The Life and Works of Vladimir Nabokov - Nabokov as Translator

Vladimir Nabokov's translation of his Russian novels into English had been an early goal, even before his 1940 emigration to the United States. "None of my American friends have read my Russian books and thus every appraisal on the strength of my English ones is bound to be out of focus," he wrote in 1959. Both Kamera obskura (Laughter in the Dark) and Otchaianie (Despair) had been badly translated by others in the late 1930s, but after his move to America he could not interest publishers in commissioning English versions of his other novels until the recognition  he received for Lolita in the late 1950s prompted a string of offers. The English translations that followed were Invitation to a Beheading (1959), The Gift (1963), The Defense (1964), The Eye (1965), Despair (new translation, 1966), King, Queen, Knave (1968), Mary (1970) and Glory (1971).

	The Art of Translation
	Nabokov, who was acutely alert to the perils of translation, divided literary translators into three types: the scholar, the "well-meaning hack," and "the professional writer relaxing in the company of a foreign confrere." According to Nabokov, simple human error is excusable in a translator, but the worst degree of turpitude is reached in a translation when a masterpiece has been "vilely beautified in such a fashion as to conform to the notions and prejudices of a given public."

Following is a chronological look at his nine major Russian works and his later English translations of each. These works helped bring about Nabokov's rise to prominence in the Russian émigré community in Europe in the 1920s and '30s--though the audience for his work would grow exponentially after the publication of his English-language novels.

A novel of émigré life: Mashen'ka, Berlin, 1926 (Mary, 1970)

 
Shortly after his marriage, in 1925, to Véra, the woman to whom he would dedicate his major literary works, Nabokov began Mashen'ka (Mary), derived from an earlier, abandoned novel entitled Happiness--a title he retained almost until publication. On February 15, 1926, he signed a contract with Slovo, the Berlin publishing house founded by his late father, for the book's publication, and excerpts appeared in March in two of the émigré periodicals that proliferated in cities with large émigré communities: Vozrozhdenie in Paris and Slovo in Riga, Latvia. By the time Mashen'ka reached the bookstalls, the influential critic Yuli Aykhenvald had already proclaimed Nabokov "a new Turgenev."

NYPL, Berg Collection

In the foreword to the English translation of Mashen'ka, shown here in manuscript form, Nabokov discussed the circumstances of the original compostion and its much later translation into English.

The publishers promoted Mashen'ka as "a novel of émigré life," and in fact its action takes place during the 1924 peak of the émigré exodus from Berlin to Paris, in a pension not unlike Nabokov's mother's quarters in Prague. The novel was lauded for its innovative structure and vibrant, if occasionally unpalatable, detail. It tells the story of the Russian émigré Ganin, who discovers that the lover he left behind in Russia, Mashen'ka, has married his fellow boarder in Berlin. Mashen'ka never appears in the novel, but is conjured by Ganin's reminiscences. Mashen'ka incorporates a wealth of autobiographical material, from Ganin's general nostalgia for his homeland to the very specific and realistic descriptions of Vyra, Nabokov's summer home. In the midst of composing the work, in October 1925, he wrote to his mother that "it already begins to seem that my [characters] are real people, and not my inventions." Mashen'ka herself is based on Nabokov's old flame Lyussa--whom he would name Tamara in Speak, Memory. "The girl really existed," he wrote to Edmund Wilson 20 years later; five of her love letters to Nabokov are quoted in the novel.

Through the process of preparing these translations for the American market, Nabokov developed the habit of prefacing each work with an explanatory foreword. In the foreword to Mary he wrote that the translation was "as faithful to the text as I would have insisted on its being had that text not been mine.... The only adjustments I deemed necessary are limited to brief utilitarian phrases in three or four passages alluding to routine Russian matters (obvious to fellow-émigrés but incomprehensible to foreign readers) ... etc."


Translation and transformation: Korol', dama, valet, Berlin, 1928 (King, Queen, Knave, 1968)

NYPL, Berg Collection

Nabokov suggested the very basic design used for his books by both Putnam's and McGraw-Hill: a solid background, preferably white, with simple, bold lettering, as in this pen-and-ink sketch.

