Translators are the ghosts of the literary profession, invisible men who don a mask and pretend to be someone else. Translating is a peculiar occupation, especially when the mask you wear belongs to a writer who is still alive, as Vladimir Nabokov very much was when I worked for him. To impersonate such a protean stylist would have been hard for anyone and certainly exceeded the powers of a near beginner like myself, but I was young and brash and willing to try. Nabokov valued me, I now think, precisely because I was green and malleable enough to bend to his whims and listen to what he said. And when in one respect I ceased to listen, our collaboration ended.
I met him forty years ago, by sheer coincidence. I was a graduate student in Russian literature at Columbia University, and in the fall of 1959 I rented a room from an elderly Russian émigré named Anna Feigin. Anna found me unbearably supercilious at first and so insufferably “English” that she longed to throw me out. Luckily she couldn’t afford to: I was the only one who had answered her advertisement.
My aloofness issued more from self-doubt than from national stereotypes, and my periodic arrogance disguised an inferiority complex rather than the reverse, which Anna quickly realized. “I am extremely pleased with my new tenant,” she wrote to a first cousin some time after I arrived. “He is decent, kind and modest, and works all the time.” It is immodest of me to quote this, of course, but it is relevant to another part of this story. Anna was especially impressed by the fact that I had studied Russian, had spent several months living with a family of Russian émigrés in Paris, and was reasonably fluent in French as well as Russian. “In short, I’ve never seen the like around here. And he brought a whole library of books with him.”
Anna’s letter now resides in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, where I read it not very long ago, but at the time I knew little about the nature of her feelings toward me. I did, however, begin to get to know her better. Short to begin with, Anna was bent even shorter by arthritis; the creases in her friendly face would often deepen as she grimaced with the pain of a sudden movement. Despite having a cousin and a few friends in New York, she did not like to go out much. One of her reasons for having a tenant, she told me, was that she feared attack if she lived alone. I told her not to be afraid. I had grown up in tougher circumstances in a working-class family in England and was sure I could take care of her (those were the days before the drug boom and the appearance of guns on every street corner).
Anna was fascinated by my stories. The daughter of rich Jewish parents, and a concert pianist by training, she would have had a glittering career if the Bolsheviks had not forced her to move to Berlin. Like many Russian émigrés, she had moved to France to flee the Nazis and from there had escaped by the skin of her teeth to America on the eve of World War II. She knew about privation and poverty but had little concept of the English class system that I criticized so bitterly.
We discussed Russian literature in the kitchen she let me share with her. I expressed, among many other opinions, admiration for Nabokov’s provocative study of Gogol and praised the novel Pnin, his affectionate portrait of an absented-minded Russian scholar at sea on an American campus. I told her that I was also interested in translation and had translated parts of Chekhov and Lermontov into English. In late fall I told her about my first publishing commission, to translate Cities and Years, a modernist novel by the Soviet author Konstantin Fedin. Anna made a face at the word “Soviet,” but was pleased by my success. As I now know, she also reported these conversations to her cousin.
In February, 1960, Anna unexpectedly invited me to dinner. It was a unique occasion. Despite our many friendly chats, I had never been through the door that led to her parlor and private living quarters. On the night in question I knocked on her door, entered, and was solemnly introduced to a tall avuncular gentleman with an Edwardian air, a plummy English lisp, and a firm handshake, and to a perfectly coiffed, petite, white-haired lady, who looked perfectly elegant in the perfect French manner—Mr. and Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov. An immensely tall young man, about my age, uncoiled himself from a low armchair and introduced himself as their son, Dmitri.
Anna was Vera Nabokov’s first cousin, and not just any cousin but virtually Vera’s elder sister. They had lived in the same apartment in Berlin before Vera’s marriage to Vladimir. Anna had typed Nabokov’s first novel, Mary. The three of them had gone on holidays together, had planned to build a joint summer house, and were close neighbors throughout most of their years in Europe. It was the Nabokovs who had brought Anna to the United States from occupied France. And Vera was the cousin to whom Anna had been writing about me, which is why her letters are now in the Berg Collection.
