Strong opinions

A REPLY TO MY CRITICS

In regard to my novels my position is different. I cannot imagine myself writing a letter-to-the-editor in reply to an unfavorable review, let alone devoting almost a whole day to composing a magazine article of explanation, retaliation, and protest. I have waited at least thirty years to take notice — casual and amused notice — of some scurvy abuse I met with in my «V. Sirin» disguise, but that pertains to bibliography. My inventions, my circles, my special islands are infinitely safe from exasperated readers. Nor have I ever yielded to the wild desire to thank a benevolent critic — or at least to express somehow my tender awareness of this or that friendly writer's sympathy and understanding, which in some extraordinary way seem always to coincide with talent and originality, an interesting, though not quite inexplicable phenomenon.

If, however, adverse criticism happens to be directed not at those acts of fancy, but at such a matter-of-fact work of reference as my annotated translation of Eugene Onegin (hereafter referred to as EO), other considerations take over. Unlike my novels, EO possesses an ethical side, moral and human elements. It reflects the compiler's honesty or dishonesty, skill or sloppiness. If told I am a bad poet, I smile; but if told I am a poor scholar, I reach for my heaviest dictionary.

I do not think I have received all the reviews that appeared after EO was published; I fail to locate a few that I was sure I had in my chaotic study; but judging by the numerous ones that did reach me, one might conclude that literal translation represents an approach entirely devised by me; that it had never been heard of before; and that there was something offensive and even sinister about such a method and undertaking. Promoters and producers of what Anthony Burgess calls «arty translations» — carefully rhymed, pleasantly modulated versions containing, say, eighteen percent of sense plus thirty-two of nonsense and fifty of neutral padding are I think more prudent than they realize. While ostensibly tempted by impossible dreams, they are subliminally impelled by a kind of self-preservation. The «arty translation» protects them by concealing and camouflaging ignorance or incomplete information or the fuzzy edge of limited knowledge. Stark literalism, on the other hand, would expose their fragile frame to unknown and incalculable perils.

It is quite natural, then, that the solidly unionized professional paraphrast experiences a surge of dull hatred and fear, and in some cases real panic, when confronted with the possibility that a shift in fashion, or the influence of an adventurous publishing house, may suddenly remove from his head the cryptic rosebush he carries or the maculated shield erected between him and the specter of inexorable knowledge. As a result the canned music of rhymed versions is enthusiastically advertised, and accepted, and the sacrifice of textual precision applauded as something rather heroic, whereas only suspicion and bloodhounds await the gaunt, graceless literalist groping around in despair for the obscure word that would satisfy impassioned fidelity and accumulating in the process a wealth of information which only makes the advocates of pretty camouflage tremble or sneer.

These observations, although suggested by specific facts, should not be construed in a strictly pro domo sua sense. My EO falls short of the ideal crib. It is still not close enough and not ugly enough. In future editions I plan to defowleric it still more drastically. I think I shall turn it entirely into utilitarian prose, with a still bumpier brand of English, rebarbative barricades of square brackets and tattered banners of reprobate words, in order to eliminate the last vestiges of bourgeois poesy and concession to rhythm. This is something to look forward to. For the moment, all I wish is merely to put on record my utter disgust with the general attitude, amoral and Philistine, towards literalism.

It is indeed wonderful how indifferent most critics are to the amount of unwillful deceit going on in the translation trade. I recall once opening a copy of Bely's Petersburg in English, and lighting upon a monumental howler in a famous passage about a blue coupe which had been hopelessly discolored by the translator's understanding kubovyy (which means «blue») as «cubic»! This has remained a model and a symbol. But who cares and why bother? Mr. Rosen in The Saturday Review (November 28, 1964) ends his remarks on rhymed versions of Eugene Onegin with the expression of a rapturous hope: «It only remains for a talented poet like Robert Lowell to take advantage [of these versions] to produce a poem in English that really sings and soars». But this is an infernal vision to me who can distinguish in the most elaborate imitation the simple schoolboy howler from the extraneous imagery within which it is so pitifully imbedded. Again — what does it matter? «It is part of the act», as Mr. Edmund Wilson would say. The incredible errors in the translations from the Russian which are being published nowadays with frenetic frequency are dismissed as trivial blemishes that only a pedant would note.

Even Professor Muchnic, who in a recent issue of The New York Revtew of Books delicately takes Mr. Guy Daniels apart as if he were an unfamiliar and possibly defective type of coffee machine, neglects to point out that in both versions of Lermontov's poem which she quotes — Daniels' effort and Baring's very minor (pace Mirski) poem — the same grotesque imp blows a strident trumpet. For we have here an admirable example of one of those idiomatic freaks that for reasons of mental balance foreigners should not even try to rationalize. Lermontov's Russian goes: Sosedka est' u nib odna . . . Kak vspomnish', kak davno rasstaliis And the literal sense is: «They have a certain neighbor [fern.] . . . Oh, to think how long ago we parted!» The form vspomnish' looks like the second person singular of «remember», but in this intonational arrangement it should be the first person in literal translation since it is addressed by the speaker to himself. Now, both versionists being ignorant of idiomatic Russian did not hesitate to use the second person (though actually the result gives a painfully didactic twist to the sentence, which should have made the translator think twice). Baring's version (which Professor Muchnic, I am sorry to say, calls «a wonderfully precise reproduction of the sense, the idiom») runs: «We had a neighbor . . . and you remember I and she ..». While the more humble Daniels translates: «There was a girl as you'll recall..». I have italicized the shared boner. The point is not that one version is better than the other (frankly there is not much to choose between the two); the point is that unwittingly both use the same wrong person as if all paraphrasts were interconnected omphalically by an ectoplasmic band.

