Literalness, Translation, and Commentary : Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin
Julia Trubikhina, New York University
When Nabokov’s four-volume translation of Eugene Onegin was published
by the Bollingen Foundation in 1964 – a second revised edition came out in 1975
– it provoked a variety of reactions, from disbelief (“the raised eyebrow, the
sharp intake of breath”) and outrage, to admiration and appraisal. This paper
will approach Nabokov’s mammoth endevour from the perspective of the following
issues:
- translation and violence: translation of an “animate,” live original into
“inanimate” text: Nabokov conceptualizes translation as “profanation of the
dead.” The critic’s/translator’s freedom, as he gets rid of the “original”
author (Pale Fire), produces an unreliable or lucidly mad narrator/interpretor.
In discussing translation as the allegorical mode it is especially important
to be attuned to the notion of repetition (Benjamin’s “Allegories are, in
the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.”). Jean Baudrillard
discusses repetition as emerging from a position of liminality between life
and death, the rhetorical strategy that, according to him, involves doubling
– the reanimation of a model, the return of the “original” in its artificial
copy. (Echange symbolique et la Mort.)
- authorship and legitimacy: Most of European literature came to Russia through
translations from French and occasionally from German – which renders the
very idea of authorship problematic. Reading Richardson, the Russian reader
was in fact reading Prevost with his understanding of “elegant taste.” As
Nabokov wrote in “The Servile Path”: “In consequence, Shakespeare is really
Letourneur, Byron and Moore are Pichot, Scott is Dufauconput, Sterne is Fienais,
and so on.” Nabokov’s incredible undertaking in Onegin is akin to the
attempt of eighteenth-century Russian classicism to “translate” the whole
of European culture into the Russian language, while the literary language
itself was a work-in-progress. In this sense, Lotman’s idea of cultural translation
as a translation of a code or a structure, rather than a verbal communication
of information, is very true in Nabokov’s case. If the notion of authorship
is inherently problematic, what are we reading in the case of Nabokov’s translation?
- anti-consumable translation as a compromise: While other existing English
translations of Onegin (Johnston, Elton/Briggs, Falen, Arndt) are meant
to be read, Nabokov’s idiosyncratic translation, in fact, can only be studied
(the four volume “mammoth” grew out of a “little book” intended for teaching
purposes). Meanwhile, the commentary paradoxically takes on the function of
the translation and becomes in English what Puškin’s text is in Russian.
- commentary. I will bring in Pale Fire, a novel written simultaneously
with Nabokov’s work on the Onegin translation, and published in 1962.
Pale Fire bears such striking structural similarity to Nabokov’s Onegin
that it is easy to suggest self-parody. Pale Fire, as does all of Nabokov’s
fiction, produces a double. The commentary and the poem – or, for that matter,
Nabokov and Pushkin in Onegin – are doubles in their own right.