It would be nice to say that I have a vivid memory of that first meeting, but I don’t. I do remember deep armchairs, an oriental rug, vases of flowers, and a table set with fine china. But the rest is a blur. Nabokov was basking in the afterglow of his huge success with Lolita. The novel had turned him into a world-class celebrity and had made him rich. Stanley Kubrick had paid an enormous sum for the movie rights, and Nabokov had just returned to New York from five luxurious months in Europe—his first visit there since his hasty escape from the Nazis in 1940. He was now on his way to Hollywood to write a script for Kubrick. More importantly for my immediate future, Nabokov had just come to an arrangement with Putnam to publish translations of several of his early Russian novels in English.
A short time after that dinner, Anna casually asked if I could give her one of my translations to send to Nabokov. I handed her a short story, “Gusev,” by Anton Chekhov. I received a letter back from Vera, now in Hollywood, to say that she and her husband had no copy of Chekhov in Russian to compare my work with, but would I care to translate three pages from Chapter 4 of Nabokov’s last Russian novel, The Gift?
“If my husband suggests a sample to be translated out of this book it is because you will have no difficulty in borrowing a copy from my cousin, while we shall be able to check your version using a copy we have here... My husband asks me to add that the passage in question is difficult”—“much more difficult,” she herself added, “than Chehov.” Vera wrote that publishers would pay six dollars a page, a handsome price at the time, and that her husband was frequently asked by publishers to suggest to them the names of suitable translators.
The three pages began with a poem, which I was asked not to bother with, and a passage whose opening sentences I translated as follows:
A sonnet, apparently barring the way, but perhaps, on the contrary, providing a secret link which would explain everything—if only man’s mind could withstand that explanation. The soul sinks into a momentary dream— and now with the peculiar theatrical vividness of those risen from the dead, they come out to meet us: father Gavriil, in a silk pomegranate chasuble, with a long staff, an embroidered sash across his wide stomach, and with him, already illumined by the sun, an extremely attractive little boy—pink, awkward, and delicate.
Yes, this was certainly different from Chekhov.
It was a month before I sent back the three pages, not because they were so difficult (though they were certainly that) but because I had my graduate studies to attend to. Vera wrote to thank me for the translation. “My husband thinks it is perfectly wonderful.” “Pomegranate,” a literal translation, was amended by Nabokov to “cerise” and later to “garnet-red”; the wide stomach became a “big” one, and there were more changes further on, but the passage survives recognizably in the published version. Vera asked if I would be prepared to translate the rest of Chapter 4. Son Dmitri was planning to translate most of the novel, but he had just won a scholarship to sing with La Scala in Milan and doubted if he could manage the whole book. “If this offer is acceptable, I would like to add one more thing: my husband always reserves the right to make any changes in the finished translations. He wants from the translator as close an adherence to the original as possible.”
The offer surprised me more than it should have. Vera had covered herself by saying that Nabokov might suggest my name to publishers if he liked my translations. Barely a word had been said about translating Nabokov himself. I had been covertly tested without knowing it. But I was happy to have passed the test and had no problem with Nabokov’s last stipulation. Although I hadn’t then heard of his injunction to translators to follow “the servile path,” I firmly believed that the translator’s job was to come between author and reader as little as possible. As a translator, I was servile by instinct and therefore closer to his ideal than I realized.
BY NOW it was the early summer of 1960. I had traveled out to the small fishing village of Sausalito, just north of San Francisco, where friends told me I would find the Beat poets and their allies. Oddly enough, at the very moment I was drifting into the orbit of the great mandarin of modern American prose, I was searching for his polar opposite: the literary avant-garde. As a young would-be writer of twenty-five, I preferred the “hot” prose of D.H. Lawrence and the young Saul Bellow as well as the breathless Kerouac to the chilly baroque splendors of Nabokov. True, Lolita had been pretty hot in its way, but it struck me as more like a baked Alaska: hot, sweet meringue on the outside, ice-cold at the core. In truth, I was less enamored of Humbert Humbert’s masturbatory monologues than I dared own up to at the time.