Despite the violent attitude towards literalism, I still find a little surprising the intensity of human passions that my rather dry, rather dull work provokes. Hack reviewers rush to the defense of the orthodox Soviet publicists whom I «chastise» and of whom they have never heard before. A more or less displaced Russian in New York maintains that my commentary is nothing but a collection of obscure trifles and that besides he remembers having heard it all many years ago in Gorki from his high-school teacher, A. A. Artamonov.

The word «mollitude», which I use a few times, has been now so often denounced that it threatens to become almost a household word, like «nymphet». One of my most furious and inarticulate attackers seems to be an intimate friend of Belinski (born 1811), as well as of all the paraphrasts I «persecute». The fury is, I suppose, pardonable and noble, but there would be no sense in my reacting to it. I shall also ignore some of the slapstick — such as a little item in The New Republic (April 3, 1965) which begins «Inspector Nabokov has revisited the scene of the crime in L'affaire (Jnegutne» and is prompted by a sordid little grudge of which the editor, presumably, had no knowledge. A reviewer writing in the Novyy Zhurnal (No. 77), Mr. Moris Fridberg — whom I am afraid I shall be accused of having invented — employs a particularly hilarious brand of bad Russian (kak izvestno dlya lyubogo studenta, as known «for» every student) to introduce the interesting idea that textual fidelity is unnecessary because «in itself the subject-matter of [Pushkin's] work is not very important». He goes on to complain that I do not say a word about such Pushkinists as Modzalevski, Tomashevski, Bondi, Shchyogolev, and Gofman — a statement that proves he has not only not read my commentary, but has not even consulted the Index; and on top of that he confuses me with Professor Arndt whose preliminary remarks about his «writing not for experts but students» Mr. Fridberg ascribes to me. A still more luckless gentleman (in the Los Angeles Times) is so incensed by the pride and prejudice of my commentary that he virtually chokes on his wrath and after enticingly entitling his article «Nabokov Fails as a Translator» has to break it off abruptly without having made one single reference to the translation itself. Among the more serious articles there is a long one in The New York Times Book Review, June 28, 1964, by Mr. Ernest Simmons, who obligingly corrects what he takes to be a misprint in One: xxv: 5; «Chadaev», he says, should be «Chaadaev»; but from my note to that passage he should have seen that «Chadaev» is one of the three forms of that name, and also happens to be Pushkin's own spelling in that particular line, which otherwise would not have scanned.

For obvious reasons I cannot discuss all the sympathetic reviews. I shall only refer to some of them in order to acknowledge certain helpful suggestions and corrections. I am grateful to John Bayley (The Observer, November 29, 1964) for drawing my attention to what he calls — much too kindly, alas — «the only slip» in my commentary: uAuf alien Gipfeln» (in the reference to Goethe's poem) should be corrected to « Ueber alien Uipfeln». (1 can add at least one other: My note to Two: xxxv: 8 contains a silly blunder and should be violently deleted.) Anthony Burgess in Encounter has suddenly and conclusively abolished my sentimental fondness for FitzGerald by showing how he falsified the «witty metaphysical tentmaker's» actual metaphors in «Awake] for morning in the bowl of Night . . . «. John Wain, in The Listener (April 29, 1965), by a sheer feat of style has made me at once sorry for one of my «victims» and weak with laughter: «This [the discussion of prosody], by the way, is the section in which Arthur Hugh Clough gets described as a poetaster; the effect is like that of seeing an innocent bystander suddenly buried by a fall of snow from a roof . . . «. J. Thomas Shaw, in The Russian Review (April 1965), observes that I should have promoted Pushkin after his graduation to the tenth civil rank («collegiate secretary») instead of leaving him stranded on the fourteenth rung of the ladder; but I cannot find in my copy the misprinted Derzhavin date which he also cites; and I strongly object to his listing James Joyce, whom I revere, among those writers whom I condemn «in contemptuous asides» (apparently Mr. Shaw has dreadfully misunderstood what I say about Joyce's characters falling asleep by applying it to Joyce's readers). Finally, the anonymous reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement (January 28, 1965) is perfectly right when he says that in my notes I do not discuss Pushkin's art in sufficient detail; he makes a number of attractive suggestions which, together with those of two other reviewers and several correspondents, would make a fifth volume, or at least a very handsome Festschrift. The same reviewer is much too lenient when he remarks that «a careful scrutiny of every line has failed to reveal a single careless error in translation». There are at least two: in Four: xliii: 2T the word «but» should be deleted, and in Five: xi: 3, «lawn» should be «plain».

The longest, most ambitious, most captious, and, alas, most reckless, article is Mr. Edmund Wilson's in I he New York Review of Books (July 15, 1965)*, and this I now select for a special examination.

* This is the text readers should consult. It is reprinted in an abridged, emended, and incoherent form in Edmund Wilson's A Window on Russia Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1972.

A number of earnest simpletons consider Mr. Wilson to be an authority in my field («he misses few of Nabokov's lapses», as one hasty well-wisher puts it in a letter to The New York Review on August 26), and no doubt such delusions should not be tolerated; still, I am not sure that the necessity to defend my work from blunt jabs and incompetent blame would have been a sufficient incentive for me to discuss that article, had I not been moved to do so by the unusual, unbelievable, and highly entertaining opportunity that I am unexpectedly given by Mr. Wilson himself of refuting practically every item of criticism in his enormous piece. The mistakes and misstatements in it form an uninterrupted series so complete as to seem artistic in reverse, making one wonder if, perhaps, it had not been woven that way on purpose to be turned into something pertinent and coherent when reflected in a looking glass. I am unaware of any other such instance in the history of literature. It is a polemicist's dream come true, and one must be a poor sportsman to disdain what it offers.

