Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Attempts to render a poem in another language fall into three categories. (1) Paraphrastic: offering a free version of the original, with omissions and additions prompted by the exigencies of form, the conventions attributed to the consumer and the translator’s ignorance. (2) Lexical (or constructional): rendering the basic meaning of words (and their order). This a machine can do under the direction of an intelligent bilinguist. (3) Literal: rendering, as closely as the associative and syntactical capacities of another language allow, the exact contextual meaning of the original. Only this is a true translation … Can a rhymed poem like Eugene Onegin be truly translated with a retention of its rhymes? The answer is, of course, no. To reproduce the rhymes and yet translate the entire poem literally is mathematically impossible.[81]

This statement (mimicking and also reversing John Dryden’s much earlier distinction of imitation, paraphrase, and meta-phrase) introduces Nabokov’s own nonrhyming translation of Pushkin’s novel, accompanied by an immensely long and learned, line-by-line commentary on the meanings of Pushkin’s verses. The main work is not the translation at all but Nabokov’s appropriation of it through his inflated peritext. Master of style in two languages and a uniquely skillful crafter of translingual puns, Nabokov laid down his writer’s mantle on the altar of Pushkin and adopted what he called “the servile path.”[82] There’s a profound reason for his frankly uncharacteristic modesty in this case. Who can rival Pushkin? No Russian can dream of doing such a thing—yet every Russian writer also dreams of unseating Pushkin from his throne. For the Russian writer that Nabokov still was twenty years after the adoption of English as his literary tongue, translating Pushkin was not a straightforward translation task.

Let’s consider what the stakes were for Nabokov (but for no one else) in recasting Pushkin in English verse. It’s safe to assume that Nabokov could have done so like no other had he let himself dare. He would have set himself up as Pushkin’s rival. More than that: he would have written Eugene Onegin himself.

At much the same time as Nabokov started his plain prose version of Pushkin, Georges Perec read Herman Melville’s story of a New York clerk, “Bartleby the Scrivener.” It seemed to him quite perfect, and he wished he had written it himself. But I can’t do that! he wailed in a letter to a friend, because Melville wrote it first.[83] The same sense of having been already outwritten—of having been robbed in advance of a glory that could perhaps have been his—lies at the root of Nabokov’s strange operation with Pushkin’s sublime verse.

In fact, Nabokov had done some stanzas of Onegin into English verse in the 1950s already—but then turned around in fright. He could see he was not Pushkin. Later on, he adopted his servile path of pseudo-literal translation not because it was relevant to the study or practice of literary translation but because it helped hide that embarrassing fact.

Nabokov’s public lesson in poetry translation quoted above is threadbare and misleading. There are far more ways than three of translating fixed form. A “paraphrase” is not the only alternative to a “lexical” translation, and the latter can in no way even now be done directly by a machine. The “literal” style Nabokov proposes and claims to use is just what anyone else would call plain prose. Nabokov’s introduction to his exhaustive exploration of all the allusions and referential meanings of the words of Pushkin’s novel tells us many interesting things (about Nabokov, about Russia, about language and style) but nothing about the translation of form.