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.
3 comments:
I also enjoy footnotes and digressions, etc., which reminds me that the late Terry Teachout would tuck "extra" facts into the footnotes of his books as a way of rewarding those readers who take the trouble (which I always do) to peruse the footnotes or endnotes (sigh) of books. He appreciated the thorough reader.
The late Joseph Frank's five-volume literary biography of Dostoevsky, published by the Princeton University Press, has given me a deep appreciation for the Russian novelist.
I started to read Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin for the footnotes, but never finished. Nabokov himself said, possibly half seriously, that his version was something of a "crib", or flatfooted word-for-word translation, possibly of value to students. In any case, it's a highly eccentric project from the brilliantly eccentric author of Ada.
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