Strong opinions

by Vladimir Nabokov

  In the present case, I greatly regret that Mr. Wilson did not consult me about his perplexities, as he used to in the past. Here are some of the ghastly blunders that might have been so easily avoided.

  «Why», asks Mr. Wilson, «should Nabokov call the word netu an old-fashioned and dialect form of net. It is in constant colloquial use and what I find one usually gets for an answer when one asks for some book in the Soviet bookstore in New York». Mr. Wilson has mistaken the common colloquial netu which means «there is not», «we do not have it», etc., for the obsolete netu which he has never heard and which as I explain in my note to Three: hi: 12, is a form of net in the sense of «not so» (the opposite of «yes»).

  «The character called yo», Mr. Wilson continues, «is pronounced . . . more like 'yaw' than like the 'yo' in 'yonder.'« Mr. Wilson should not try to teach me how to pronounce this, or any other, Russian vowel. My «yo» is the standard rendering of the sound. The «yaw» sound he suggests is grotesque and quite wrong. I can hear Mr. Wilson — whose accent in Russian I know so well — asking that bookseller of his for «Miertvye Dushi» («Dead Souls»). No wonder he did not get it.

  «Vse», according to Mr. Wilson (explaining two varieties of the Russian for «all»), «is applied to people, and vsyo to things». This is a meaningless pronouncement. Vse is merely the plural of ves' (masculine), vsya (feminine), and vsyo (neuter).

  Mr. Wilson is puzzled by my assertion that the adjective zloy is the only one-syllable adjective in Russian. «How about the one-syllable predicative adjectives?» he asks. The answer is simple: I am not talking of predicative adjectives. Why drag them in? Such forms as mudr («is wise»), glup («is stupid»), ploh («is very sick indeed») are not adjectives at all, but adverbish mongrels which may differ in sense from the related adjectives.

  In discussing the word pochuya Mr. Wilson confuses it with chuya («sensing») (see my letter about this word in the New Statesman, April 23, 1965) and says that had Pushkin used pochuyav, only then should I have been entitled to put «having sensed». «Where», queries Mr. Wilson, «is our scrupulous literalness?» Right here. My friend is unaware that despite the different endings, pochuyav and pochuya happen to be interchangeable, both being «past gerunds», and both meaning exactly the same thing.

  All this is rather extraordinary. Every time Mr. Wilson starts examining a Russian phrase he makes some ludicrous slip. His didactic purpose is defeated by such errors, as it is also by the strange tone of his article. Its mixture of pompous aplomb and peevish ignorance is hardly conducive to a sensible discussion of Pushkin's language and mine — or indeed any language, for, as we shall presently see, Mr. Wilson's use of English is also singularly imprecise and misleading.

  First of all it is simply not true to say, as he does, that in my review of Professor Arndt's translation (The New York Review of Books, August 30, 1964) «Nabokov dwelt especially on what he regarded as Professor Arndt's Germanisms and other infelicities of phrasing, without apparently being aware of how vulnerable he himself was». I dwelled especially on Arndt's mistranslations. What Mr. Wilson regards as my infelicities may be more repellent to him for psychological reasons than «anything in Arndt», but they belong to another class of error than Arndt's or any other paraphrases casual blunders, and what is more Mr. Wilson knows it. I dare him to deny that he deliberately confuses the issue by applying the term «niggling attack» to an indignant examination of the insults dealt out to Pushkin's masterpiece in yet another arty translation. Mr. Wilson affirms that «the only characteristic Nabokov trait» in my translation (aside from an innate «sadomasochistic» urge «to torture both the reader and himself», as Mr. Wilson puts it in a clumsy attempt to stick a particularly thick and rusty pin into my effigy) is my «addiction to rare and unfamiliar words». It does not occur to him that I may have rare and unfamiliar things to convey; that is his loss. He goes on, however, to say that in view of my declared intention to provide students with a trot such words are «entirely inappropriate» here, since it would be more to the point for the student to look up the Russian word than the English one. I shall stop only one moment to consider Mr. Wilson's pathetic assumption that a student can read Pushkin, or any other kussian poet, by «looking up» every word (atter all, the result of this simple method is far too apparent in Mr. Wilson's own mistranslations and misconceptions), or that a reliable and complete Russko-angliyskiy slovar'not only exists (it does not) but is more easily available to the student than, say, the second unabridged edition (1960) of Webster's, which I really must urge Mr. Wilson to acquire. Even if that miraculous slovar' did exist, there would still be the difficulty of choosing, without my help, the right shade between two near synonyms and avoiding, without my guidance, the trapfalls of idiomatic phrases no longer in use.

