Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940-1977

by Vladimir Nabokov

  p.23 tender pale areolas are rendered as "sidenglansande om-givingen". What terrible nonsense! Areolas means here the colored area around the nipples.

  p.24. The "Kingdom by the Sea" is an allusion to Edgar Poe's "Annabel Lee". Your translator omits the Kingdom by the Sea thus depriving the "angels" in the next sentence and "Dolores Lee" at the end of the paragraph of any sense whatsoever.

  p.3. "Miranda", omitted on p.3, comes from Hilaire Belloc's poem ("Do you remember an inn, Miranda" etc.), while "Mirana" on page 12 is the name of the Riviera Hotel which had belonged to Humbert's father and is described in the beginning of Part I. Your translator after omitting "Miranda", turns "Mirana" into "Miranda".

  p.82 A football cheerleader, in this case of course a female one, to which Lolita is compared, has become "a football-playing boy"—not only a meaningless, but also an idiotic comparison.

  Sampling the translation here and there (and finding it hopeless everywhere) I have discovered a considerable number of omissions, ranging from one-word pictures (as, for instance, "non-Laodicean" quality of the water, meaning that it was not lukewarm and referring to the famous passage in the Gospels (Rev. Ill, 14–16), on p.2, to whole passages of which I have marked only a few—pp. 3 and 6, for instance).

  Page 6 also has a perfectly unwarranted, and rather nasty, insertion or transposition by the translator, which I have marked in the typescript.

  I mention only in passing the swarm of errors or misprints in the English text of my poem on pp. 106-107 of the typescript, a poem which was merely transcribed from my book.

  All in all, you certainly could not call this "an authorized" translation, or even a "translation approved by the author". I emphatically disapprove of it. I probably cannot prevent you from publishing it—under the express condition that all the omissions are reinstated, in this second volume as well as in the first volume, where a whole chapter is missing* and innumerable passages and paragraphs are omitted; e.g., the opening paragraph of my Chapter 31 (your Chapter 30). Fortunately I do have the right to insist on the complete reinstatement of the entire English text.

  Frankly, I fail to understand why a first-rate publishing house, after acquiring a work they obviously consider worth translating and publishing, would want to bring out a mutilated and worthless version of it. If I were in your place I certainly would not settle for the abominable version your translator has prepared for you. In any case I must insist that PNIN's translation into Swedish be made by another translator, someone who knows English and can be trusted to respect the text of the original. I was sorry to hear of Mme Rydelius' death. There is another lady who is supposed to be an honest translator, Mme Karin de Laval. I am not familiar with her work but you might want to ask her to make a sample translation of one chapter or less.

  I had better finish this letter now. The perusal of Mr. Kjellstrom's mistranslation of my poor book has plunged me in despair.

  Yours truly,

  Vladimir Nabokov

  PS. I am convinced that Mr. Kjellstrom cannot be trusted to reinstate all his omissions since in many cases he appears incapable of understanding the text. Your best chance of improving your version would be to have an American Swede or a Swedish American go carefully over the whole book.

  TO: IVAN OBOLENSKY

  CC, 1 p.

  Goldwin Smith Hall

  Cornell University

  Ithaca, N.Y.

  November 20, 1957

  Dear Obolensky,

  I have just received a registered letter from Girodias in which he says: "I inform you that we are proceeding with the printing of a special edition of 'Lolita' for sale in the United States since it seems improbable that we will arrive at an agreement for a reprint by another publisher."

  I know, however, from my agent that he has received an offer from yet another American publisher so that I am inclined to deem his letter a mere threat. Nevertheless all this worries me extremely. I am no businessman.

  I thank you for your letter of November 13. May I assume that the papers have already gone to Paris? Could you speed up the proceedings so as to obtain a clear answer from your Paris lawyer within a week? I am afraid that unless I can write Girodias a determined and final letter soon, he may take the initiative and involve me into difficulties. I wish to avoid a legal fight at all cost.

