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.