Stalking Nabokov

by Brian Boyd

  I find another man’s mistake,

  I analyze alliterations

  That grace your feasts and haunt the great

  Fourth stanza of your Canto Eight.

  This is my task—a poet’s patience

  And scholiastic passion blent:

  Dove-droppings on your monument.

  (PP 175)

  Third, Verses and Versions offers another facet of one of the greatest and most multifaceted writers of the twentieth century—not only a major author in two languages and in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama but also, as readers have come to realize, a world-class scientist, a groundbreaking scholar, and a translator.

  Nabokov once said that he called the first version of his autobiography Conclusive Evidence because of the two Vs at the center, linking Vladimir the author and Véra the anchor and addressee, as she proves to be by the end of the book. Verses and Versions similarly links Vladimir and Véra, who wanted to assemble a book like this as a monument to her husband’s multifacetedness. It also pays homage to Poems and Problems, which, late in his career, introduced readers to Nabokov’s Russian verse as well as his English and to still another facet of his creativity, his world-class chess-problem compositions.

  Pushkin has a special place in the hearts of all Russians who love literature. He has a particularly special place for Nabokov in his Russian work (Pushkin is the tutelary deity of his last and greatest Russian novel, The Gift, which even ends with an echo of the ending of Eugene Onegin, in a perfect Onegin stanza, cast in prose) and in his efforts as an English writer to make Pushkin known. Pushkin is also a byword for the untranslatability of poetic greatness: unquestioned in his preeminence in his native land yet long almost unrecognized within any other. Flaubert, one of the brightest stars in Nabokov’s private literary pléiade, famously remarked to his friend Turgenev: “He is flat, your poet.”

  Nabokov himself discusses the untranslatability of one of Pushkin’s great love lyrics in the first of his essays on translation. I would like here to consider another great love lyric, “Ya vas lyubil” (“I loved you”), which Nabokov translated three times, in three different ways: in an awkward verse translation of 1929 and in a literal translation and a lexical (word for word) translation, accompanied by a stress-marked transliteration and a note, about twenty years later. None of these quite works (the lexical is not even meant to work, merely to supply the crudest crib); none of these can quite convince the English-language reader that this is one of the great love lyrics— one of the great lyrics of any kind—in any language.

  Yet Nabokov is not alone. For the bicentennial of Pushkin’s birth—and coincidentally the centennial of Nabokov’s—Marita Crawley, a great-great-great-granddaughter of Pushkin and chairman of the British Pushkin Bicentennial Trust, asked herself how she could convince the English-speaking public that Pushkin’s genius is as great as Russians claim. She answered herself: she would invite a number of leading poets to “translate” Pushkin poems, or rather to make poems out of Pushkin translations. In a volume for the Folio Society, she includes poets of the stature of Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and Carol Ann Duffy. Duffy took “Ya vas lyubil”:

  I loved you once. If love is fire, then embers

  smoulder in the ashes of this heart.

  Don’t be afraid. Don’t worry. Don’t remember.

  I do not want you sad now we’re apart.

  I loved you without language, without hope,

  now mad with jealousy, now insecure.

  I loved you once so purely, so completely,

  I know who loves you next can’t love you more.

  Duffy is a fine poet, but I suspect few will think this one of literature’s great lyrics—not that she is not as successful as other poets in After Pushkin.14 What is it that makes Pushkin’s poem great?

  I offer a plain translation into lineated prose:

  I loved you; love still, perhaps,

  In my heart has not quite gone out;

  But let it trouble you no more;

  I do not want to sadden you in any way.

  I loved you wordlessly, hopelessly,

  Now by timidity, now by jealousy oppressed;

  I loved you so sincerely, so tenderly,

  As God grant you may be loved by someone else.