I was too late for the Beat poets (and too early for Haight-Ashbury). I settled down to a lonely bachelor life in my room in Sausalito (rented to me by yet another Russian émigré) and started on Cities and Years. Vera was soon in touch with a “better plan” than before. Would I translate another Nabokov novel, The Luzhin Defense, in its entirety? The book, about an errant chess genius, was shorter and easier than The Gift, but the translation was needed “as soon as possible.” I demurred. I had to finish Cities and Years first and would be returning to New York to prepare for my graduate orals. Vera came back with a new suggestion: Dmitri was overwhelmed by his music studies, so would I do Chapters 2 through 5 of The Gift and revise Dmitri’s Chapter 1 to suit?
Vera already took it for granted that I would translate at least one novel, if not two, but I was still a reluctant debutant. Nabokov, it must be remembered, although an instant celebrity, was not yet a literary colossus. Lolita had been a succès de scandale as much as it had been a literary event. The nine novels, several dozen short stories, innumerable poems, and handful of plays Nabokov had written in Russian were completely unknown to the English speaking world (and also to me), while Pale Fire, Ada, and all of the later works were still to come. I admired what prose I had seen, but I was far from falling in love with it.
Nevertheless, I was highly honored and flattered by Nabokov’s attention, and the six dollars a page spoke loudly to an impoverished graduate student. Vera sent the outlines of a contract. It was a wonderfully simple document, typed on one and a half pages by Vera herself. I would undertake to deliver a complete translation of The Gift within one calendar year and would revise the first hundred pages or so completed by Dmitri. But I balked at Vera’s stipulation that the translation was to be “faithful, exact, and complete.” How, I wanted to know, would the courts define “faithful” and “exact”? I didn’t anticipate any difficulties between us, I wrote back, but “I would prefer to have these words either omitted or faithfully and exactly defined.”
This cocksure phrase seemed rather witty to me at the time and was a hint of the tone I was to adopt in subsequent correspondence. Like many insecure individuals, I was always fiercer on paper than in the flesh. Fortunately, Vera was tolerant and quietly dropped the words I objected to without comment. Nabokov reserved the right to make “any changes and/or corrections in the finished text” he found “necessary or desirable,” and also the right to dispose of it as he wished. It was enough. We signed the contract in August 1960.
AT THE end of the summer I acquired my first automobile and drove erratically to Los Angeles on the beginning leg of a transcontinental trip home. The Nabokovs were staying in Mandeville Canyon Road and invited me to lunch. We ate on a pretty terrace fringed with hibiscus, palm trees, and subtropical bushes that I did not recognize. Nabokov, little suspecting the difficulties that lay ahead, was in an expansive mood and professed himself extremely satisfied with his Lolita script. He warmly approved of my plan to write a dissertation on the structure of Anna Karenina and expressed his deep admiration for Tolstoy.
It was six more months before I could get to the translation of The Gift, which, contrary to my hopes, turned out to be a long-distance collaboration with the author. I started it in New York, did most of the work in Southampton, England, completed the book in Paris and Milan, and mailed the final chapter from Ljubljana in the former Yugoslavia (Vera wrote that the book had been opened by customs but had made it across the border with no losses.) The Nabokovs during this time moved from Los Angeles to Nice (spending the winter on the Promenade des Anglais), then to Stresa, Italy, to Champex in the Swiss Alps, where Nabokov hunted butterflies, to Geneva, and finally to Montreux. We did at one point discuss a meeting to go over the text together, but in the end it proved impossible, and the whole thing was done by correspondence.