  With the greatest pleasure I have read "A Death in the Family".1 It is full of delightful images. I am now beginning the splendid-looking "Andersonville".2

  My best regards to Mr. McDowell. Do write me very soon.

  Sincerely,

  Vladimir Nabokov

  TO: IVAN OBOLENSKY

  CC, 1 p.

  Goldwin Smith Hall

  Cornell University

  Ithaca, NY.

  November 29, 1957

  Dear Prince Obolensky,

  I hear from Mr. Minton of Putnam's that he had a talk about LOLITA either with you or with Mr. McDowell.

  I would like to avoid any kind of misunderstanding, so let me remind you that, as has already been mentioned, I cannot enter into an agreement before a clarification of my relations with OLYMPIA has been achieved. I also mentioned to you that, much as I would desire a break with Mr. Girodias, I would not undertake litigation, since this would involve a loss of time (a most essential consideration) and, probably, considerable expenses.

  It is important for me to establish my legal position with regard to OLYMPIA in the shortest possible time and I would be most interested to know the conclusions to which your legal adviser has arrived. I also expect to receive shortly a legal opinion direct from Paris which it might be interesting to compare to the one you may obtain.

  Sincerely yours,

  Vladimir Nabokov

  TO: WALTER J. MINTON

  CC, 1 p.

  Goldwin Smith Hall

  Cornell University

  Ithaca, N.Y.

  November 29, 1957

  Dear Mr. Minton,

  It was nice of you to telephone. I would like to repeat that, although McDowell, Obolensky did make an offer for LOLITA, no agreement has been signed, nor am I under any definite commitment, either to them or to any other publisher.

  I would welcome a formal offer from you. My wife forgot to mention one important consideration. Can I assume that if you publish LOLITA you would be prepared to defend it in the Courts, going all the way to the Supreme Court, should such a necessity arise; and that this could be made part of the agreement?1

  Sincerely yours,

  Vladimir Nabokov

  TO: WALTER J. MINTON

  CC, 1 p.

  Goldwin Smith Hall

  Ithaca, NY.

  December 23, 1957

  Dear Mr. Minton,

  Please find enclosed a photostat of my agreement with Olympia and copy of some passages from a letter, referring to the question of copyright.

  Incidentally, it might interest you to know that Obolensky had the legal situation analyzed by his lawyers whose opinion was that an arbitration would probably be necessary to make the abrogation of the agreement with Olympia "stick", and that such litigation might or might not be successful. I wish to avoid litigation if at all possible, although I believe my case is actually stronger now than when Obolensky's lawyers looked into it. Mr. Girodias's statement which he has now elaborated by stating that of the copies he allegedly sold between April and June 30, which he puts at 170, only 8 copies were sold in the USA, appears to me as a fraudulent statement.

  Here is a first paragraph from a letter of Dec. 10 that I received from Barney Rosset of Grove Press: "Recently I received a letter from Maurice Girodias asking me if I would be interested in publishing LOLITA in this country. I certainly am interested and wrote back to him to that effect, suggesting that we make an arrangement whereby I would pay you a royalty of 7V2 per cent on the first 10,000 copies and 10 per cent thereafter. A separate royalty of 5 per cent would go to M. Girodias."

  Finally, I wish to thank you for the beautiful bird book. The illustra
tions are splendid, and to-night I am going to plunge into the text.

  Sincerely yours,

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Encl.

  COURSE DESCRIPTION

  1958

  Prof. Vladimir Nabokov, Cornell University

  Lit 312. Course description. (Spring semester). Masters of European

  Fiction. 3 hrs. MoWeFr 12–12.50

  Starting with a comparative study of three fantasies: Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Gogol's The Carrick and Kafka's The Metamorphosis, and going on to a close analysis of three novels: Tolstoy's Anna Karenin, Proust's In Quest of Lost Time (first volume only; in English translation) and Joyce's Ulysses. All these works are studied from the point of view of structure and style with great attention given to technical details and factual, specific features.