As Mr. Wilson points out with such disarming good humor at the beginning of his piece, he and I are old friends. I fully reciprocate «the warm affection sometimes chilled by exasperation» that he says he feels for me. When I first came to America a quarter of a century ago, he wrote to me, and called on me, and was most kind to me in various matters, not necessarily pertaining to his profession. I have always been grateful to him for the tact he showed in not reviewing any of my novels while constantly saying flattering things about me in the so-called literary circles where I seldom revolve. We have had many exhilarating talks, have exchanged many frank letters. A patient confidant of his long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian language and literature, I have invariably done my best to explain to him his monstrous mistakes of pronunciation, grammar, and interpretation. As late as 1957, alone of our last meetings, in Ithaca, upstate New York, where I lived at the time, we both realized with amused dismay that, despite my frequent comments on Russian prosody, he still could not scan Russian verse. Upon being challenged to read Evgeniy Onegin aloud, he started to perform with great gusto, garbling every second word, and turning Pushkin's iambic line into a kind of spastic anapest with a lot of jaw-twisting haws and rather endearing little barks that utterly jumbled the rhythm and soon had us both in stitches.

In the present case, I greatly regret that Mr. Wilson did not consult me about his perplexities, as he used to in the past. Here are some of the ghastly blunders that might have been so easily avoided.

«Why», asks Mr. Wilson, «should Nabokov call the word netu an old-fashioned and dialect form of net. It is in constant colloquial use and what I find one usually gets for an answer when one asks for some book in the Soviet bookstore in New York». Mr. Wilson has mistaken the common colloquial netu which means «there is not», «we do not have it», etc., for the obsolete netu which he has never heard and which as I explain in my note to Three: hi: 12, is a form of net in the sense of «not so» (the opposite of «yes»).

«The character called yo», Mr. Wilson continues, «is pronounced . . . more like 'yaw' than like the 'yo' in 'yonder.'« Mr. Wilson should not try to teach me how to pronounce this, or any other, Russian vowel. My «yo» is the standard rendering of the sound. The «yaw» sound he suggests is grotesque and quite wrong. I can hear Mr. Wilson — whose accent in Russian I know so well — asking that bookseller of his for «Miertvye Dushi» («Dead Souls»). No wonder he did not get it.

«Vse», according to Mr. Wilson (explaining two varieties of the Russian for «all»), «is applied to people, and vsyo to things». This is a meaningless pronouncement. Vse is merely the plural of ves' (masculine), vsya (feminine), and vsyo (neuter).

Mr. Wilson is puzzled by my assertion that the adjective zloy is the only one-syllable adjective in Russian. «How about the one-syllable predicative adjectives?» he asks. The answer is simple: I am not talking of predicative adjectives. Why drag them in? Such forms as mudr («is wise»), glup («is stupid»), ploh («is very sick indeed») are not adjectives at all, but adverbish mongrels which may differ in sense from the related adjectives.

In discussing the word pochuya Mr. Wilson confuses it with chuya («sensing») (see my letter about this word in the New Statesman, April 23, 1965) and says that had Pushkin used pochuyav, only then should I have been entitled to put «having sensed». «Where», queries Mr. Wilson, «is our scrupulous literalness?» Right here. My friend is unaware that despite the different endings, pochuyav and pochuya happen to be interchangeable, both being «past gerunds», and both meaning exactly the same thing.

All this is rather extraordinary. Every time Mr. Wilson starts examining a Russian phrase he makes some ludicrous slip. His didactic purpose is defeated by such errors, as it is also by the strange tone of his article. Its mixture of pompous aplomb and peevish ignorance is hardly conducive to a sensible discussion of Pushkin's language and mine — or indeed any language, for, as we shall presently see, Mr. Wilson's use of English is also singularly imprecise and misleading.

First of all it is simply not true to say, as he does, that in my review of Professor Arndt's translation (The New York Review of Books, August 30, 1964) «Nabokov dwelt especially on what he regarded as Professor Arndt's Germanisms and other infelicities of phrasing, without apparently being aware of how vulnerable he himself was». I dwelled especially on Arndt's mistranslations. What Mr. Wilson regards as my infelicities may be more repellent to him for psychological reasons than «anything in Arndt», but they belong to another class of error than Arndt's or any other paraphrases casual blunders, and what is more Mr. Wilson knows it. I dare him to deny that he deliberately confuses the issue by applying the term «niggling attack» to an indignant examination of the insults dealt out to Pushkin's masterpiece in yet another arty translation. Mr. Wilson affirms that «the only characteristic Nabokov trait» in my translation (aside from an innate «sadomasochistic» urge «to torture both the reader and himself», as Mr. Wilson puts it in a clumsy attempt to stick a particularly thick and rusty pin into my effigy) is my «addiction to rare and unfamiliar words». It does not occur to him that I may have rare and unfamiliar things to convey; that is his loss. He goes on, however, to say that in view of my declared intention to provide students with a trot such words are «entirely inappropriate» here, since it would be more to the point for the student to look up the Russian word than the English one. I shall stop only one moment to consider Mr. Wilson's pathetic assumption that a student can read Pushkin, or any other kussian poet, by «looking up» every word (atter all, the result of this simple method is far too apparent in Mr. Wilson's own mistranslations and misconceptions), or that a reliable and complete Russko-angliyskiy slovar'not only exists (it does not) but is more easily available to the student than, say, the second unabridged edition (1960) of Webster's, which I really must urge Mr. Wilson to acquire. Even if that miraculous slovar' did exist, there would still be the difficulty of choosing, without my help, the right shade between two near synonyms and avoiding, without my guidance, the trapfalls of idiomatic phrases no longer in use.