Correspondence, in this case, meant correspondence with Vera. It is a commonplace that Nabokov never wrote letters. There were exceptions to the rule: the famous correspondence with Edmund Wilson, for instance. But it was generally true. As Stacy Schiff has shown in her biography of Vera, it was a convenient way for Nabokov not only to guard his time but to erect yet one more barrier between himself and the outside world. In my case, as I later saw in the Berg Collection, he annotated the letters and lists of questions I sent to him, and Vera wrote the final replies, often reproducing the exact phraseology he had used in his notes. In the three years of our collaboration, I received only three letters signed by him.
Much of the correspondence was taken up with technical matters. The transliteration of Russian names and letters into English, to which Nabokov would devote many pages in his introduction to his translation of Eugene Onegin, was a particularly hot topic. Reading over Dmitri’s chapter after it had been corrected by Nabokov, I had the nerve to observe that “complete chaos reigns in the transliteration of Russian characters... particularly over the Russian vowels.” I objected to Nabokov’s spelling of “Chehov,” which sounded funny to the English ear in place of the customary Chekhov, said I preferred “tsar” to the Germanic (and unfortunately American) “czar,” and contested a number of other spellings that looked awkward or comical or Gallic to me.
Nabokov, via Vera, responded mildly to these strictures, accepting “tsar” and a number of other suggestions, and also sending me a copy of his Onegin system of transliteration. On the subject of “Chehov,” however, he and Vera were adamant.
My husband... absolutely insists on Chehov (not Tchechov—a semi-Germanism—or Tscekhov, etc). He assures you that it does not matter that Chehov sounds funny to an Englishman: being much more nearly correct than the other varieties, it will gradually become more accepted... He also assures you that Tschekhov, Tchechov, etc. sound even funnier to a Russian than Chehov does to an Englishman.
I was riled by both the tone and the content of this little lecture, and after an elaborately polite discussion of the pros and cons of various transliteration systems and their inevitable imperfections, I couldn’t resist a retaliation.
In replying to [my suggestions], you quote about five ludicrous spellings for Chekhov and refuse them all successfully—but without ever saying that I never suggested them, or that I find them as ridiculous as you do. Nor do you anywhere quote the suggestion that I did make— namely the spelling I use above... I trust you will not condemn me on the basis of some monstrous, mythical Tschekhov in the future.
And that was not all.
You say in your letter that “it does not matter that Chehov sounds funny to an Englishman” since other varieties sound even funnier to a Russian. Forgive me, but I was under the impression that the Russian ear had been catered to in the Russian, and that this edition was intended for the English-speaking world.
There was more in the same vein, and Vera nicely apologized in her next letter. But she did not give way on the spelling of “Chehov.”
Later we got into another altercation over Tolstoy—not the name but the name of one of his works. I had written to say that my dissertation was to be a structural analysis of Anna Karenina. “Anna Karenin (not Karenina, please!),” replied Vera. I knew what she meant. The “a” is merely the feminine form of “Karenin” that logically shouldn’t exist in English. But again I dug in my heels. “Of course you are right, strictly speaking, but... Anna came into English literature and into my life as Karenina, and Karenina she will remain.” I then (mimicking Nabokov) scanned the two names and innocently added that to use “Karenin” would be “like translating a Pushkin line accurately and completely destroying the rhythm.” Little did I realize the aptness of that lighthearted comment.
Another intricate subject was the question of what kind of English to use for the translation—English English or American English? It mattered less to Nabokov’s elaborately formal prose than it would have to that of a more colloquial writer, but the question came up more often than I had expected. I boasted (unjustifiably, I now think) that I was comfortable with “either dialect” but found it confusing to come across “tram” and “streetcar” on the same page, and later complained: “You have changed my anglicisms to Americanisms and my Americanisms to anglicisms—which way do you want me to go?” It turned out that I was more worried about this question than Nabokov was; it didn’t matter to him nearly as much as transliteration.
American English, please, whenever there is an essential divergence between the two. On the whole, however, my husband thinks that the idiom should be more or less neutral. He does not mind if “tram” and “streetcar” appear on the same page.
