I still pick up Tatiana’s earring,

  Still travel with your sullen rake.