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Nabokov Columns, Translating

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Nabokov Columns, Translating G s> Nabokov at Cornell Paul Cody Before Lolita, before the fame, furor, and fortune, much of Vladimir Nabokov’s life was about displacement and loss— was a series of comings and goings, exits and entrances. It was about what more than a few great twentieth-century artists called the “enigma of arrival.” Is there ever a truly safe and stable place in the world? Where is home? Is it really, as the poet Robert Frost wrote, the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in? Vladimir Nabokov arrived in Ithaca on July 1, 1948, and moved into what would be the first in a long series of rented hous­ es, at 957 East State Street. “We are enchanted with Cornell,” Nabokov wrote, “and very very grateful to the kind fate that has guided us here.” He was forty- nine years old that first Ithaca summer, and twice exiled by two of the great polit­ ical cataclysms of the century—first from his native Russia by the rise of Bolshe­ vism, and then from Paris in 1940, a few weeks ahead of Nazi troops. His father, from one of Russia’s oldest and wealthi­ est aristocratic families, had been a lead­ ing liberal democrat and fighter against anti-Semitism in pre-Revolutionary Rus­ sia. V.D. Nabokov, revered by his son, had been killed in Berlin in 1922 by a right-wing fanatic when the elder Nabokov tried to shield the target of an assassin at a public rally. Vladimir’s mother, Elena Ivanovna Nabokov, would die May 2, 1939, in a third-class hospital room in Prague. Vladimir had only been able to visit her once during the preceding seven years, in 1937. Because of the political unrest in Europe, he was unable to attend her funeral. Brian Boyd, in his magisterial two-vol­ ume biography, begins Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years by saying, “Nabokov had left Russia in 1919 on a crowded little cargo ship, playing chess with his father on its deck as Bolshevik machine guns strafed the waters of Sebastopol Harbor.” Twenty-one years later, just ahead of the Nazis, Nabokov crossed the Atlantic on the Champlain, sailing into New York Harbor in late May, 1940. On its following trip to the United States, the Champlain would be Jack Sherman sunk by a German U-boat. Perhaps life could never be safe, permanent, nor easy. Before Cornell, Nabokov had lost his were written in a language from whose papers on entomology. He would cross was being noticed in some circles, by the native antry, his family fortune, and his country he had been exiled, for a shrink­ continents and scale mountains, net in late 1940s sales of the novels were still mother and father. He had lived in genteel ing audience of 6migr6 readers with a hand, in search of those other elusive and pathetic, and Wellesley College had penury in England, Germany, and France taste for the avant-garde. strangely beautiful migrants. refused him anything more than another during those early years of exile, giving And then in his first decade in the Unit­ During all the travel, the scramble for one-year appointment. lessons in tennis, English, and Russian, ed States there would be more imperma­ money, the year-by- year appointments, But one of the people who knew and writing newspaper chess columns, and nence, still more temporary dwellings. he would complete his first English admired Nabokov’s work was Morris translating. Nabokov wrote poetry and Semester by semester, year by year. novel. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bishop ’14, PhD ’26, a professor of collaborated on a few screenplays, did Appointments to teach at Stanford Uni­ and the novel Bend Sinister—obliquely Romance languages who chaired Cor­ some acting, and wrote his early Russian versity and at Wellesley College. Work at about the terror of both right- and left- nell’s search committee to hire a Russian novels—Mary, King, Queen, Knave', The Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zool­ wing zealots, Nazis and Communists. literature professor. Though Nabokov Defense', Despair', and Invitation to a ogy—for Nabokov was a world-class lep- Nabokov wrote short stories and began had graduated from Cambridge Universi- Beheading. None of the novels earned idopterist, an expert on butterflies, who what would be a life-long association continued on page 6 more than a few hundred dollars, and all would eventually publish eighteen scientific with the New Yorker. Though his work page 2 T he R O O K P i^ S September 1998 The Green Bird in the Basement we don't know how it got there, crows, pigeons, doves, grackles, drop and touch the damn thing, take for even if the basement windows and robins, although we did have some kind of care of it, not knowing were open, they're wholly screened, a pair of woodpeckers this spring if we could have done anything to so it must have been a one-time at our birdfeeder, red tufted heads save him, fluke when we opened the back door and speckled bodies, and a scarlet and then the basement door just tanager couple, not to leave out beyond the small entryway between, those geese and ducks in the pond but it still looks pretty unlikely in the park, and that strange dark or'maybe he just came for this bird, a fair-sized parakeet, whatsit with the long curved neck to us looking for a safe place to have gotten down there at all, that swims with its body under water, to die away from the sharp-toothed mewling and moulting, all holed up which only goes to show how content squirrels, and wanting a decent burial among the basement ceiling beams I am when they know their place with appropriate prayers and songs where we could do little to help, and where they belong, but how can for the. passing of such melodious unfamiliar with such strangeness I relish them dying in my house? life from the world, from my life, at the bottom of our own damn house, how have I become responsible for something who penetrated domestic walls somehow for fear of being bitten or infected that's not mine but somehow to bring us news of what's really except perhaps to call the ASPCA I have to take care of and which going on out there, messages from and ask them to come and rescue it— doesn't even work out in the end? high high up among the tall trees and us, of course—from this impasse, along these ordinary Flushing streets but they can't come till tomorrow, of this great round heart beating it being too late, it seems, tonight beneath the rectangles of our lives for them to do anything, despite I had an uneasy sleep that night the squares of our days singing us the fact that our visitor projects speckled with bright and restless to turn and return in curves to the all the warning signs of not being able dreams of strange countries and spirals of our dying and kiss to make it through the night, unfamiliar songs and prophecies the rod that chastises, for we die, drooping and whimpering softly, we found him cold on the concrete as he died, reminding us of what and avoiding us among the beams floor the next morning, neglected, transpires underneath our houses who are as fearful of chasing him fallen from his perch in a swoon, beneath the cheerful smells of as he is of our good intentions, and the place was starting to smell breakfast in the morning, the voice we are not used to one another so we had to clean it all up and of time and dreams we all ignore like this, dispose of him in a black plastic bag and from which no one can escape like they do lately with fallen soldiers and the victims of fire and flood feeling regret that it had to come although I've seen them to this and guilty that I couldn't help —Norman Friedman screeching up among the tall trees and resentment at being handed this along the street as I jog past, late assignment in the-first place wondering whether this is natural and—well—now that you ask, I'll or whether they're children's pets tell you, a missed opportunity Norman Friedman is a retired English profes­ escaped from thin domestic bounds a chance to cross the boundary sor and a psychotherapist. He is currently seek­ either way an exotic intrusion and grow feathers and beak for ing a publisher for his third volume of poetry, among the usual Flushing sparrows, a change, a chance to let revulsion Revelation to See My Face. 2)eath in Sammy As she did in her bestselling Giving Up The Romance Reader, Pearl WILLIAM TREVOR Abraham gives us an insid­ er's glimpse into Hasidic life.. Praise for William Trevor's America bestselling Felicia's Journey Praise for The Romance Reader: "This story...is about a journey as Mr. Trevor shows just how wise brave as Huck Finn's, as difficult as and wry and funny and morally astute Holden Caulfield's, as stark as any an observer of the human comedy he I've read." is. —Patrick McGrath New York Times Book Review — Anne Roiphe Los Angeles Times A thriller lifted to the level of high art. —Publisher's Weekly PEARL ABRAHAM 214pages*$23-95 cloth* Viking ir S u b s c r ib e t o : I T h e Friends of the Bookpress iROOKFRESS M.
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