  Edmund Wilson sees himself (not quite candidly, 1 am afraid, and certainly quite erroneously) as a common sensical, artless, average reader with a natural vocabulary of, say, six hundred basic words. No doubt such an imaginary reader may be sometimes puzzled and upset by the tricky terms 1 find it necessary to use here and there — very much here and there. But how many such innocents will tackle KO anyway? And what does Mr. Wilson mean by implying I should not use words that in the process of lexicographic evolution begin to occur only at the level of a «fairly comprehensive dictionary»? When does a dictionary cease being an abridged one and start growing «fairly» and then «extremely» comprehensive? Is the sequence: vest-pocket, coat-pocket, great-coat-pocket, my three book shelves, Mr. Wilson's rich library? And should the translator simply omit any reference to an idea or an object if the only right word — a word he happens to know as a teacher or a naturalist, or an inventor of words — is discoverable in the revised edition of a standard dictionary but not m its earlier edition or vice versa? Disturbing possibilities! Nightmarish doubts! And how does the harassed translator know that somewhere on the library ladder he has just stopped short of Wilson's Fairly Comprehensive and may safely use «polyhedral» but not «lingonberry»? (Incidentally, the percentage ot what Mr. Wilson calls «dictionary words» in my translation is really so absurdly small that I have difficulty in finding examples.)

  Mr. Wilson can hardly be unaware that once a writer chooses to youthen or resurrect a word, it lives again, sobs again, stumbles all over the cemetery in doublet and trunk hose, and will keep annoying stodgy gravediggers as long as that writer's book endures. In several instances, English archaisms have been used in my EO not merely to match Russian antiquated words but to revive a nuance of meaning present in the ordinary Russian term but lost in the English one. Such terms are not meant to be idiomatic. The phrases 1 decide upon aspire towards literality, not readability. They are steps in the ice, pitons in the sheer rock of fidelity. Some are mere signal words whose only purpose is to suggest or indicate that a certain pet term of Pushkin's has recurred at that point. Others have been chosen for their Gallic touch implicit in this or that Russian attempt to imitate a French turn of phrase. All have pedigrees of agony and rejection and reinstatement, and should be treated as convalescents and ancient orphans, and not hooted at as impostors by a critic who says he admires some of my books. I do not care if a word is «archaic» or «dialect» or «slang»; I am an eclectic democrat in this matter, and whatever suits me, goes. My method may be wrong but it is a method, and a genuine critic's job should have been to examine the method itself instead of crossly fishing out of my pond some of the oddities with which I had deliberately stocked it.

  Let me now turn to what Mr. Wilson calls my «infelicities» and «aberrations» and explain to him why I use the words he does not like or does not know.

  In referring to Onegin's not being attracted by the picture of family life, Pushkin in Four: xm: 5 uses the phrase semeystvennoy kartinoy. The modern term is semeynoy kartinoy and had Pushkin chosen it, I might have put «family picture». But I had to indicate the presence of Pushkin's rarer word and used therefore the rarer «familistic» as a signal word.

  In order to indicate t
he archaic note in vospomnya (used by Pushkin in One: xlvii: 67 instead of vspomnya, or vspomniv, or vspominaya), as well as to suggest the deep sonorous diction of both lines (vospomnya prezhnih let romany; vospomnya, etc.), I had to find something more reverberating and evocative than «recalling intrigues of past years», etc., and whether Mr. Wilson (or Mr. N. for that matter) likes it or not, nothing more suitable than «rememorating» for vospomnya can be turned up.*

  * For reasons having nothing to do with the subject of this essay I subsequently changed the translation, exact in tone but not in syntax, of those two lines (see the epigraph to my Mary, McGrawHill, New York, 1970).