Edmund Wilson sees himself (not quite candidly, 1 am afraid, and certainly quite erroneously) as a common sensical, artless, average reader with a natural vocabulary of, say, six hundred basic words. No doubt such an imaginary reader may be sometimes puzzled and upset by the tricky terms 1 find it necessary to use here and there — very much here and there. But how many such innocents will tackle KO anyway? And what does Mr. Wilson mean by implying I should not use words that in the process of lexicographic evolution begin to occur only at the level of a «fairly comprehensive dictionary»? When does a dictionary cease being an abridged one and start growing «fairly» and then «extremely» comprehensive? Is the sequence: vest-pocket, coat-pocket, great-coat-pocket, my three book shelves, Mr. Wilson's rich library? And should the translator simply omit any reference to an idea or an object if the only right word — a word he happens to know as a teacher or a naturalist, or an inventor of words — is discoverable in the revised edition of a standard dictionary but not m its earlier edition or vice versa? Disturbing possibilities! Nightmarish doubts! And how does the harassed translator know that somewhere on the library ladder he has just stopped short of Wilson's Fairly Comprehensive and may safely use «polyhedral» but not «lingonberry»? (Incidentally, the percentage ot what Mr. Wilson calls «dictionary words» in my translation is really so absurdly small that I have difficulty in finding examples.)

Mr. Wilson can hardly be unaware that once a writer chooses to youthen or resurrect a word, it lives again, sobs again, stumbles all over the cemetery in doublet and trunk hose, and will keep annoying stodgy gravediggers as long as that writer's book endures. In several instances, English archaisms have been used in my EO not merely to match Russian antiquated words but to revive a nuance of meaning present in the ordinary Russian term but lost in the English one. Such terms are not meant to be idiomatic. The phrases 1 decide upon aspire towards literality, not readability. They are steps in the ice, pitons in the sheer rock of fidelity. Some are mere signal words whose only purpose is to suggest or indicate that a certain pet term of Pushkin's has recurred at that point. Others have been chosen for their Gallic touch implicit in this or that Russian attempt to imitate a French turn of phrase. All have pedigrees of agony and rejection and reinstatement, and should be treated as convalescents and ancient orphans, and not hooted at as impostors by a critic who says he admires some of my books. I do not care if a word is «archaic» or «dialect» or «slang»; I am an eclectic democrat in this matter, and whatever suits me, goes. My method may be wrong but it is a method, and a genuine critic's job should have been to examine the method itself instead of crossly fishing out of my pond some of the oddities with which I had deliberately stocked it.

Let me now turn to what Mr. Wilson calls my «infelicities» and «aberrations» and explain to him why I use the words he does not like or does not know.

In referring to Onegin's not being attracted by the picture of family life, Pushkin in Four: xm: 5 uses the phrase semeystvennoy kartinoy. The modern term is semeynoy kartinoy and had Pushkin chosen it, I might have put «family picture». But I had to indicate the presence of Pushkin's rarer word and used therefore the rarer «familistic» as a signal word.

In order to indicate the archaic note in vospomnya (used by Pushkin in One: xlvii: 67 instead of vspomnya, or vspomniv, or vspominaya), as well as to suggest the deep sonorous diction of both lines (vospomnya prezhnih let romany; vospomnya, etc.), I had to find something more reverberating and evocative than «recalling intrigues of past years», etc., and whether Mr. Wilson (or Mr. N. for that matter) likes it or not, nothing more suitable than «rememorating» for vospomnya can be turned up.*

* For reasons having nothing to do with the subject of this essay I subsequently changed the translation, exact in tone but not in syntax, of those two lines (see the epigraph to my Mary, McGrawHill, New York, 1970).

Mr. Wilson also dislikes «curvate», a perfectly plain and technically appropriate word which I have used to render kriyye hecause I felt that «curved» or «crooked» did not quite do justice to Onegin's regularly bent manicure scissors.

Similarly, not a passing whim but the considerations of prolonged thought led me to render hour: ix: 5, prtvychkoy zhizni izbalovan, as «spoiled by a habitude of life». I needed the Gallic touch and found it preferable in allusive indefinitude — Pushkin's line is elegantly ambiguous — to «habit of life» or «life's habit». «Habitude» is the right and good word here. It is not labeled «dialect» or «obsolete» in Webster's great dictionary.

Another perfectly acceptable word is «rummer», which I befriended because of its kinship with ryumka, and because I wished to find for the ryumki of Five: xxix: 4 a more generalized wineglass than the champagne flutes of xxxii: 89, which are also ryumki. If Mr. Wilson consults my notes, he will see that on second thought I demoted the nonobsolete but rather oversized cups of xxix to jiggers of vodka tossed down before the first course.

I cannot understand why Mr. Wilson is puzzled by «dit» (Five: vm: 13) which I chose instead of «ditty» to parallel «kit» instead of «kitty» in the next line, and which will now,

I hope, enter or reenter the language. Possibly, the masculine rhyme I needed here may have led me a little astray from the servile path of literalism (Pushkin has simply pesnya — «song»). But it is not incomprehensible; after all, anybody who knows what, say, «titty» means («in nailmaking the part that ejects the half-finished nail») can readily understand what «tit» means («the part that ejects the finished nail»).

Next on Mr. Wilson's list of inappropriate words is «gloam». It is a poetic word, and Keats has used it. It renders perfectly the mgla of the gathering evening shadows in Four: xlvii: 8, as well as the soft darkness of trees in Three: xvi: 11. It is better than «murk», a dialect word that Mr. Wilson uses for mgla, with my sanction, in another passage — the description of a wintry dawn.

