What the feud between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson says about translation | Hacker News Reader

What the feud between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson says about translation

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45 pointslermontov21 comments

I have not read Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin, but this piece led me to wonder if he was an inspiration for Stanley Lombardo's translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which are stark departures from previous translations that eschew meter in favor of clarity and meaning.

(As a side note, those translations are fantastic, and I highly recommend them.)

I've read it and own the two-volume paperback version (someone made the mistake of asking me what I wanted for Christmas a few years ago).

The actual poem left me completely cold (and it's the only version I've ever read). The footnotes and everything else are fascinating. Everything in Nabokov's own voice is always, and everywhere, a joy to read. He was, as he tried to explain, creating a reference work, an aid to scholars and students, not a translation to "enjoy". You turn to it to find out what Pushkin wrote in his poem, rendered into English, as accurately as possible. Wilson just failed to understand the purpose of this work and his criticisms were irrelevant.

I'm interested in people's opinions of the Lombardo translations. Looking for a version of the Illiad to read.

Thanks for the explanation. That makes more sense, and that's definitely not what Lombardo did with his Iliad. Lombardo stresses clear and accurate intention rendered into English. He retains a verse form, but it's blank verse. It's very much a spirit of the verse translation over the letter. For example, he'll drop epithets here and there, assuming you don't need to know for the thirtieth time that Achilles is the son of Peleus, but he doesn't drop all of them so that you get to see them. It is by no means perfect, but I've read multiple translations (Pope, Fitzgerald, Fagles). The Pope is kind of wonderful for what it is, but it's dated and extremely loose in order to fit his verse form, and I would not recommend it as a first translation. I do recommend the Lombardo as a first translation. It's worth noting that no translation truly does justice to the original language, but I don't think that possible or even necessary.

Thank you. I really appreciate your comments about the Iliad translations.

That's the part I don't understand about their feud. (I haven't read the translation, just reviews of Beam's book.) It seemed clear that Nabokov's translation aims at a different purpose than more "readable" translations, and there is a valid place for both approaches.

Just a book recommendation: If you want to get a feel for Nabokov (and his depth), have a look at the "Annotated Lolita" - the editor points out so many details and allusions as to make your head spin.

https://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Lolita-Revised-Updated/dp/0...

For something ever so slightly lighter, consider "Pnin"; for some heavy (but delightful) going, consider "Pale Fire". Bring time and a drink.

Do you have any tips/advice related to Dostoevsky? Editions? Annotations? I'll take anything.

Unfortunately not, neither for Tolstoy. Anyone?

I'm by no means an expert but from my experience the Maude translation of War and Peace is rather nice. Can be a little difficult to find though.

Nice, I've got the Maude translation of War and Peace. Search on Libgen, 99% of things are there.

I read Garnett and P/V translations side by side for a while and found P/V to be remarkably more vivid.

We've been using both P/V and Garnett on this Goodreads group for "Demons". The prose of P/V is often more arresting and grabs one's interest more readily; Garnett is also quite good in most places, and has the advantage of being available on Gutenberg for copy/paste.

https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/207716-dostoevsky-demon...

As someone bilingual in Russian and English, I have to say that translating between the two languages is quite hard.

* English has a fixed word order: "man bites dog" != "dog bites man". Russian allows words to be reordered, phrases split and interleaved, to achieve the desired emphasis, flow, or emotional impact.

* English has a flexible information structure: the topic and the focus can be in any order. In literary Russian, the information structure is fixed: the focus goes at the end of the phrase.

* The English verb system (emphasizing the relative order of events) and Russian verb system (emphasizing the aspect and manner of action) map rather poorly onto each other in either direction.

* One language may require a positive statement where the other requires a negative statement - and vice versa, with no general pattern. Compare English "the best movie ever" and the Russian equivalent "лучше фильма не видел" (literally, "a better movie [than this one] I have not seen")...

* Technical English loves to agglutinate random roots together to make a new word. Unpacking and serializing the result in Russian typically results in something long, awful, and bureaucratic-sounding.

* Russian loves hard-to-translate impersonal statements (следует, нельзя), and its system of diminutives/augmentatives doesn't have a nice correspondence in English.

* It is very often difficult to find a translation that matches both the intended meaning and the "feel" (positive, negative, common, unusual, colloquial, old-fashioned, scientific) of a word.

And that's even before you attempt to replicate a particular poetic rhyme and meter in a language less well suited for it.

As someone dabbling in translation (I'm currently translating an English-language book my wife uses in homeschooling our kids to French), I have to say that it's much harder than it looks.

Despite having a pretty good command of both languages, some things just don't really apply. For instance, there was a lengthy discussion about CE, AD, and BCE dates, but in French we pretty much only use "av. J.C." and "ap. J.C" (before and after Jesus Christ), so I had to trim it down a lot.

Keeping the appropriate tone throughout is pretty hard, too.

Getting the tone of voice right is especially tricky in my experience. As a reader I always find translations harder to 'accept'; I am always left wondering where the author's work stops and the translator's starts, especially with the translated renditions of dialects and socio-economically stratified language.

Alas, there are only so many languages one can manage to read effectively in. For some languages, such as Russian or ancient Greek, I will likely remain dependent on translators.

On the topic of the ongoing migration to CE/BCE in English; I have no French lingual experience to speak of, but aren't ÈC (Ère commune) and ÈV (Ère vulgaire) equivalent to CE and BCE respectively?

I gave my French tutor a book by the Douglas Hofstadter, Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise Of The Music Of Language[1]. A book that deals with this very challenge. French is such a beautiful language that translations of poetic French involves a number of compromises.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Ton-Beau-Marot-Praise-Language/dp/046...

"Beam’s book does not really belong to the Russian translation wars. It is better assigned to that burgeoning field in the humanities, affect or emotion studies (subsets: shame studies, insult studies, disappointment, and regret studies)..."

That is one way to put lipstick on the flamewar-as-entertainment pig.

As for the argument itself, I applaud Nabokov's contextual literalism, but if the result is rough and uneven where the original was lyrical, I don't know that the author would thank him.

Nabokov's intention in translating Onegin was obviously to create something like the circumstances of "Pale Fire." It has always struck me as funny that this is brought up as some kind of critical debate about approaches to translation, when it was more along the lines of performance art.

I've always assumed the opposite, where Pale Fire was a sort of self-parodical novel, playing on Nabokov's realization of his own eccentricities.

Although Pale Fire came out in 1962 and Nabokov's Onegin in 1964, he had been working on Onegin translation since at least 1950, according to a piece he wrote in 1955, yclept 'Problems of Translation: "Onegin" in English'. A favorite quote of mine from that Partisan Review article:

"I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity."[1]

I highly recommend giving the article a read if you haven't come upon it, and are interested in hearing his theory (and distaste for "substitut[ing] easy platitudes for the breathtaking intricacies of the text") in his own words!

Performance art it may well still be! But, a performance involving writing precise treatises well before Pale Fire was released.

[1]http://hgar-srv3.bu.edu/collections/partisan-review/search/d... , the article starts on page 496/148.

Thanks for the link!

Yes, I should have been more clear in original post. I think Onegin, Pale Fire, and his other critical writings on translation are all part of the same artistic performance. We tend to look at writers/artist through this kind of atomizing lens, distinguishing one work from another in a kind of consumptive mode. Each book as a product to be evaluated in relation to others, it's techniques separate from the experience of the work. I think this says more about the circumstances of art under Capitalism than a writer's/artist's subjectivity, especially in the case of someone like Nabokov, who was so obviously fond of meta-narratives and intertexuality.

This is an interesting and thought-provoking read. Thank you for posting it.

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