By the end of July 1961 I had finished Chapter 4 and by mid-August was close to the end of Chapter 5. Vera wrote to say that her husband was “amazed at the speed with which you work.” I, too, am amazed when I look back. To say I was inspired would be misleading. On the contrary: I wasn’t moved by Nabokov’s prose at all. I was too young and too ignorant. I found its rhythms florid, mannered, and artificial, and its metaphorical tropes reductive. Instead of art being ennobled by its likeness to nature, nature was likened to a collection of artistic effects. This reversal of the usual order was part of Nabokov’s originality. In his ludic universe, life imitated art, not the other way round. All was artifice and device, an approach that I was able to savor only with maturity. But at that early age I did not respond; Nabokov’s prose was the opposite of the spontaneity and romanticism of my favorite writers.
What was left—and it still was plenty—was the novel as a glorious puzzle, a box of tricks that the enchanted reader makes his way through as he opens more and more compartments. In some ways it was a metaphor for the very act of translation I was engaged in, since every text presents itself to the translator as a succession of obstacles to be overcome. In the case of The Gift, whose narrative was deliberately strewn with elaborate traps and decoys, the challenge was doubled, and there were moments when I seriously doubted my ability to cope: “Your husband’s text is so crammed with nuances, so rich in diminutives, augmentatives, archaisms, slang, rare words, etc.,” I wrote early on in my work, “that I despair of ever rendering even a tenth part of it into English. A pale copy seems to be about the best I can produce.” But the battle of wits between me and the text strongly appealed to my competitive instincts, and I did improve with practice.
On a syntactical level, Nabokov turned out to be surprisingly easy to translate. His Russian was saturated with echoes of French and English, and his sentence structure was very Latinate: like Tolstoy’s. Compared with Chekhov (despite Vera’s boast), and especially compared with Gogol or Dostoyevsky, whom I was later to translate, Nabokov composed sentences that were not all that difficult to dismantle and reconstruct, and this sped up the work immensely. It was on the lexical level that he became so fiendishly difficult, and here I truly floundered. One problem was that I didn’t have a sufficient number and variety of dictionaries at my elbow in England to resolve the knottier problems, whereas Nabokov’s responses to my questions were littered with “see Webster’s,” “see O.E.D.,” etc., which offered an interesting insight into his own procedures. As Homer or the Bible are to some writers, dictionaries were to Nabokov. But even with a mountain of reference works at my disposal I could never have been equal to Nabokov’s immensely rich and idiosyncratic vocabulary.
I was also obliged to rush through the translation much faster than I would have wished in order to meet our agreed-upon deadline of August. If there was an excess of errors, I explained to Vera, it was due to speed more than incompetence. I needn’t have hurried. Nabokov was delayed by the exacting and exhausting work required of him to finish Pale Fire, which was now scheduled to appear before The Gift, and he said he wouldn’t be able to get to the translation for several months. In view of the increased time available I offered to take the last couple of chapters back and rework them, but Vera said it would not be necessary. I was still hoping that I would be able to get together with Nabokov and go over the translation in person, and there was talk of a rendezvous in England or New York, but nothing could be decided until Pale Fire was finished.
Meanwhile Nabokov continued to answer the various questions and problems I had raised concerning the early chapters. There was one passage in which I tried to emulate the protagonist’s rhyming schemes in English. “‘Crying’ immediately suggested lying and dying under sighing pines on a silent night. ‘Waterfall’ prompted my muse to recall some long forgotten ball. ‘Flowers’ called for hours about bowers which were ours,” and so on for the better part of a page.
Nabokov carefully read through my suggestions and sent back the following: “Letuchiy (flying) immediately grouped tuchi (clouds) over the kruchi (steeps) of the zhguchey (burning) desert and of neminuchey (inevitable) fate,” etc. I was not to diverge from the servile path even for a moment. Those familiar with Nabokov’s eccentric translation of Eugene Onegin (especially his commentary) will recognize the principle. Nabokov’s version was more faithful to the original’s literal sense, but I couldn’t suppress a pang over the loss of English rhythm and wordplay.
