Books: Great Performance

(2 of 3)

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.

Actually, it is something between prose and poetry that Nabokov has used—he has retained Pushkin's iambic tetrameter—and the result is a recognizable and respectable cousinship. To a Russian raised on the original poem, Nabokov's version naturally lacks the music, but retains much of the rhythm, and at least does not (as do the often jingly previous translations) mock Pushkin's music by the clumsiness of its imitation. The sense is as nearly exact as translation permits.

Horned or Cornute. Nabokov's own enormous word skill gives the translation felicity. But his very range of language allows him to choose words which, although exact in meaning, do not give the flavor of the original, generally because they are too highflown or arcane. The simple Russian word for "horned" (Ch. 6, XXXIX) becomes "cornute," which means horned but is not a simple English word. Simple words for "sweetness" and "youth" become "dulcitude" and "juventude" in English (Nabokov excuses himself somewhat abashedly by pointing out that the sense of the couplet—a sneer at moon-June versifying—requires that in this case the words rhyme).

But a reviewer must look hard for lapses. Notably, there is happily no feeling that the translator, who may be the greatest living performer—not necessarily writer—in English, is giving a performance.

It must be said that this rare suppression of the Nabokov literary personality is limited to the translation itself, and that the translation occupies only part of one volume of a four-volume work. Most of the remainder is a vast, outrageous, scholarly, funny, instructive and wholly characteristic mass of notes, offering 1) an exhaustive, line-by-line commentary on the text, variants of the text, and the difficulties of translation; 2) an exhaustive, line-by-line digression from this commentary, of which an elegant three-page defense of pedantry is typical; 3) a complete course in Russian and English prosody; 4) a learned if somewhat irritable gloss on 19th century literature; 5) a great deal of biographical information about Pushkin, which would be more helpful if it were collected in one chunk, not squirreled about the entire work; and 6) repeated masterly demonstrations of the art of literary insult. Dostoevsky, for instance, is described as "a much overrated, sentimental, and Gothic novelist of the time."

Occasionally (as when Nabokov solemnly offers as a talisman the lines that happen to fall at the exact center of the work), the notes are extreme enough to be worthy of Professor Kinbote, the demented footnoter of Nabokov's own Pale Fire.