In the same passage which both I and Mr. Wilson have translated, my «shippon» is as familiar to anyone who knows the English countryside as Mr. Wilson's «byre» should be to a New England farmer. Both «shippon» and «byre» are unknown to pocketdictionary readers; both are listed in the threecentimeterthick Penguin (1965). But I prefer «shippon» for hlev because I see its shape as clearly as that of the Russian cowhouse it resembles, but see only a Vermont barn when I try to visualize «byre».

Then there is «scrab»: «he scrabs the poor thing up», bednyazhku tsaptsarap (One: xiv: 8). This tsap-tsarap — a «verbal interjection» presupposing (as Pushkin notes when employing it in another poem) the existence of the artificial verb tsaptsarapat', jocular and onomatopoeic — combines tsapat' («to snatch») with tsarapat («to scratch»). I rendered Pushkin's uncommon word by the uncommon «scrab up», which combines «grab» and «scratch», and am proud of it. It is in fact a wonderful find.

I shall not analyze the phrase «in his lunes» that Mr. Wilson for good measure has included among my «aberrations». It occurs not in my translation, which he is discussing, but in the flow of my ordinary comfortable descriptive prose which we can discuss another time.

We now come to one of the chief offenders: «mollitude». For Pushkin's Gallic nega I needed an English counterpart of mollesse as commonly used in such phrases as il perdit ses jeunes anntes dans la mollesse et la volupte or son coeur nage dans la mollesse. It is incorrect to say, as Mr. Wilson does, that readers can never have encountered «mollitude». Readers of Browning have. In this connection Mr. Wilson wonders how I would have translated chistyh neg in one of Pushkin's last elegies — would I have said «pure mollitudes»? It so happens that I translated that little poem thirty years ago, and when Mr. Wilson locates my version (in the Introduction to one of my novels*) he will note that the genitive plural of nega is a jot different in sense from the singular.

[* Despair. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 302303, 1966]

In Mr. Wilson's collection of betes noires my favorite is «sapajou». He wonders why I render dostoyno staryh obez'yan as «worthy of old sapajous» and not as «worthy of old monkeys». True, obez'yana means any kind of monkey but it so happens that neither «monkey» nor «ape» is good enough in the context.

«Sapajou» (which technically is applied to two genera of neotropical monkeys) has in French a colloquial sense of «ruffian», «lecher», «ridiculous chap». Now, in lines 12 and 911 of Four: vii («the less we love a woman, the easier 'tis to be liked by her . . . but that grand game is worthy of old sapajous of our forefathers' vaunted times») Pushkin echoes a moralistic passage in his own letter written in French from Kishinev to his young brother in Moscow in the autumn of 1822, that is seven months before beginning Eugene Onegin and two years before reaching Canto Four. The passage, well known to readers of Pushkin, goes: «Moins on aime une femme et plus on est sur de I'avoir . . . mats cettepuissance est digne d'un vieux sapajou du dixhuittemesiicle».

Not only could I not resist the temptation of retranslating the obez'yan of the canto into the AngloFrench «sapajous» of the letter, but I was also looking forward to somebody's pouncing on that word and allowing me to retaliate with that wonderfully satisfying reference. Mr. Wilson obliged — and here it is.

«There are also actual errors of English», continued Mr. Wilson, and gives three examples: «dwelled» which I prefer to «dwelt»; «about me», which in Two: xxxix: 14 is used to render obo mne instead of the better «of me»; and the word «loaden», which Mr. Wilson «had never heard before». But «dwelled» is marked in my dictionary only «less usual» — not «incorrect»; «remind about» is not quite impossible (e.g., «remind me about it tomorrow»); as to «loaden», which Mr. Wilson suggests replacing by «loadened», his English wobbles, not mine, since «loaden» is the correct past participle and participial adjective of «load».

In the course of his strange defense of Arndt's version — in which, according to Mr. Wilson, I had been assiduously tracking down Germanisms — he asserts that «it is not difficult to find Russianisms in Nabokov» and turns up one, or the shadow of one («left us» should be «has left us» in a passage that I cannot trace). Surely there must be more than one such slip in a work fifteen hundred pages long devoted by a Russian to a Russian poem; however, the two other Russianisms Mr. Wilson lists are the figments of his own ignorance:

In translating slushat' shum morskoy (Eight: iv: 11) I chose the archaic and poetic transitive turn «to listen the sound of the sea» because the relevant passage has in Pushkin a stylized archaic tone. Mr. Wilson may not care for this turn — I do not much care for it either — but it is silly of him to assume that I lapsed into a naive Russianism not being really aware that, as he tells me, «in English you have to listen to something». First, it is Mr. Wilson who is not aware of the fact that there exists an analogous construction in Russian prislushivat'sya k zvuku, «to listen closely to the sound» — which, of course, makes nonsense of the exclusive Russianism imagined by him, and secondly, had he happcned to leaf through a certain canto of Don Juan, written in the year Pushkin was beginning his poem, or a certain Ode to Memory, written when Pushkin's poem was being finished, my learned friend would have concluded that Byron («Listening debates not very wise or witty») and Tennyson («Listening rhe lordly music») must have had quite as much Russian blood as Pushkin and I.