  Mr. Wilson also dislikes «curvate», a perfectly plain and technically appropriate word which I have used to render kriyye hecause I felt that «curved» or «crooked» did not quite do justice to Onegin's regularly bent manicure scissors.

  Similarly, not a passing whim but the considerations of prolonged thought led me to render hour: ix: 5, prtvychkoy zhizni izbalovan, as «spoiled by a habitude of life». I needed the Gallic touch and found it preferable in allusive indefinitude — Pushkin's line is elegantly ambiguous — to «habit of life» or «life's habit». «Habitude» is the right and good word here. It is not labeled «dialect» or «obsolete» in Webster's great dictionary.

  Another perfectly acceptable word is «rummer», which I befriended because of its kinship with ryumka, and because I wished to find for the ryumki of Five: xxix: 4 a more generalized wineglass than the champagne flutes of xxxii: 89, which are also ryumki. If Mr. Wilson consults my notes, he will see that on second thought I demoted the nonobsolete but rather oversized cups of xxix to jiggers of vodka tossed down before the first course.

  I cannot understand why Mr. Wilson is puzzled by «dit» (Five: vm: 13) which I chose instead of «ditty» to parallel «kit» instead of «kitty» in the next line, and which will now,

  I hope, enter or reenter the language. Possibly, the masculine rhyme I needed here may have led me a little astray from the servile path of literalism (Pushkin has simply pesnya — «song»). But it is not incomprehensible; after all, anybody who knows what, say, «titty» means («in nailmaking the part that ejects the half-finished nail») can readily understand what «tit» means («the part that ejects the finished nail»).

  Next on Mr. Wilson's list of inappropriate words is «gloam». It is a poetic word, and Keats has used it. It renders perfectly the mgla of the gathering evening shadows in Four: xlvii: 8, as well as the soft darkness of trees in Three: xvi: 11. It is better than «murk», a dialect word that Mr. Wilson uses for mgla, with my sanction, in another passage — the description of a wintry dawn.

  In the same passage which both I and Mr. Wilson have translated, my «shippon» is as familiar to anyone who knows the English countryside as Mr. Wilson's «byre» should be to a New England farmer. Both «shippon» and «byre» are unknown to pocketdictionary readers; both are listed in the threecentimeterthick Penguin (1965). But I prefer «shippon» for hlev because I see its shape as clearly as that of the Russian cowhouse it resembles, but see only a Vermont barn when I try to visualize «byre».

  Then there is «scrab»: «he scrabs the poor thing up», bednyazhku tsaptsarap (One: xiv: 8). This tsap-tsarap — a «verbal interjection» presupposing (as Pushkin notes when employing it in another poem) the existence of the artificial verb tsaptsarapat', jocular and onomatopoeic — combines tsapat' («to snatch») with tsarapat («to scratch»). I rendered Pushkin's uncommon word by the uncommon «scrab up», which combines «grab» and «scratch», and am proud of it. It is in fact a wonderful find.

  I shall not analyze the phrase «in his lunes» that Mr. Wilson for good measure has included among my «aberrations». It occurs not in my translation, which he is discussing, but in the flow of my ordinary comfortable descriptive prose which we can discuss another time.

  We now come to one of the chief offenders: «mollitude». For Pushkin's Gallic nega I needed an English counterpart of mollesse as commonly used in such phrases as il perdit ses jeunes anntes dans la mollesse et la volupte or son coeur nage dans la mollesse. It is incorrect to say, as Mr. Wilson does, that readers can never have encountered «mollitude». Readers of Browning have. In this connection Mr. Wilson wonders how I would have translated chistyh neg in one of Pushkin's last elegies — would I have said «pure mollitudes»? It so happens that I translated that little poem thirty years ago, and when Mr. Wilson locates my version (in the Introduction to one of my novels*) he will note that the genitive plural of nega is a jot different in sense from the singular.

  [* Despair. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 302303, 1966]

  In Mr. Wilson's collection of betes noires my favorite is «sapajou». He wonders why I render dostoyno staryh obez'yan as «worthy of old sapajous» and not as «worthy of old monkeys». True, obez'yana means any kind of monkey but it so happens that neither «monkey» nor «ape» is good enough in the context.

