Stalking Nabokov (38 page)

And on my bedside table glows

Another man’s departed bride.

And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole

Town with innumerable lights,…

After Botkin arrives as her father’s neighbor in early 1959, Hazel sees in him a kindred spirit, a desperate man on the brink of suicide. Recognizing his troubles, she offers him a consolation in the visions of Zembla that she develops in his mind, a fantasy in which he is a deposed king who escapes from his former castle, carrying with him a tiny volume of
Timon of Athens
, and emerges near the Royal Onhava Theater, then into Timon Alley and Coriolanus Lane, a fantasy, in other words, where Shakespeare pervades, as he does already in New Wye, where a landscaper of genius has planted an avenue of all the trees mentioned by Shakespeare (a wonderful echo, in this context, of the “Pushkin Avenue” in
The Gift
). Hazel devises the Zemblan fantasy to soothe Kinbote’s disturbed mind, to express her own new radiant confidence, and to stimulate her father to write a verse autobiography that will commemorate his lifelong attempt to see past the mirror world of death.

Curiously, even Shade’s dead parents seem to join with his dead daughter in influencing the poet. I do not have room to explain, but part of the evidence is a famous passage in
Hamlet—
one Nabokov translated into Russian—where the Ghost of King Hamlet declares to his son, “The glow-worm shows the matin to be near, And ’gins to pale his ineffectual fire.” Alongside Shade’s dead parents Hazel seems to stand, and alongside her, after
his
death, stands Shade himself, adding his own contributions to Kinbote’s commentary. And behind them seems to stand the Shakespeare who pervades this whole world.

Let me quote from one of my earliers books,
Nabokov’s
Pale Fire:

From start to finish of
Pale Fire
Shakespeare recurs as an image of stupendous fecundity, someone from whom we continually borrow and through whom we can continually pass on our experience of the unending bounty of things, as Shade’s parents and his daughter pass on the
Timon
in the tunnel to Kinbote and then to Shade himself. In this novel of worlds within worlds, this “system of cells interlinked within / Cells interlinked within cells interlinked/Within one stem,” death borrows endlessly from life and life from death, one level of creativity takes from another and endlessly gives. “I’ll example you with thievery,” Timon says,…but Nabokov steals from this speech to express not Timon’s contempt for universal thievery but his own vision of an unfathomable creative generosity behind our origins and ends.

(
NPFMAD
245–46)

In both
The Gift
and
Pale Fire
, Nabokov creates artists who despite their frustrations and losses sense the ultimate bountifulness of things. As readers we are eventually allowed to see, even more clearly than the writers themselves, how they have been influenced by the spirits of their beloved dead, and, beyond them, by the colossal creative energies radiating out from a Pushkin or a Shakespeare, and, beyond them, in a sense, by the Nabokov who creates Fyodor’s and Shade’s worlds—and who suspects the role in his own work and life of his father’s spirit, of forces he can best imagine in terms of the creative radiance of a Pushkin or a Shakespeare, and of still more unfathomable sources of energy and design beyond them in nature, in the design of life itself. Readers who know Nabokov will know that one of his main examples of the playful creative design behind nature is natural mimicry. In the “Second Addendum to ‘The Gift,’ ” Nabokov’s afterthought to the work where he invokes Pushkin with the deepest metaphysical resonance, he refers again to natural mimicry and links it with Shakespeare, when he writes “of the fantastic refinement of ‘protective mimicry,’ which, in a world lacking an appointed observer endowed with artistic sensitivity, imagination, and humor, would simply be useless (
lost upon the world
), like a small volume of Shakespeare lying open in the dust of a boundless desert” (
N’sBs
219).

In an unpublished lecture Nabokov distinguishes the
toska
running through Pushkin’s poetry from Oneginesque
spleen
and defines it as “a feeling of aimless longing permeating one’s whole being,” “an acute dissatisfaction with one’s surroundings”; it “presupposes a high goal, contempt for compromise, and that irrational sense of worlds beyond worlds which is so characteristic of true mysticism.”
⁵
Nabokov, too, can express a sense of dissatisfaction with his surroundings, but he expresses much more deeply a sense of endless gratitude for the generosity of the world that he finds in nature, in a butterfly or a bird, or in art, in Shakespeare or Pushkin. Fyodor on a bus feels exasperated that he is “wasting his youth on a boring and empty task, on the mediocre teaching of foreign languages—when he has his own language, out of which he can make anything he likes—a midge, a mammoth, a thousand different clouds. What he should really be teaching was…the constant feeling that our days here are only pocket money, farthings clinking in the dark, and that somewhere is stocked the real wealth, from which life should know how to get dividends in the shape of dreams, tears of happiness, distant mountains” (
Gift
175). For Nabokov, the most accessible account, the most tangible tally, the most concrete image of that “real wealth” beyond the pocket money of the here and now is the legacy of Shakespeare or Pushkin—and perhaps, he hopes, the legacy they have helped him, too, to bequeath.

16. Nabokov as Verse Translator

Introduction to
Verses and Versions

I was always touched by Véra Nabokov’s enthusiasm for overlooked aspects of her husband’s literary art. Since she was particularly eager to assemble a volume of his verse translations, I made a point of noting down every one I came across as I catalogued the Montreux archives. But she was too busy with other things, as I was, until it was too late for her to complete the task. In 2004 Dmitri Nabokov referred to me a request from Stanislav Shvabrin, then working on a Ph.D. at UCLA. Shvabrin had found at Harvard some unpublished Nabokov translations of Tyutchev and others and had asked Dmitri could he publish them. I suggested that we should combine forces, using the material I had gathered over the years with Véra in mind. Stas patiently identified and transcribed the texts Nabokov had used and transliterated them for our website for the book,
http://www.nabokovversesandversions.ac.nz/
. I introduced the volume, explaining the surprises of Nabokov’s changing attitudes to translating Russian verse.