In the mazurka of Canto Five one of the dancers «leads Tatiana with Olga» (podvyol Tat'yanu s Ol'goy) towards Onegin. This has little to do with the idiomatic my s ney (which is lexically «we with her», but may mean «she and I») that Mr. Wilson mentions. Actually, in order to cram both girls into the first three feet of Five: xiiv: 3, Pushkin allowed himself a minor solecism. The construction

Tat'yanu i Ol'gu would have been better Russian (just as «Tatiana and Olga» would have been better English), but it would not have scanned. Now Mr. Wilson should note carefully that this unfortunate Tat'yanu s Ol'goy has an additional repercussion: it clashes unpleasantly with the next line where the associative form is compulsory: Onegin s Ol'goyu poshyol, «Onegin goes with Olga». Throughout my translation I have remained a thousand times more faithful to Pushkin's Russian than to Wilson's English and therefore in these passages I did not hesitate to reproduce both the solecism and the ensuing clash.

«The handling of French is peculiar», grimly observes Mr. Wilson, and adduces three instances:

«The name of Rousseau's heroine is», he affirms, «given on one page as Julie and on the next as Julia». This is an absurd cavil since she is named Julie all the thirteen times she is mentioned in the course of the four-page note referring to her (the note to Three: ix: 7), as well as numerous times elsewhere (see Index); but maybe Mr.

Wilson has confused her with Augustus' or Byron's girl (see Index again).

The second «peculiar» example refers to the word monde in the world-of-fashion sense copiously described in my note to One: v: 8 (le monde, le beau monde, le grand monde). According to Mr. Wilson it should always appear with its «le» in the translation of the poem. This is an inept practice, of course (advocated mainly by those who, like Mr. Wilson, are insecure and self-conscious in their use of le and la), and would have resulted in saying «le noisy monde» instead of «the noisy monde» (Eight: xxxiv: 12). English writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries wrote «the monde», not «le monde». I am sure that if Mr. Wilson consults the OED, which I do not have here, he will find examples from Walpole, Byron, Thackeray, and others. What was good enough for them is good enough for Pushkin and me.

Finally, in this peculiar group of peculiar French there is the word sauvage, which according to Mr. Wilson should not have appeared in my rendering of Two: xxv: 5, dika, pechal'na, molchaliva, «sauvage, sad, silent»; but apart from the fact that it has no exact English equivalent, I chose this signal word to warn readers that Pushkin was using dika not simply in the sense of wild or «unsociable but in a Gallic sense as a translation of «sauvage». Incidentally, it often occurs in English novels of the time along with monde and ennui.

«As for the classics», says Mr. Wilson, «Zoilus should be Zu'ilus and Eol, Aeolus». But the diacritical sign is quite superfluous in the first case (see, for instance, Webster) and «Eol» is a poetical abbreviation constantly cropping up in English poetry. Moreover, Mr, Wilson can find the full form in my Index. I am unable to prevent my own Zoilus from imitating a bright and saucy schoolboy, but really he should not tell me how to spell the plural of «automaton» which has two endings, both correct. And what business does he have to rebuke me for preferring Theocritus to Virgil and to insinuate that I have read neither?

There is also the strange case of «stuss». «What does N. mean», queries Mr. Wilson, «when he speaks of Pushkin's addiction to stuss? This is not an English word and if he means the Hebrew word for nonsense which has been absorbed into German, it ought to be italicized and capitalized. But even on this assumption it hardly makes sense». This is Mr. Wilson's nonsense, not mine. «Stuss» is the Knglish name of a card game which I discuss at length in my notes on Pushkin's addiction to gambling. Mr. Wilson should really consult some of my notes (and Webster's dictionary).

Then there is Mr. Nabokov's style. My style may be all Mr. Wilson says, clumsy, banal, etc. But in regard to the examples he gives it is not unnecessarily clumsy, banal, etc. If in translating toska lyubvi Tat'yanu-gonit (Three: xvi: 1), «the ache of love chases Tatiana» (not «the ache of loss», as Mr. Wilson nonsensically misquotes), I put «chases» instead of the «pursues» that Mr. Wilson has the temerity to propose, I do so not only because «pursues» is in Russian not gonit but presleduet, but also because, as Mr. Wilson has not noticed, it would be a misleading repetition of the «pursue» used in the preceding stanza (tebya presleduyut mechty, «daydreams pursue you»), and my method is to repeat a term at close range only when Pushkin repeats it.

When the nurse says to Tatiana nu delo, delo, ne gnevaysya, dusha moya, and I render it by «this now makes sense, do not be cross with me, my soul», Mr. Wilson in a tone of voice remindful of some seventeenth-century French — pedant discoursing on high and low style, declares that «make sense» and «my soul» do not go together, as if he knows which terms in the nurse's Russian go together or do not!

As I have already said, many of the recurring words I use (ache, pal, mollitude, and so on) are what I call «signal words», i.e., terms meant, among other things, to indicate the recurrence of the corresponding Russian word. Style, indeed! It is correct information I wish to give and not samples of «correct style». I translate ochen'milo-postupil-nash-priyatel, in the beginning of Four: xviii (which is also the beginning of the least artistic section in Four: xviiixxn), by «very nicely did our pal act», and this Mr. Wilson finds «vulgarly phrased»; but Mr. Wilson stomps in where I barely dare to tread because he is quite unaware that the corresponding Russian phrase is also trite and trivial. There simply exists no other way of rendering that genteel ochen' milo (Pushkin is imitating here a simpering reader), and if I chose here and elsewhere the signal word «pal» to render the colloquial turn of priyateV, it is because there exists no other way of expressing it. «Pal» retains the unpleasant flippancy of priyateV as used here, besides reproducing its first and last letters. PriyateV ViVson would be, for instance, a flippant and nasty phrase, out of place in a serious polemical text. Or does Mr. Wilson really think that the passage in question is better rendered by Professor Arndt? («My reader, can you help bestowing praise on Eugene for the fine part he played with stricken Tanya?»)