Korol', dama, valet (King, queen, knave) was, like Mashen'ka, conceived, executed and published in just over a year. It focuses on the lives of three Germans: Franz; his aunt Martha, with whom he is carrying on an affair; and his uncle Kurt Dreyer, whom they plot to murder. It was a great popular success, earning positive reviews, an evening of public debate in Berlin, and a remunerative sale of German rights that enabled Nabokov and Véra to settle their debts. With the balance that remained, they embarked on their first butterfly excursion together, to the Pyrenees.Nabokov's son, Dmitri, took an original pass at translating Korol', dama, valet into English. Nabokov's biographer Brian Boyd claims that in reviewing Dmitri Nabokov's literal translation of Korol', dama, valet Vladimir Nabokov "altered the novel at every level." After comparing the father's version and the son's version, Julian V. Connolly, a Nabokov scholar, concludes that "[Vladimir Nabokov's] revisions not only tighten the work in terms of plot and characterization, they significantly expand the richness of its literary and metaliterary allusiveness." Nabokov defends these alterations in the foreword: "Very soon I asserted [ascertained] that the original sagged considerably more than I had expected.... [M]y main purpose in making [the "little changes"] was not to beautify a corpse but rather to permit a still breathing body to enjoy certain innate capacities which inexperience and eagerness, the haste of thought and the sloth of word had denied it formerly. Within the texture of the creature, those possibilities were practically crying to be developed or teased out."


Zashchita Luzhina, Berlin, 1930 (The Defense, 1964)

Zashchita Luzhina (The defense), the novel Nabokov later described as the "story of a chess player who was crushed by his genius," was his first complete critical success. It provoked Nina Berberova to claim that Nabokov's work validated the entire generation of émigré writers, and it drew this praise from Ivan Bunin: "This kid has snatched a gun and done away with the whole older generation, myself included."
For the English-language version, The Defense, Nabokov remained quite faithful to the Russian original while aggressively revising Michael Scammell's literal translation. In a remarkable decision, The New Yorker ran the entire novel in two installments in 1965.

Nabokov's novella Sogliadatai (The eye), whose narrator has supposedly committed suicide as the story begins, was serialized in Sovremennye zapiski in the fall of 1930, and was also excerpted in Poslednie novosti. It did not appear in book form until 1938, when Nabokov collected it with 12 other stories, inaugurating the 13-story collection as the standard format for nearly all his American compilations. The English translation, The Eye, appeared in 1965 in Playboy. Phaedra, a French publisher, later undertook its book publication, though without any accompanying stories.


A family affair: Podvig, Paris, 1932 (Glory, 1971)

NYPL, Berg Collection

This typescript draft of Glory, translated from the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov in 1970, features his father's holograph corrections, additions and deletions.

 

Nabokov had considered several titles for his next work: Voploshchenie ("the 'realization' of a plan, the 'embodiment' of a dream"), Zolotoy vek ("golden age") and others, before settling on Podvig (Glory) as the name of the book, whose serialization began in February 1931.

In 1966 he described Podvig as "the story of a Russian expatriate, a romantic young man of my set and time, a lover of adventure for adventure's sake, proud flaunter of peril, climber of unnecessary mountains, who merely for the pure thrill of it decides one day to cross illegally into Soviet Russia, and then cross back to exile. Its main theme is the overcoming of fear, the glory and rapture of that victory." Two characters--Vadim and Teddy--were, at least in part, based on close friends from Trinity College: Prince Nikita Romanov and Robert de Calry were two of Nabokov's most cherished companions at Cambridge and merited inclusion in his memoir, Speak, Memory.


The 1971 translation of Podvig into English was a family affair. Dmitri had undertaken the task in good faith, but after several months of continual disruptions by his career (he was an opera singer), it was still unfinished. Véra translated the final third, and Nabokov revised the whole to make it "meticulously true to the [Russian] text." When he had nearly finished the final read-through, Nabokov wrote in his diary: "Two pages left! ... the entire thing corrected by me, an excruciating task that took three months to complete with a few interruptions. Last Russian novel, thank God."