Translation, like politics, is an art of compromise: inevitable compromise between the resources of From-ish and those of To-ish.
¹
When the unique riches of From-ish—all the accidents of its associations and accidence— have been exploited to the full by a poet of genius, the compromise must be all the greater.

“Vladimir Adamant Nabokov,” as he once signed himself, was a man singularly averse to compromise. Artists usually are: within the work, as nowhere else in life, they can choose their own conditions. Nabokov notoriously eschewed compromise by translating the unquestioned masterpiece of Russian verse, Aleksandr Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin
, into an English version that allows readers to understand the exact sense of Pushkin’s lines, especially through notes eight times as long as the poem, but renounces any attempt to provide an equivalent of Pushkin’s poetry, his perfect placement of words, his seemingly effortless mastery of rhythm and rhyme. Rather than trying to replicate Pushkin’s landscape in another medium, another place, Nabokov provides detailed signposts to Pushkin’s precise terrain.

But before 1951, when he arrived at this austerely unpoetic method of translating
Eugene Onegin
, Nabokov had been a brilliant translator of verse into verse, always with a strong loyalty to accuracy of sense but accepting in this one instance the compromises that must be made to find some match for the verse of From in the linguistic resources and verse conventions of To. He translated from French and English—and even German, of which he knew little—into Russian, from Russian and French into English, and from Russian into French.

Fluently trilingual by the age of seven, he translated at twelve Mayne Reid’s Wild West novel,
The Headless Horseman
, into French alexandrines. That translation does not survive, but much of his prolific early verse and verse translation does, although neither Nabokov himself nor his son Dmitri has judged this juvenilia worth publishing. In his last years Nabokov was ruthless in selecting his early verse for his collection
Stikhi
(Poems), published two years after his death. His first nine years as a poet are represented there by only slightly more poems than the single year of 1923, his last year as predominantly a poet, his first year of real poetic maturity. That year, therefore, provides the starting point for this collection of Nabokov’s verse translations.

There is another reason for choosing 1923. That was the year Nabokov met Véra Slonim, whom he married two years later. Fluent in Nabokov’s three languages, and also in German, an avid reader of his verse before they met, and already herself translating and publishing in
Rul’
, the Russian émigré newspaper where Nabokov had published most of his early work, Véra remained particularly attached sixty years later to the notion of assembling a volume of her husband’s verse translations and would have edited it herself in her eighties had she had the strength and time.

Nabokov, too, had often thought of collecting his verse translations, even after he had insisted so firmly in
Eugene Onegin
on the need for unyielding literality. In November 1958 the young Jason Epstein, who had eagerly published
Pnin
and
Nabokov’s Dozen
for Doubleday, flew from New York to Ithaca to secure Nabokov for the firm he had just joined, Random House, and proposed publishing three books:
Eugene Onegin
; an anthology of Russian poetry, including the masterpiece of Russian medieval poetry, the
Song of Igor’s Campaign
, and “some Pushkin, some Lermontov, Tyutchev, possibly Blok & Hodasevich”; and Nabokov’s greatest Russian novel,
The Gift
.
²
Nabokov signed an agreement for an “Anthology of Russian Verse in translation,”
³
which he expected to include, apart from the Igor epic, “three short dramas by Pushkin and poems from Lomonosov (XVIII century), through Zhukovski, Batyushkov, Tyutchev, Pushkin, Lermontov, Fet, to Blok.”
⁴

But after spending a productive spring in Arizona, Nabokov realized by June 1959 that
The Song of Igor’s Campaign
had become “a book in itself which cannot be combined with the kind of second half we had planned. That second half…would throw the book completely out of balance because it would necessarily lack the copious notes the first half has.” Since the second half was “supposed to cover the entire century of Russia’s renaissance in poetry, the commentary should have taken at least twice as many pages as that on
The Song
.”
⁵
Nabokov realized he did not have the time, and Random House happily published
The Song of Igor’s Campaign
on its own.

In the wake of
Lolita’
s triumph, Nabokov was kept busy both writing new novels and translating or supervising translations of his old Russian work. In 1968, dissatisfied with Putnam, the publisher of
Lolita
, he was ready to move to McGraw-Hill, which offered a large advance for a multibook contract that included
Ada
. Late in the year he proposed delivering a translation of his first novel,
Mary
, and “An Anthology of Russian Poets” by mid-January 1970.
⁶
Other books, however, replaced that proposed anthology, and when a second multibook contract was being negotiated with McGraw-Hill late in 1973, Nabokov proposed delivering an “Anthology of Russian Poetry in English” in 1978. By 1975 he had become too weak to advance the project, and by 1977 he was dead. When Véra recovered from the shock of his death, she wanted to compile the volume herself but did not know where to locate all she had in mind or how to find the time.

Verses and Versions
contains the anthology of Russian poets Nabokov proposed to McGraw-Hill and more. It also includes some of Nabokov’s discussions of translation (others are readily available in
Eugene Onegin
and
Strong Opinions
); the entire texts, both notes and translations, from his first anthologies of Russian verse (
Three Russian Poets
[1944], expanded in the British edition of 1947 into
Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev
); and selections of notes and verses from the
Eugene Onegin
commentary, talks to fellow Russian émigrés, his still-unpublished Cornell lectures on Russian verse, and his translations of verse by Mandelshtam and Okudzhava, which are more recent than the translations he originally intended to include. Still left in the archives are Nabokov’s Russian translations, early and late, from English, French, and German (Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Goethe, and others) and his translations from Russian (Pushkin, Tyutchev) into French.