  Lit 326. Course description. (Spring semester). Russian literature in Translation. 3 hrs. MoWeFr 11–11.50

  The same approach holds good for this course which covers A Hero of Our Time (Lermontov, in my translation); literal translations of poems by Lermontov, Tyutchev, Nekrasov, Fet and Blok; Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (Guerney's translation); Dostoevski's Memoirs from under the Floor (Guerney's translation); Tolstoy's Anna Karenin (students enrolled in both courses substitute Hadji Murad and Death of Ivan Ilich)- and Chehov's The Ravine and The Lady with the Small Dog.

  TO: RICHARD SCHICKEL1

  CC, 1 p.

  Goldwin Smith Hall

  Ithaca, NY.

  January i, 1958

  Dear Mr. Schickel,

  For many years (1941–1949) I looked after the lepidoptera in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. I have been collecting leps during more than fifty summers in many remote regions. I have worked out several taxonomic problems. I have discovered several new American butterflies, one of which is pleasingly called by lepidopterists "Nabokov's Wood Nymph" (a feral cousin of our common friend). Although I do not teach biology at Cornell, I am in touch with the admirable entomological museum here. Moreover, I discuss in detail beetles and their parasites every year around April, when in my literature course, I get to Kafka's "Metamorphosis", after which, in May, I annually attempt to identify the noctuid moth that circles around a lamp in the brothel scene of Joyce's "Ulysses". And there are three butterflies in "Madame Bovary", black, yellow, and white, respectively. So you see that your making me a professor of biology was not only very much to the point, but warmed a cockle which no success in comparative literature can so exquisitely prick.

  I never write to critics—and therewith have hurt friends and disappointed foes. In the present case, however, I confess to having found it very difficult not to write to you when I read your article in "The Reporter", which was the most intelligent and most artistic appreciation which has appeared so far in regard to my nymphet.2

  I trust LOLITA will be published soon in this country. It has appeared in Danish and Swedish, and is being translated into Italian, German, Dutch and French. I am in the very act of revising the French translation, and have spent several hours trying to explain to the French reader the meaning of "majorette".

  I wish you a very happy New Year.

  Sincerely,

  Vladimir Nabokov

  TO: PROF. MEYER ABRAMS1

  CC, 4 pp.

  Ithaca, N.Y.

  January 6, 1958

  Dear Mike,

  I have greatly enjoyed "A Glossary of Literary Terms".2 It is a neat, clear, precise, and scholarly piece of work. Many thanks for the book and for the nice inscription. The critical remarks I have jotted down are of slight importance in comparison to the worth of your work—but here they are, anyway:

  p. 1 Grishkin is nice....3

  I object to this example for three reasons: a) the student of today is not obliged to recognize a mediocre poem by a minor poet of yesterday; b) there can be nothing "concrete" about a name ("Grishkin") which is either an impossible derivation from "Grisha" (in that case, it should have been "Grishin") or a yiddish comedy name, or simply a vulgar allusion (rather typical of Tom's vulgar mind) to "griskin", which means "pork chop" in Tom's high-tea England; and c) it happens to represent a prosodic variation (inversion of accent or my "tilt", see further) which is not accounted for under "Meter", pp. 50–52.

  p.3 Assonance

  The Kubla Khan example illustrates at best an "eye assonance" since all these "a" (and "u") sounds are pronounced differently. It does not illustrate the "ear assonance" to which the unqualified "assonance" refers. Moreover, one might note that the term "assonance" is also used for a certain type of inexact rhyme and for internal instrumentation, such as

  When vapours to their swimming brains advance

  And double tapers on the table dance

  or

  (Dry den)

  ......and with a store

  Of indistinguishable sympathies

  Mingling most earnest wishes for the day

  (Wordsworth)

  p. 13 Cliché

  Pope's satiric comment which you quote pertains not to Clichés in general but specifically to the Expected Rhyme, a term which should be listed, I think.

  p. 39 The "chanson innocent", by another Grishkin,4 should be, of course, "chanson innocente".

  p.50 "Wrenched accent" has been also applied by prosodists to what I call "tilting" (see further).