Mr. Wilson's last example in the series pertaining to «bad style» has to do with the end of Seven: xxxn. When rendering the elegiac terms in which Tatiana takes leave of her country home, I had to take into account their resemblance to the diction of Pushkin's youthful elegy addressed to a beloved country place («Farewell, ye faithful coppices», etc.), and also to that of Lenski's last poem. It was a question of adjustment and alignment. This is why I have Tatiana say in a stilted and old-fashioned idiom, «Farewell, pacific sites, farewell, secluded [note the old-fashioned pronunciation of the correspondent uedinennyy] refuge! Shall I see you?» «Such passages», says Mr. Wilson, «sound like the products of those computers which are supposed to translate Russian into English». But since those computers are fed only the basic Russian Mr. Wilson has mastered, and are directed by anthropologists and progressive linguists, the results would be his comic versions, and not my clumsy but literal translation.

Probably the most rollicking part of Mr. Wilson's animadversions is the one in which he offers his own mistranslation as the perfection I should have tried to emulate.

My rendering of gusey kriklivyh karavan tyanulsya k yugu (Four: xli: 11 and beginning of 12) is «the caravan of clamorous geese was tending southward» but, as I note in my commentary, kriklivyh is lexically «screamy»* and the idiomatic tyanulsya conveys a very special blend of meaning, with the sense of «progressing in a given direction» predominating over the simple «stretching» obtainable from pocket dictionaries (see also note to Seven: iv: 14). Mr. Wilson thinks that in his own version of the coming of winter in Four, part of which I quote in my Commentary with charitably italicized errors, he is «almost literally accurate and a good deal more poetically vivid than Nabokov». The «almost» is very lenient since «loudtongued geese» is much too lyrical, and «stretching» fails to bring out the main element of the contextual tyanulsya.

[* In revising my translation for a new edition I have changed «clamorous» to the absolutely exact «cronking». ]

A still funnier sight is Mr. Wilson trying to show me how to translate properly ego loshadka, sneg pochuya, pletyotsya rys'yu kak nibud' (Five: n: 34), which in my literal rendering is «his naggy, having sensed the snow, shambles at something like a trot». Mr. Wilson's own effort, which goes «his poor (?) horse sniffing (?) the snow, attempting (?) a trot, plods (?) through it (?)», besides being a medley of gross mistranslations, is an example of careless English. If, however, we resist the unfair temptation of imagining Mr. Wilson's horse plodding through my trot and, instead, have it plod through Mr. Wilson's snow, we obtain the inept picture of an unfortunate beast of burden laboriously working its way through that snow, whereas in reality Pushkin celebrates relief, not exertions. The peasant is not «rejoicing» or «feeling festive», as paraphrasts have it (not knowing Pushkin's use of torzhestvovat''here and elsewhere), but «celebrating» (the coming of winter), since the snow under the sleigh facilitates the little nag's progress and is especially welcome after a long snowless autumn of muddy ruts and reluctant cart wheels.

Although Mr. Wilson finds my Commentary overdone, he cannot help suggesting three additions. In a ludicrous display of pseudo-scholarship he insinuates that I «seem to think» (I do not, and never did) that the application by the French of the word «goddams» to the English (which 1 do not even discuss) begins in the eighteenth century. He would like me to say that it goes back to the fifteenth century. Why should I? Because he looked it up?

He also would have liked me to mention in connection with the «pensive vampire» (Three: xii: 8) of Polidori's novelette (1819) another variety of vampire which Pushkin alluded to in a poem of 1834 suggested by Merimee's well-known pastiche. But that vampire is the much coarser vurdalak, a lowly graveyard ghoul having nothing to do with the romantic allusion in Canto Three (1824); besides he appeared ten years later (and three years after Pushkin had finished Eugene Onegin) — quite outside the period limiting my interest in vampires.

The most sophisticated suggestion, however, volunteered by Mr. Wilson, concerns the evolution of the adjective krasnyy which «means both red and beautiful». May this not be influenced «by the custom in Old Russia, described in Hakluyt's Voyages, of the peasant women's painting large red spots on their cheeks in order to beautify themselves?» This is a preposterous gloss, somehow reminding one of Freud's explaining a patient's passion for young women by the fact that the poor fellow in his self-abusing boyhood used to admire Mt. Jungfrau from the window of a water closet.

I shall not say much about the paragraph that Mr. Wilson devotes to my notes on prosody. It is simply not worth while. He has skimmed my «tedious and interminable appendix» and has not understood what he managed to glean. From our conversations and correspondence in former years I well know that, like Onegin, he is incapable of comprehending the mechanism of verse — either Russian or English. This being so, he should have refrained from «criticizing» my essay on the subject. With one poke of his stubby pencil he reintroduces the wretched old muddle I take such pains to clear up and fussily puts back the «secondary accents» and «spondees» where I show they do not belong. He makes no attempt to assimilate my terminology, he obstinately ignores the similarities and distinctions I discuss, and indeed I cannot believe he has read more than a few lines of the thing.

My «most serious failure», according to Mr. Wilson, «is one of interpretation». Had he read my commentary with more attention he would have seen that I do not believe in any kind of «interpretation» so that his or my «interpretation» can be neither a failure nor a success. In other words, I do not believe in the old-fashioned, naive, and musty method of human-interest criticism championed by Mr. Wilson that consists of removing the characters from an author's imaginary world to the imaginary, but generally far less plausible, world of the critic who then proceeds to examine these displaced characters as if they were «real people». In my commentary I have given examples and made some innocent fun of such criticism (steering clear, however, of any allusion to Mr. Wilson's extraordinary misconceptions in The Triple Thinkers).