  My translation, if undistinguished, is acceptable, though I almost sinned by ending, “As God grant you may be loved again.” In Pushkin the last word is “drugím” and means “by another” (in context, “by another man”): “As God grant you may be loved by another.” I should not have thought of closing with “again” and would not have done so had I not been intending to supply a literal translation and a lexical one. On its own, “again” might be ambiguous, might suggest the speaker has perhaps ended up anticipating a complete revival of his own feelings. What is needed is a short, strong, decisive ending, and “again” at first seemed to supply some of this, though without the shift and precision of thought and feeling in Pushkin’s “drugím,” where “As God grant you may be loved by another” ended too intolerably limply for me to tack it to the rest of the translation.

  The poem starts with what might seem banal, “Ya vas lyubíl,” except that it is in the past, and that gives it its special angle. As Pushkin treats of the near-universal experience of having fallen out of love, he gradually moves from the not unusual—the change from present love to near past, the aftershock of emotions, the shift from desire to tender interest and concern—to the unexpected closing combination, the affirmation of the past love in the penultimate line, “I loved you so sincerely, so tenderly,” then to the selfless generosity of the last line, the hope that she will be loved again as well as he has loved her, which in its very lack of selfishness confirms the purity of the love he had and in some sense still has.

  Where Duffy’s “who loves you next” almost implies a line-up of lovers, Pushkin offers a surprise, yet utter emotional rightness and inevitability. Where Duffy’s line becomes a near boast, emphasizing that the speaker’s love is unsurpassable, Pushkin’s speaker dismisses self to focus on and pray for his former love.

  This is what Pushkin is like, again and again. He cuts directly to the core of a human feeling in a way that makes it new and yet recognizably right and revelatory. He creates a complex emotional contour through swift suggestion, a scenario all the more imaginatively inviting by being unconstrained by character and event. His expression seems effortless and elegant, but his attention and ours is all on the accuracy of the emotion. In this poem Pushkin allows just one shadow of one metaphor, in the verb in the second line, ugásla, which can mean “gone out” or “extinguished,” where Duffy feels the need to embellish and poeticize the image into “If love is fire, then embers / smoulder in the ashes of this heart,” with a pun on “heart” and “hearth.” This is inventive translation, but it is not Pushkin’s steady focus on feeling. Duffy’s lines draw attention to the poet, to the play. In other moods Push-kin can himself be supremely playful and playfully self-conscious in his own fashion, but here he offers an emotional directness and a verbal restraint amid formal perfection that is alien to English poetry and that to Duffy feels too bald to leave unadorned.

  With your attention now engaged, ready to slow down and savor this poem, I offer below Pushkin’s own words, transliterated and stressed, with an italicized word-for-word match below (a “lexical translation” in Nabokov’s terms) and my strictly literal translation below that.

  Nabokov’s note comments perceptively on the sound-link between “lyubímoy” and “drugím” in the last line, which makes the inevitability and the surprise both greater. “Drugím,” coming last, rhyming quietly and expectedly with “tomím” but also happening to echo the “lyubímoy” it is linked so closely to in sense, sets off the whole poem’s explosive emotional charge in its final word, without resorting to anything conventionally “poetic.” As Alexander Zholkovsky notes, moreover, a Russian might well expect a short poem beginning “Ya vas lyubíl” and leading
up to a rhyme with “tomím” to end with the word “lyubím,” “(be)loved”; instead it ends with “drugím,” “by another,” as if to compress the difference between the “ya,” the “I” who used to love you in the poem’s first word and this “drugím,” this “other” in the poem’s last word, who perhaps will love you so well.15

  Nabokov first tried to translate this poem, uncharacteristically, in 1929, when he was developing as a Russian writer and almost always translating into rather than from Russian. (The occasion was the centenary of the poem’s composition, and since Nabokov was born a hundred years after Pushkin, he was translating it at the age at which Pushkin wrote it.) The translation opens with the eyebrow-raising “I worshipped you.” Although not strictly equivalent to Pushkin, this phrase reflects the sense that the speaker has indeed worshipped the beloved “wordlessly, hopelessly,” passively, and distantly rather than actively and intimately, and its stress provides a reasonably close match for the metrical force of Pushkin’s opening “Ya vas lyubíl.” But “I worshipped you” becomes increasingly a liability as the poem progresses and it has to be repeated each time “loved” or “love” would normally return. In general, the translation sacrifices too much sense to keep Pushkin’s stresses and his alternating feminine/masculine rhymes. Nabokov chooses the same “ember”/”remember” rhyme that Duffy independently arrives at, but maintains the rhyme where Duffy abandons the effort halfway through. But his rhymes are trite (fashion-passion, true-you) and the whole poem too compliantly follows tired English verse conventions.