In Chapter 3 I encountered a characteristic blizzard of butterfly names and was completely flummoxed until Nabokov sent a list of equivalents. Malayan hawkmoth, swallowtail, painted lay, Amandus blue, Freya fritillary, and so on (a list that was just as beautiful in English as in the original Russian). Determined to do better with a long description of mushroom hunting, I labored for several days and through several dictionaries to do the passage justice, but when the emended text came back Nabokov had cut the entire passage. Mushroom hunting is a continental passion that means little to Anglo-Saxons, so Nabokov took an uncharacteristically pragmatic view and simply erased the scene.
It was, of course, an education in itself to work with him even by correspondence. I remember one page coming back with a long list of Russian synonyms for verbs depicting light in the margins, with their English equivalents attached: glimmer, glow, gleam, shine, twinkle, sparkle, dazzle, coruscate, and so on. There were little lessons on verbs of motion (a complicated business in Russian), and extensive instruction on botany, zoology, entomology, and every possible aspect of natural history.
I am often asked why it was that Nabokov even needed a translator into English. After all, the author of Bend Sinister, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Pnin, and Lolita was hardly lacking in English prose style. I myself asked him that question when I visited him in Los Angeles, and was given two reasons. The first was that he needed the precious time to go on writing original works in English. After all, he was already in his early sixties when he made his literary and popular breakthrough, and he wanted to do much more. The second reason, he said, was that he wanted to spare himself the temptation of rewriting his early Russian books in English instead of simply translating them.
Both reasons held largely true for The Gift. His corrections did border on revision at times, but Jane Grayson, an English professor who has studied these matters, states that on the whole he did not try to rewrite this important novel but carried out a creative reworking of my literal translation. This can be seen, says Grayson, if the translation is compared with the translations of earlier novels such as King, Queen, Knave and Laughter in the Dark, and Despair (all initially translated by Dmitri), which Nabokov rewrote extensively.
My own mission was to turn Nabokov’s Russian prose into more or less fluent English without either falling into the pit of literalism or sliding into the swamp of interpretation. I was adjured to reproduce the original as faithfully as I could but was expressly forbidden to be “creative.” That was Nabokov’s prerogative, as he confirmed in one of his rare signed letters:
Besides correcting direct mistakes I have dealt with a number of inaccuracies. In a few cases the changes are meant to simplify or clarify matters, or else they reflect my own predilections of style. I realize quite well that the odd turn of some of your sentences is owing to your desire to be faithful to every detail of the original, as I had asked you to be; but here and there you have been handicapped by not quite knowing the exact meaning of a Russian term, especially in the case of homonyms or words deceptively resembling one another. I have put an exclamation mark in the margin... merely in order to draw your attention to these shortcomings. The book is very hard to translate and in many cases you have found clever and elegant solutions. On the whole you have done a very good job.
In my general euphoria over the relative success of my translation of The Gift, and because we had not been able to meet, I tried to engage Nabokov in more personal correspondence. At one point I asked him about writers I thought might have influenced him, including Andrey Bely and the Russian Formalists. I also mentioned my admiration for the French painter Jean Dubuffet and asked Nabokov what he thought of Dubuffet’s collages of butterfly wings. Nabokov’s reply was succinct.
James Joyce. I greatly admire Ulysses. Bely. Petersburg is one of the three or four greatest novels of our time. I have never read The Good Soldier. Robbe-Grillet. Best French writer—but have never read his manifestoes. Shlovski. I seem to remember an essay of his on Onegin. Never met him. What is termed “formalism” contains certain trends absolutely repulsive to me. Collage of butterfly wings. A ridiculous mutilation.