  «Sapajou» (which technically is applied to two genera of neotropical monkeys) has in French a colloquial sense of «ruffian», «lecher», «ridiculous chap». Now, in lines 12 and 911 of Four: vii («the less we love a woman, the easier 'tis to be liked by her . . . but that grand game is worthy of old sapajous of our forefathers' vaunted times») Pushkin echoes a moralistic passage in his own letter written in French from Kishinev to his young brother in Moscow in the autumn of 1822, that is seven months before beginning Eugene Onegin and two years before reaching Canto Four. The passage, well known to readers of Pushkin, goes: «Moins on aime une femme et plus on est sur de I'avoir . . . mats cettepuissance est digne d'un vieux sapajou du dixhuittemesiicle».

  Not only could I not resist the temptation of retranslating the obez'yan of the canto into the AngloFrench «sapajous» of the letter, but I was also looking forward to somebody's pouncing on that word and allowing me to retaliate with that wonderfully satisfying reference. Mr. Wilson obliged — and here it is.

  «There are also actual errors of English», continued Mr. Wilson, and gives three examples: «dwelled» which I prefer to «dwelt»; «about me», which in Two: xxxix: 14 is used to render obo mne instead of the better «of me»; and the word «loaden», which Mr. Wilson «had never heard before». But «dwelled» is marked in my dictionary only «less usual» — not «incorrect»; «remind about» is not quite impossible (e.g., «remind me about it tomorrow»); as to «loaden», which Mr. Wilson suggests replacing by «loadened», his English wobbles, not mine, since «loaden» is the correct past participle and participial adjective of «load».

  In the course of his strange defense of Arndt's version — in which, according to Mr. Wilson, I had been assiduously tracking down Germanisms — he asserts that «it is not difficult to find Russianisms in Nabokov» and turns up one, or the shadow of one («left us» should be «has left us» in a passage that I cannot trace). Surely there must be more than one such slip in a work fifteen hundred pages long devoted by a Russian to a Russian poem; however, the two other Russianisms Mr. Wilson lists are the figments of his own ignorance:

  In translating slushat' shum morskoy (Eight: iv: 11) I chose the archaic and poetic transitive turn «to listen the sound of the sea» because the relevant passage has in Pushkin a stylized archaic tone. Mr. Wilson may not care for this turn — I do not much care for it either — but it is silly of him to assume that I lapsed into a naive Russianism not being really aware that, as he tells me, «in English you have to listen to something». First, it is Mr. Wilson who is not aware of the fact that there exists an analogous construction in Russian prislushivat'sya k zvuku, «to listen closely to the sound» — which, of course, makes nonsense of the exclusive Russianism imagined by him, and secondly, had he happcned to leaf through a certain canto of Don Juan, written in the year Pushkin was beginning his poem, or a certain Ode to Memory, written when Pushkin's poem was being finished, my learned friend would have concluded that Byron («Listening debates not very wise or witty») and Tennyson («Listening rhe lordly music») must have had quite as much Rus
sian blood as Pushkin and I.

  In the mazurka of Canto Five one of the dancers «leads Tatiana with Olga» (podvyol Tat'yanu s Ol'goy) towards Onegin. This has little to do with the idiomatic my s ney (which is lexically «we with her», but may mean «she and I») that Mr. Wilson mentions. Actually, in order to cram both girls into the first three feet of Five: xiiv: 3, Pushkin allowed himself a minor solecism. The construction

  Tat'yanu i Ol'gu would have been better Russian (just as «Tatiana and Olga» would have been better English), but it would not have scanned. Now Mr. Wilson should note carefully that this unfortunate Tat'yanu s Ol'goy has an additional repercussion: it clashes unpleasantly with the next line where the associative form is compulsory: Onegin s Ol'goyu poshyol, «Onegin goes with Olga». Throughout my translation I have remained a thousand times more faithful to Pushkin's Russian than to Wilson's English and therefore in these passages I did not hesitate to reproduce both the solecism and the ensuing clash.