  By the 1940s, Nabokov’s verse translations into English were far more assured and often superb. By the 1950s he had committed himself to literalism, but sometimes with uneasy compromises, if not for the sake of rhyme then for the sake of rhythm. In the case of “Ya vas lyubíl,” his “lexical” translation often seems closer than the literal translation not only to Pushkin’s words but to his power. The line “now by shyness, now by jealousy oppressed,” which I have gladly drawn on, captures the order, the sense, and, except for the tight sound patterns, the impact of Pushkin’s “To róbost’yu, to révnost’yu tomím.” For some reason Nabokov “improved” this into a literal version, “either by shyness irked or jealousy,” supposedly better English and no less accurate, yet in fact both less accurate and more awkward. The last line of the literal version does improve the last line (“as give you God to be loved by another”) of the lexical, but only into “as by another loved God grant you be,” which has the sense but neither the clarity nor the éclat of Pushkin’s line.

  Nabokov writes that he regularly felt the urge to tinker with his translations, and he may well have continued to do so here had he prepared his own Verses and Versions. But the difficulties he had translating his favorite Russian poet—difficulties he expresses eloquently and ironically in his own voice—are as interesting as, and deliberately more challenging than, his successes. Nabokov uncompromisingly translates the second line of “Ya vas lyubíl” as “not quite extinguished in my soul.” I rendered it as “in my heart has not quite gone out.” In Russian, “dushá,” “soul,” is far more common than its English equivalent and covers much of the territory of the heart as the conventional seat of the emotions. Nabokov, in refusing to compromise on “soul,” points to a difference between Russian and English that lies at the core of the difference between an English speaker’s and a Russian’s sense of self and other and of life and death.

  Pushkin famously compared translators to horses changed at the post houses of civilization. In his earlier and more accessible translations, Nabokov makes us feel the post-horses have arrived, that we are meeting Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, or Hodasevich almost face to face. In his later work, translation is not the illusion of arrival but the start of a journey—glimpses of the destination but also of the bracing rigors of the intervening terrain. Through the contrasting strategies within Verses and Versions, as through the special methods of Eugene Onegin, Nabokov continues to prod English-speaking readers into persisting on our journey toward the peaks of Russian poetry.

  17. Tolstoy and Nabokov

  I adore Tolstoy, but as a member of an English rather than a Slavic department did not teach him until I launched a graduate course in narrative in 1993, which included both Anna Karenina and Ada—whose first sentence Nabokov lifts from the first sentence of Anna Karenina.

  In the Laurence and Suzanne Weiss Lecture at Amherst College in 1992, I compared Tolstoy and Nabokov. To offer examples that presupposed no other knowledge of the works, I opted for the opening of Anna Karenina and the start not of Ada but the better known and less complex Lolita. I wanted to show how great writers say things so differently, even as they learn from their predecessors, because they see so differently.

  Nabokov once recalled the novelist and Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin telling him about visiting Tolstoy for the first time and being almost shocked “to see suddenly emerge from a small door a little old man instead of the giant he had involuntarily imagined.” Nabokov added in his own voice: “And I have also seen that little old man. I was a child and I faintly remember my father shaking hands with someone at a street corner, then telling me as I continued our walk, ‘That was Tolstoy.’ ”1 The only other overlaps I have found between these two lives was that both were photographed in the same year by the great Petersburg photographer Karl Bulla, Tolstoy in his seventies or eighties, Nabokov at seven or eight, each with his own trademark, a peasant costume or a butterfly book, and that both lived at Gaspra, the estate of Countess Sophia Panin, Tolstoy during a spell of ill health in 1902, Nabokov when his family was fleeing the revolution in Petrograd in 1918.