I have also demonstrated the factual effect of Pushkin's characterizations as related to the structure of the poem. There are certain inconsistencies in his treatment of his hero which are especially evident, and in a way especially attractive, in the beginning of Canto Six. In a note to Six: xxviii: 7, I stress the uncanny, dreamlike quality of Onegin's behavior just before and during the duel. It is purely a question of architectonics — not of personal interpretation. My facts are objective and irrefutable. I remain with Pushkin in Pushkin's world. I am not concerned with Onegin's being gentle or cruel, energetic or indolent, kind or unkind («you are simply very kindhearted», says a woman to him quoted in his diary; he is «zloy, unkind», says Mr. Wilson); I am concerned only with Pushkin's overlooking, in the interest of the plot, that Onegin, who according to Pushkin is a punctilious home du monde and an experienced duelist, would hardly choose a servant for second or shoot to kill in the kind of humdrum affair where vanity is amply satisfied by sustaining one's adversary's fire without returning it.

The actual cause of the encounter is however quite plausible in Pushkin: upon finding himself at a huge vulgar feast (Five: xxxi) so unlike the informal party promised him by Lenski (Four: xlix), Onegin is quite right to be furious with his deceitful or scatterbrained young friend, just as Lenski is quite justified in calling him out for flirting with Olga. Onegin accepts the challenge instead of laughing it off as he would have done if Lenski had chosen a less pedantic second. Pushkin stresses the fact that Onegin sincerely loves the youth but that amour propre is sometimes stronger than friendship. That is all. One should stick to that and not try to think up «deep» variations which are not even new; for what Mr. Wilson inflicts upon me, in teaching me how to understand Onegin, is the old solemn nonsense of Onegin's hating and envying Lenski for being capable of idealism, devoted love, ecstatic German romanticism and the like «when he himself is so sterile and empty». Actually, it is just as easy, and just as irrelevant (yet more fashionable — Mr. Wilson is behind the times), to argue that Onegin, not Lenski, is the true idealist, that he loathes Lenski because he perceives in him the tuture tat swinish squire Lenski is doomed to become, and so he raises slowly his pistol and . . , but Lenski in malignant cold blood is also raising his pistol, and God knows who would have killed whom had not the author followed wisely the old rule of sparing one's more interesting character while the novel is still developing. If anybody takes «a mean advantage», as Mr. Wilson absurdly puts it (none of the principals can derive any special «advantage» in a duel a volonte), it is not Onegin, but Pushkin.

So much for my «most serious failure».

All that now remains to be examined is Mr. Wilson's concern for reputations — Pushkin's reputation as a linguist and the reputations of SainteBeuve and others as writers.

With an intensity of feeling that he shares with Russian monolinguists who have debated the subject, Mr. Wilson scolds me for underrating Pushkin's knowledge of English and «quite disregarding the evidence». I supply the evidence, not Mr. Wilson, not Sidorov, and not even Pushkin's own father (a cocky old party who maintained that his son used to speak fluent Spanish, let alone English). Had Mr. Wilson carefully consulted my notes to One: xxxvni: 9, he would have convinced himself that I prove with absolute certainty that neither in 1821, nor 1833, nor 1836, was Pushkin able to understand simple English phrases. My demonstration remains unassailable, and it is this evidence that Mr. Wilson disregards while referring me to stale generalities or to an idiotic anecdote about the Raevski girls' giving Pushkin lessons in English in a Crimean bower. Mr. Wilson knows nothing about the question. He is not even aware that Pushkin got the style of his «Byronic» tales from Pichot and Zhukovski, or that Pushkin's copying out extracts from foreign writers means nothing. Mr. Wilson, too, may have copied extracts, and we see the results. He complains I do not want to admit that Pushkin's competence in languages was considerable, but I can only reply that Mr. Wilson's notion ot such competence and my notion of it are completely dissimilar. I realize, of course, that my friend has a vested interest in the matter, but I can assure him that although Pushkin spoke excellent eighteenth-century French, he had only a gentleman's smattering of other foreign languages.

Finally — Mr. Wilson is horrified by my «instinct to take digs at great reputations». Well, it cannot be helped; Mr. Wilson must accept my instinct, and wait for the next crash. I refuse to be guided and controlled by a communion of established views and academic traditions, as he wants me to be. What right has he to prevent me from finding mediocre and overrated people like Balzac, Dostoevski, SainteBeuve, or Stendhal, that pet of all those who like their French plain? How much has Mr. Wilson enjoyed Mme. de StaeTs novels? Has he ever studied Balzac's absurdities and Stendhal's cliches? Has he examined the melodramatic muddle and phony mysticism of Dostoevski? Can he really venerate that archvulgarian, SainteBeuve? And why should I be forbidden to consider that Chaykovski's hideous and insulting libretto is not saved by a music whose cloying banalities have pursued me ever since I was a curlyhaired boy in a velvet box? If 1 am allowed to display my very special and very subjective admiration for Pushkin, Browning, Krylov, Chateaubriand, Griboedov, Senancour, Kuchelbccker, Keats, Hodascvich, to name only a few of those I praise in my notes, I should be also allowed to bolster and circumscribe that praise by pointing out to the reader my favorite bogeys and shams in the hall of false fame.

In his rejoinder to my letter of August 26, 1965, in The New York Review, Mr. Wilson says that on rereading his article he felt it sounded «more damaging» than he had meant it to he. His article, entirely consisting, as I have shown, of quibbles and blunders, can be damaging only to his own reputation — and that is the last look I shall ever take at the dismal scene.

Completed on January 20, 1966, and published in February of that year in Encounter. One or two forced peeps did come after that «last look». The essay was reprinted in Nabokov's Congeries, Viking, New York, 1968.