THE TRANSLATOR’S DOUBTS VLADIMIR NABOKOV AND THE AMBIGUITY OF TRANSLATION C U LT U R A L R EVOLUTIONS : R USSIA IN THE 20 TH C ENTURY S ERIES E DITOR Boris Wolfson—Amherst College E DITORIAL B OARD : Anthony Anemone—The New School Robert Bird—The University Of Chicago Eliot Borenstein—New York University Angela Brintlinger—The Ohio State University Karen Evans-Romaine—Ohio University Jochen Hellbeck—Rutgers University Lilya Kaganovsky—University Of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Christina Kiaer—Northwestern University Alaina Lemon—University Of Michigan Simon Morrison—Princeton University Eric Naiman—University Of California, Berkeley Joan Neuberger—University Of Texas, Austin Ludmila Parts—Mcgill University Ethan Pollock—Brown University Cathy Popkin—Columbia University Stephanie Sandler—Harvard University THE TRANSLATOR’S DOUBTS VLADIMIR NABOKOV AND THE AMBIGUITY OF TRANSLATION JULIA TRUBIKHINA BOSTON 2015 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A bibliographic record for this title is available from the Library of Congress. 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Published by Academic Studies Press 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com For my grandmother, Valeria Kunina, who—by her life worthy of a Soviet “Scarlett O’Hara” rather than any scholarly word she actually wrote—taught me a thing or two about what matters in art: perseverance, allegiance to ironic rationality, intolerance to cruelty, and the higher sense of loyalty that, if we are to believe Ezra Pound, “is hard to explain.” T a b l e o f C o n t e n t s Acknowledgments 8 Introduction 9 Chapter 1 38 Nabokov’s Beginnings: “Ania” in Wonderland or “Does Asparagus Grow in a Pile of Manure?” Chapter 2 86 The Novel on Translation and “über-Translation”: Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Eugene Onegin Chapter 3 141 “Cinemizing” as Translation: Nabokov’s Screenplay of Lolita and Stanley Kubrick’s and Adrian Lyne’s Cinematic Versions Conclusion 206 Vladimir Nabokov within the Russian and Western Traditions of Translation Selected Bibliography 226 Index 240 A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s This book grew out of my doctoral dissertation. It would not have been possible without my friend and dissertation adviser, Richard Sieburth. Due to Richard and in the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s understanding of the Translator’s task, I was able to maintain this project with stoicism as a “chiasmus of hope and catastrophe.” He had a wonderful vision of the whole while the project was in its disjointed parts. His enormous erudition and insightful suggestions were invaluable to me. I am grateful to my colleague and friend Elizabeth Beaujour, who knew the project at its dissertation stage and at various points read and commented on its different parts. I feel enormous gratitude to the colleagues and friends who, along with Elizabeth, long ago were part of my dissertation committee: Eliot Borenstein and Mikhail Iampolski, thank you! I am tremendously fortunate to work alongside terrific colleagues in the Russian Division of Hunter College, CUNY, and benefit every day from their knowledge, sense of companionship, and our shared love for Russian literature and culture. I am grateful to my daughter Anya for being my anchor and unrelenting judge in all matters extraliterary. I want to thank my mother, Natalia Kunina, for enabling me to make my own “translation” in space and culture, to come to graduate school at New York University and, ultimately, to undertake this project. In her usual quiet way, she gave me the most valuable thing one can get from a parent—a strong sense of self. Finally, everlasting thanks to my husband, Dennis Slavin, for being—in translation terms—both loyal and faithful, and for his selfless help and support throughout my work on this book. I ntroductIon 1 On Translating Eugene Onegin I. What’s translation? On a platter A poet’s pale and glaring head, A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter, And profanation of the dead. 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. II. Reflected words can only shiver Like elongated lights that twist In the black mirror of a river Between the city and the mist. Elusive Pushkin! Persevering, I still pick up Tatiana’s earring, Still travel with your sullen rake. I find another man’s mistake, I analyze alliterations That grace your feats and haunt the great Fourth stanza of your Canto Eight. This is my task—a poet’s patience And scholiastic passion blent: Dove-droppings on your monument. Vladimir Nabokov (1955)2 Introduction “. It is not the highest praise of a translation, particularly in the age of its origin, to say that it reads as if it had originally been written in that language. Rather the significance of fidelity as ensured by literalness is that the work reflects the great longing for linguistic complementation. ” Walter Benjamin3 This book singles out translation as a way of talking about literary history and theory, philosophy, and interpretation. Vladimir Nabokov is its case study. The advantage of making Nabokov a case study for an investigation of questions of translation is obvious. It is hard to separate Vladimir Nabokov from the act of translation, in all senses of the word—ranging from “moving across” geographical borders and cultural and linguistic boundaries to the transposing of the split between “here” and “there” and “then” and “now” (the essential elements of exile, components of every émigré experience) onto a metaphysical plane sometimes suggested by private maps of his personal Zemblas and Antiterras. Obviously, the issue of exile, so central to Nabokov’s praxis and status, ties in closely with the problematics of translation, since, for one thing, overcoming the linguistic consequences of exile “caused him more torment than any of the other sufferings imposed upon him by emigration.”4 Walter Benjamin’s requirement that a translator should not convert a foreign language into his own but should instead allow his own language to be powerfully affected, even penetrated by the foreign one, resonates profoundly with Nabokov’s bilingual status. Nabokov’s linguistic polyphony is both the “matter and form” of his oeuvre. To borrow George Steiner’s definitions, The Gift, Lolita, and Ada, as well as Nabokov’s self-translations, are “tales of erotic relations between speaker and speech,” while Nabokov’s recurrent motifs of “mirrors, incest, and constant meshing of languages” are dramatizations of “his abiding devotion to Russian.”5 Just as Nabokov’s Russian prose seemed “strange” to his contemporaries — 11 — Introduction despite the indisputable mastery and finesse of his Russian language, his English-language works since the 1940s struck readers as either brilliant and witty or, on the contrary, precious or “maddeningly opaque,” but always written in a language “alien in details of lexical usage,” whose “primary rhythms . go against the natural grain of English and American speech.”6 This “polysemic nature” of Nabokov’s usage of language, however, helps keep “words and phrases in a charged, unstable mode of vitality.”7 In her treatment of Nabokov’s bilingualism, Elizabeth Beaujour notes that it “has made him both a ‘native user’ and a ‘foreigner.’”8 Nabokov’s bilingualism (in fact, polyglottism) is always a whole that is more than a sum of its components: translation between languages and cultural codes becomes a complex system of mediation of various linguistic and non-linguistic elements within a unified context. Investigating translation as a transformational rather than mimetic experience allows us to understand the strikingly original end result: in what emerges, both the “target language” and the “native” language undergo something new that dispenses with the quest for and the “anxiety” of influences. In this sense, Nabokov constitutes a perfect object for comparativist study because his oeuvre offers us the unique opportunity to look at his major texts twice: as originals and as translations. Laughter in the Dark (Camera obscura), Glory (Podvig), Mary (Mashenka), The Gift (Dar), Lolita, Despair (Otchaianie), Speak, Memory, Conclusive Evidence, and Other Shores (Drugie berega), and other texts all function as their own doubles in two languages (translated by Nabokov or by Nabokov and his son, or by other translators with considerable contribution on Nabokov’s part). The translations are also carefully supplied with Nabokov’s prefaces, which, though much shorter, possess the same explanatory and revelatory features of his commentaries to Eugene Onegin.