  So much for biography. I wish it was always so easy to dispose of.

  I’d like to compare Tolstoy and Nabokov by looking at the openings of Anna Karenina and Lolita. When I contrast the two novels, it will be to highlight the individuality of the two novelists, not to set an example of “classical realism” against an example of “postmodernism.” Tolstoy’s realism is very much his own, as Gary Morson argues so persuasively in his superb book on War and Peace.2 And Nabokov’s manner, whether you want to call it realistic or not, is his own: he is not a modernist (despite affinities with aspects of Joyce and Proust), nor a postmodernist (despite the influence he has had on some writers so labeled, he has never shared the common epistemological presuppositions, whatever they are, that are supposedly possible in “this era,” whatever that means). And although he does share some traits with the symbolists, he is mostly just himself.

  As a young man, Nabokov thought Madame Bovary “2000 metres higher than Anna Karenina.”3 By the end of the 1940s he had reversed the rankings and had come to think Anna Karenina the greatest of all novels (Meras interview). He taught it and agreed to annotate it and to retranslate it, and although that project remained incomplete because of the pressure of other work, he went on to pay tribute to the novel in his own fiction.

  In line with his general reestimation of Anna Karenina, Nabokov’s response to its first two paragraphs changed revealingly over twenty years. In late 1939 or early 1940, before arriving in the United States, he began to prepare lectures on Russian literature in the hope he would find a university literature post much sooner than he did. He jotted down: “Anna Karenin: Grand looseness of style: The word ‘house’ is repeated 8 times in the course of the first paragraph—17 lines.”4 But in the annotations he began for the Modern Library Anna Karenina fifteen years later, we find this: “the word dom (house, household, home) is repeated eight times in the course of six sentences. This ponderous and solemn repetition, dom, dom, dom, tolling as it does for doomed family life (one of the main themes of the book), is a deliberate device on Tolstoy’s part” (LRL 210). From grand looseness to deliberate design.

  But I’m not sure that this is entirely correct. I’ve translated the start of the novel myself in order to highlight the startling, dogged insistence of Tolstoy’s verbal repetitions that surely can’t all be explained as sounding on
e’s theme in the first few bars.

  “All happy families are like one another, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”: all right, repetition, but only for the sake of pointing a contrast.

  Then:

  All [remember what we were told at school: don’t start consecutive sentences and especially consecutive paragraphs with the same word] was confusion in the Oblonsky household. [I have used “house” here as a kind of chemical marker for the Russian syllable “dom”] The wife had found out that the husband was linked [I picked this word because Tolstoy recycles the same word two sentences later: normally we would translate “was having an affair”] with the former French governess in their house, and told her husband that she couldn’t live in the same house as him. This situation had been going on for three days now and was felt painfully by the couple themselves and all the members of their family and the household staff. All the members of the family and the household staff [a very characteristic repetition: Nabokov himself defines it, in an unpublished note in quite a different context: “the phantom of Tolstoy’s style: the bringing over of the last definition of one phrase into the beginning of the next one, as solid supports for the development of a logical sequence”5] felt [and that was the last verb used in the previous sentence] that there was no sense in their cohabitation and that people who had accidentally converged at any wayside inn were more linked [there’s that repetition] to one another than they [and here it comes again], the members of the Oblonsky family and household. The wife did not come out of her rooms, the husband had not been in the house for three days now. The children ran all over the house; the English governess had argued with the [housekeeper]6 and had written a note to a friend asking her to find her a new place; the cook had gone out yesterday right at dinner time; the under-cook and the coachman had given notice.

  What we have here is not so much the sounding of a theme as Tolstoy’s relentlessly analytical mind in action, his ruthless, uncompromising desire to define. He likes to turn something over patiently, facet by facet, and refuses to stop where ordinary decorum expects. Here it leads, I think we have to admit, to some awkwardness, but this awkwardness is intricately allied to his own special greatness, his readiness to take things apart, his ignoring received explanations, his rejecting ordinary limits.