By this time it had been agreed that I would translate a second novel of Nabokov’s, The Luzhin Defense (simplified to The Defense in English). In the interim I had married, and I successfully applied to Vera—for the first time—for an advance to help me rent a small apartment in New York. Vera sent the money instantly. She was a stickler in monetary matters but always treated me generously. I was so pleased to be paid regularly for such enjoyable work that I was the least demanding of employees when it came to money, but Vera insisted on paying for extras, such as checking Dmitri’s Chapter 1 of The Gift, and always paid my postal expenses. Later, when a long chapter (in addition to Dmitri’s Chapter 1) ran in The New Yorker, Vera sent me a handsome check as my share of the publication fee, which came as a complete surprise. A realist might say that such payment was only just, but I was a total novice in those days and was delighted by this unexpected bonus. I am sure that my eagerness to please contributed to our cloudless partnership that first year, and the Nabokovs responded with great courtesy and cordiality.
I started translating The Defense in the spring of 1962, shortly after getting married, but the work went slowly. I now had a job teaching Russian language and literature at Hunter College and was working on my dissertation in addition to translating. Since my wife and I were far too busy to take a honeymoon, we delayed it until the summer. We rented a former farmhouse in Brooklin on the coast of Maine, and I spent most of the two months we stayed there finishing the translation. Solzhenitsyn once told me that he read Karl Marx on his honeymoon. I translated Nabokov. I’m not sure which of us had the harder job, but I undoubtedly got the better deal.
The Defense was indeed shorter and easier than The Gift, as Vera had suggested, and by August 1962 it was completed. The Nabokovs had gone on vacation. I didn’t know where they were, and we ourselves had decided to drive across Canada and visit the World’s Fair in Seattle, so I took the typescript of the translation with me to await word of where to send it. In Seattle I heard from Vera that they had been butterfly hunting in Zermatt but were now in France, and could I send the translation?
At this point my relations with the Nabokovs were extremely cordial. We still had not managed to meet to discuss the translation of The Gift in person. Vera wrote to say that they had hoped to see me during a visit to New York in June, but I had already left for Maine. Perhaps they would manage it another time. We had also discussed the prospect of my translating more of Nabokov’s Russian novels. I had recently hesitated before signing a contract to do the first American translation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment because of that prospect, but Nabokov had said to go ahead. There would be quite a wait before the first two translations of his Russian work were out, and we could think about the future later.
I had every reason to feel pleased with myself, and when I mailed The Defense from a small town in Washington State called Walla Walla, I added chattily that we were there to watch our first rodeo. Vera replied:
It was nice to hear you have had so much fun from your trip to the West. I hope, though, that you hated the rodeo as much as I did: all those blockheads on poor deliberately tortured horses... those miserable calves half-crazed with fright. Almost as disgusting as the corrida.
Without knowing it, I had touched a sensitive nerve: Vera’s hatred of all forms of cruelty to animals. There was something in Vera’s governessy tone, however, that provoked me too, and I sent off an impassioned defense of bullfights and rodeos that ended intemperately:
Perhaps it has something to do with the masculine temperament and sensibilities. There is supposed to be an element of sadism in most of us (men) and I can certainly sense it in myself from time to time. I would be interested to know whether your husband agrees with you in this, but then he has at least one distinguished predecessor in D.H. Lawrence (The Plumed Serpent). For myself (and this is said utterly without rancor), I find it incomprehensible why butterflies should be stuck on pins.
The butterfly crack, with or without rancor, was indefensible, and there cannot be many instances of Nabokov being compared to D.H. Lawrence, nor of him being asked about sadism. My jejune letter brought forth an even more wrathful retort.
Cruelty is probably the worst evil that exists, and ever existed in the world, and—in my opinion—should be combatted vigorously, both within and without one’s personality. And sadism is the worst form of cruelty. Yes, my husband is with me in this appraisal, all the way. Incidentally, you do not believe, do you, that anyone in his right mind would be sticking pins into live butterflies? I am sorry if I sound didactic but I do think that logic is a healthy discipline for thought. But the way you reason one would be justifying Nazi extermination camps and Soviet Che-Ka next.