  p.51 Spondaic

  No spondaic words can be said to exist in English—unless a very special pause is made between the syllables, or the compound mouthed with a good deal of didactic rumination and slow jaw work. The word "heartbreak" is a trochee at heart. True spondees do not occur in English metrical verse but can be imitated in cadential or pausative verse:

  Gone is Livia, love is gone:

  Strong wing, soft breast, bluish plume;

  In the juniper tree moaning at dawn:

  Doom, doom.

  p.51 Scansion

  I am prejudiced against these little crosses and darts (instead of dimples and dashes) and am handicapped in analyzing this section because of my own work on prosody, unpublished but to appear soon, I hope. If you do not accent "into", it is illogical to accent "-ness". The scansion dart-cross of "full of" is meaningless since it is obviously not a trochee. Let me briefly explain my point of view:

  An ordinary iambic foot (i.e., one not affected by certain contractional and rhymal variations) consists of two semeia, the first semeion being called a depression and the second, an ictus ( or -). Any such foot belongs to one of the following types (where the basic metrical stress is marked thus-, and the variable word accent thus'):

  Regular foot, (Unaccented non-stress followed by accented stress), e.g. "Appease my grief, and deadly pain" (Surrey)

  Scudded foot (or False Pyrrhic), (Unaccented non-stress followed by unaccented stress), e.g. "In expectátion of a guést" (Tennyson) or "In líveliness of pérfect déeds" (id.)

  Tilt (or Inversion), (Accented non-stress followed by unaccented stress), e.g. "Sense of intolerable wrong" (Coleridge), or " Vaster than Empires, and more slow" (Marvell), or "Perfectly pure and good: I fotind" (Browning)

  False Spondee, (Accented non-stress and accented stress), e.g. "Twice hóly wás the Sábbath-béll" (Keats)

  p.6o Proust, Mann, Joyce

  I violently object to Mann's intrusion here. What on earth is this ponderous conventionalist, this tower of triteness, doing between two sacred names? His fame has been puffed up by German professors. Why should we continue to mislead students by teaching them that Mann, Galsworthy, Faulkner, Tagore and Sartre are "great craftsmen"?

  Finally, let me list a few additional terms that readers might like to find explained:

  Anacreontic sonnet

  Aphorism, aphoristic

  Autograph

  Canto

  Code

  Copy, fair

  Digression Draft, rough

  Editio optima, editio princeps

  Elegiac quatrain

  Elision, liaison

  Epigraph


  Flourished

  Gallicism

  Gloss

  Ibid.

  Ictus and depression

  Instrumentation

  Inversion; 1) phrase, 2) accent

  L.c.

  Metaphrase

  Meter: add amphibrachic

  Motto

  Octosyllable

  Parallel passages

  Paraphrase

  Plagiary

  Poetaster (e.g. Mr. Auden)

  Pyrrhic (part of ternary measures, etc.)

  Recension

  Recto, verso

  Reminiscence

  Reported speech

  Scholium,—ia,—iast

  Semeion, semeia

  Sic

  Stave

  Tautology

  Transition, the art of Ultima

  Very cordially yours,

  Vladimir Nabokov5

  TO: WALTER J. MINTON

  CC, 1 p.

  Goldwin Smith Hall

  Ithaca, N.Y.

  January 12, 1958

  Dear Mr. Minton,

  Many thanks for your letter.

  I do not think I would go to court for the sake of the foreign-language rights: they represent a minor matter, not worth the effort or the expense.

  Nor would I under any circumstances go to a French court. I would rather follow a course which might prompt Mr. Girodias to serve action on me, and do it in this country.

  Your offer of the additional royalty for me is a considerable inducement. I still believe that Mr. Girodias should (and will) back down somewhat. I regret very much that you showed him all your cards, and all my cards, when you first approached him. One of these days I am going to write him again and make him a take-it-or-leave-it offer. But I think we should first know the verdict in his court suit. The suit was to be judged on January 7th. The verdict might make a great difference in the entire situation.