Retranslation: Kamera obskura, Berlin, 1933 (Laughter in the Dark, 1938)

NYPL, Berg Collection

Nabokov's copy of Camera Obscura (translated by Winifred Roy, 1936). He signed the name "Sirin" to his early Russian work. The translation was denounced by Nabokov as "inexact and full of hackneyed expressions meant to tone down all the tricky passages."

Nabokov developed Kamera obskura (Laughter in the Dark) from the sketch of his earlier, unpublished story "Bird of Paradise." Despite the dwindling numbers of Russians in Berlin--by the summer of 1931 there were 30,000--Nabokov was able to draw full houses to two readings in the fall and winter.

Though the readings and publication were well received, Nabokov was not satisfied with the novel. But despite the book's flaws, he was eager to see this Russian work brought out in English. In 1936 he sold the rights to Hutchinson & Co., which released Winifred Roy's disastrous version, Camera Obscura, under its John Long imprint
Two years later, Nabokov retranslated it himself, ironing out many of the flaws of the original text while completing it as Laughter in the Dark. The character names were changed, but the essential plot remained intact: unbeknownst to the married Kretschmar (Albert Albinus in the English version), his lover Magda (Margot) takes up with a former flame, Robert Horn (Axel Rex). Even after Kretschmar uncovers the affair and is physically and metaphorically blinded by his anguish, Magda continues to deceive him. Kretschmar confronts her at gunpoint, but dies in the struggle. Harold Strauss's New York Times review faulted Nabokov for his lack of "real sympathy for any of his characters," but identified Laughter in the Dark as a "slight but expertly fashioned ... psychological novel."


Pulp fiction: Otchaianie, Berlin, 1936 (Despair, 1966)
 
Nabokov visited Paris in October 1936 for his first public reading there and to assess the feasibility of moving from Berlin. A public triumph, the reading included the first two

NYPL, Berg Collection

This map, hand-drawn by Nabokov, shows Kolberg, on the Wolziger See, where he, V�ra, and her cousin Anna Feigin purchased land in 1929. The property became the murder scene in Despair.

chapters of Otchaianie (Despair), then still titled "Zapiski mistifikatora" (Notes of a hoaxer). The plot revolves around a man who tries to fake his own death by murdering a vagrant he believes can pass for his double.

The only clearly autobiographical element of the novel is the setting for the murder, which takes place on the property about an hour out of Berlin that Nabokov and Véra had purchased jointly with Véra's cousin, Anna Feigin, with the intention of building on it one day. Ultimately, the only useful purpose that the land at Kolberg, on the Wolziger See, would serve for Nabokov was this fictional one. When their payments lapsed, ownership devolved to the seller.


Nabokov had learned his lesson from the botched English translation of Kamera obskura the year before, and decided to translate Otchaianie himself. To his chagrin, Despair fared no better than Camera Obscura had, and Nabokov blamed his English publisher, Hutchinson, for releasing his sophisticated works under its pulp-fiction imprint, John Long. He later referred to the novel as "something more than an essay on the psychology of crime," but admitted, "[It] turns out to be a half-baked thriller--even when I translate it myself!" In 1965, he overhauled this version, rewriting much of the original text. This revamped version was serialized in Playboy at the end of that year, and it won the magazine's annual Best Fiction award, which included a $1,000 cash prize.


His son's first translation: Priglashenie na kazn', Paris, 1938 (Invitation to a Beheading, 1959)

Nabokov wrote this anti-totalitarian novel in "a burst of spontaneous generation," composing the first draft in Berlin during a short hiatus from his major Russian novel, Dar (The gift), during the summer of 1934, when Hitler's presence had become oppressive. That winter he continued to revise, while Véra prepared the typescript. As late as 1967, he still reserved "the greatest esteem" for this novel--while feeling "most affection" for Lolita--even more than for Pale Fire and The Gift. It was the first title to be picked up by Radio Liberty's CIA-sponsored publication project, which was devoted to bringing émigré literature, censored as little as possible and distributed gratis, into the former Soviet Union under contrived publishing house imprints.


