'Current, and Probably Ephemeral, Orthodoxy'

Robert Conquest in 1965 reviewed for Poetry Vladimir Nabokov’s four-volume translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse. It’s largely a negative review, with Conquest noting that Nabokov’s over-reliance on inversion results in “awkwardness and insipidity.” He goes on to dismiss the translator’s “unsuitable vocabulary.” This was a spat fought most famously by Nabokov and his soon-to-be-former friend Edmund Wilson -- now a rather embarrassing literary spectacle. 

I own the Bollingen boxed set of Pushkin and have read it, but have no Russian and can’t offer a worthwhile judgment of the translation’s worth. I remember being highly entertained by Nabokov’s notes and commentary more than the poem itself. I enjoy footnotes, annotations and good digressions, and Nabokov is a master of them all. I finished Eugene Onegin (which I bought and read as a Nabokov completist, not for Pushkin) with the suspicion that Pushkin is one of those poets who cannot be successfully translated. What interests me more about Conquest’s review is a digression of his own. He writes of Nabokov’s scholarly work:

 

“It is also a regular rodeo of hobbyhorses. Nabokov scoffs at Virgil, Hudibras, Swift, Shchedrin, Béranger. He thinks Coleridge’s The Pains of Sleep a great poem. He urges the abolition of the Cyrillic alphabet. He sneers at other translations. Odd stuff, but at least individual. As with Yvor Winters preferring Bridges to Hopkins, agreeing or not we must respect this more than a thousand acceptances by rote of current, and probably ephemeral, orthodoxy.”

 

So many literary tastes and putative critical stances are formed in conformity with current fashion. I’m convinced of this because that’s often how I thought as a young reader. I genuinely believed that critics and teachers knew what they were talking about. It took me years to become confident enough to examine my conclusions about books, culling some, embracing others. It takes a dollop of chutzpah, especially for young people, to hold an opinion that dissents from the popular drift. I didn’t have it at seventeen. Conquest reminds me of Orwell’s famous indictment of “the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.”

 

Of course, one shouldn’t unquestionably accept Nabokov’s harsh and often unorthodox judgments. I can accept his conclusion that Dostoevsky is “a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar,” but not that Conrad had an “intolerable souvenir-shop style, romanticist clichés.” But he loved Tristram Shandy, and that redeems everything.