Very had clearly lost her temper, but I was too bumptious and blind to see it. I replied:
If logic can’t distinguish between prison camps and rodeos it doesn’t really recommend itself to me as a tool. I’m sure I feel the same way as you do about most forms of cruelty around us. It’s just that I draw the line at butterflies—I would rather see a live butterfly than a dead one (butterflies do die, don’t they?)—and you draw the line at calves being roped and flung to the ground (although they don’t die).
I cannot now defend my provocative comments on the sacred butterflies, nor the shrillness of my tone, but at the time, unbeknownst to myself, I did find one defender. Vera was in the habit of writing to Anna to check up on me or inform her about my progress. After our first meeting in New York, for example, Vladimir had come to the conclusion that I was gay and had continued in this delusion for about a year, until Anna informed him of my engagement. Now Vera wrote to Anna to complain about my intemperate letters. Anna replied that Vera and Vladimir were overreacting. “You completely fail to take into account that he is only twenty-five or twenty-six, and you are much older. You forget, or maybe you don’t know, that he comes from a poor, and more importantly, a deprived background.” Here Anna enumerated the various details of my English working-class childhood that she had picked up from our chats in her kitchen, and added: “I don’t think he was ever in good society.”
There may also have been a complaint about my translations, for Anna wrote: “How on earth could he ever have known Russian well enough to satisfy Volodya’s demands? And why on earth did you decide to give him such an important book? I often wondered but never asked.” And Anna defended me once again on the cruelty charge: “As for his remarks about sadism, I don’t see any stupidity in this, I just think of his twenty-five years.”
I was completely unaware of this exchange and continued to correspond with Vera as if nothing had happened. I had a longstanding ambition to do a full translation of Bely’s Petersburg (only an abridged translation existed at the time). I wrote to Nabokov to ask if he would consider writing an introduction: his name would make all the difference in selling it to publishers. Vera replied that he “very much approves a project to translate Petersburg. Bely is a perfectly marvelous writer.” Unfortunately, Nabokov was too swamped with his own projects to consider it. It never occurred to me to ask him simply to recommend me to a publisher, though perhaps he would have declined by then.
In October 1962 my wife gave birth to a daughter. Vera sent gifts, including a tiny loden cloak that has since become a family heirloom. The next summer we moved to England. I had been intending to read the proofs of both The Gift and The Defense, as we had agreed, but Nabokov wrote to say it would not be necessary, and with that our correspondence lapsed.
There was, however, an epilogue. Soon after my arrival in England I wrote a letter to the editor of Encounter suggesting that Mary McCarthy’s marvelously detailed and sympathetic decoding of Pale Fire (a novel I did not care for) must have been inspired, if not half written, by Nabokov. It was a silly and tactless thing to write—and completely wrong. Nabokov himself was amazed by McCarthy’s perspicacity and complimented her on it. Years later I apologized to Mary for my insolence, and she was highly amused, though I doubt if Nabokov was.
Later still, I was caught in the same trap I had set for Mary. In 1968 a friend sent me a copy of the Saturday Evening Post containing an essay by the novelist Herbert Gold. Gold had taken over Nabokov’s teaching post at Cornell and later interviewed him for The Paris Review. In his essay Gold wrote about Nabokov’s well-known penchant for hoaxes and said that the name “Michael Scammell” on the title page of The Gift had instantly struck him as an invention. “Scammell” was an unlikely name and an anagram for “le masque.” Nabokov had translated the novels himself and hidden behind this transparent pseudonym.
Gold was eventually assured by Nabokov that I existed, but his speculation was a fine illustration of the anonymity of translators and of my own anonymity in particular. I had just translated an extremely bad novel (A Thousand Illusions, by the not untalented Soviet dissident Valery Tarsis) for filthy lucre, and I was looking around for a way of distancing myself when Gold’s article arrived. Seizing on his notion of my fictionality, I signed the translation “Michel Le Masque,” a name that is still listed in all the catalogues.
The masked translator thus acquired a mask of his own. It was pleasant to know that the supreme master of disguises was indirectly, and unknowingly, responsible for the invention of this wholly mythical translator. And it is nice to think that our ultimately prickly relationship ended with a joke.