In 1959, Invitation to a Beheading became the first in a lifelong series of translations by Dmitri Nabokov of his father's stories, novels, poetry, drama, essays and letters, both "in collaboration with the author" and on his own. Then 25 years old, Dmitri already had wide experience in translation, including a collaboration with his father on a translation of Lermontov's A Hero of Our Times. He prepared the literal translation, which his father reviewed, noting years later that "the only corrections which its transformation into English could profit by were routine ones.... My son proved to be a marvelously congenial translator...." Despite Nabokov's enthusiasm for his son's efforts, Véra admitted to one friend: "Poor Dmitri did not get enough credit from the papers.... For reasons of copyright, this translation had to be described as done 'in collaboration with the author.'"


A giant among us: Dar, New York, 1952 (The Gift, 1963)
 
Nabokov's Russian masterwork tells the story of "a great writer in the making." It contains a good deal of autobiographical material, including the seemingly preordained courtship and marriage of the central couple, Fyodor and Zina, and an especially vivid portrait of the hero's father. Still, in a 1962 interview Nabokov reflected: "I am very careful to keep my characters beyond the limits of my own identity. Only the background of the novel can be said to contain some biographical touches."

NYPL, Berg Collection

Nabokov added the embellishments to this photograph taken of him in Berlin in 1925. Photographer unknown.

Nabokov's protagonist is Fyodor, whose chef d'oeuvre is a critical biography of Nikolai Chernyshevski, the father of socialist realism in 1860s Russia and a revered figure in Soviet circles. In addition to writing his own novel about Fyodor, Nabokov had to compose Fyodor's poetry and prose as well as his biography of Chernyshevski, which required a substantial amount of "monstrously difficult" research.

Public readings in 1935 and 1937 received positive responses, but Sovremennye zapiski, the faithful publisher of his previous six novels, refused to print chapter 4, "The Life of Chernyshevski," in which Nabokov lampooned the Russian literary legend. Nabokov dug in his heels, and wrote to his editors: "I can accept no compromises or joint efforts and have no intention of striking out or altering a single line." Ultimately, though, he gave in. Dar was serialized in Sovremennye zapiski, without the controversial chapter, from April 1937 to October 1938. He would have to wait 15 years to see the censored text restored, when the novel was issued in New York in 1952 by Chekhov House, an arm of the Ford Foundation's Eastern European Fund, which sought to promote internal and external émigré writers in their mother countries.


The translation of Dar into English was one of Nabokov's earliest goals after his emigration to the United States in 1940. In 1942 he wrote to James Laughlin at New Directions but failed to elicit interest in the project. Ten years later he approached Viking Press, which also declined. Finally, yet another decade later, Putnam's agreed. The success of that firm's 1958 edition of Lolita had given Nabokov substantial lobbying power, which he used to bring about the English translations of Invitation to a Beheading (1959), The Defense (1964) and Despair

	Discussion
	It is said that poetry is what is lost in translation, but nevertheless, discovering a wonderful writer in translation can be a thrilling experience. Discuss the foreign writers and works that exercised an unusually strong impact when you first read them in translation.

 (1966), as well as The Gift (1963).

The enthusiastic reception he received from his next publisher, McGraw-Hill, would allow him to bring the rest of his Russian novels into English, as King, Queen, Knave (1968), Mary (1970) and Glory (1971), and to publish translations of his Russian stories from the 1920s and '30s. Dmitri began the translation of Dar, but had time for only the first chapter. Nabokov translated all of the poetry himself--both overtly and disguised--and supervised Michael Scammell's translation of the balance of the text. Two excerpts appeared in The New Yorker before the book came out.


Brian Boyd sums up the critical response to The Gift, published 25 years after its Russian original: "Advertised as 'the greatest Russian novel to appear in the last fifty years,' its appearance confirmed the depth and range of Nabokov's talent. A New York Herald Tribune review was not atypical: 'As if we all didn't know, there is a giant among us ...'"

  Rodney Phillips, Sarah Funke 
The New York Public Library