12
As I Was Saying…
Even in the decade after the two writers’ deaths, the Onegin translation controversy occasionally lurched out of its coffin. In 1977, the year that Nabokov died, the retired British diplomat Charles Johnston published his rhyming, metered translation that so enchanted the young writer Vikram Seth, who happened to pull it off the shelf of a Palo Alto bookstore. The two events were unrelated. It seems impossible that Vladimir Nabokov would have bothered to care about yet another English Onegin, with his own mortality very much in the balance.
In 1982, from the false azure of a clear sky came that distinctive rumble from the Montreux Palace Hotel. Forty-eight-year-old Dmitri Nabokov, Vladimir’s only child and himself a decent translator, happened upon an interview with Johnston in the Moscow journal Inostrannaya Literatura (Foreign Literature). Writing from Switzerland, an outraged Dmitri unburdened himself in a breathless letter to The Times Literary Supplement: He quoted Johnston saying of his father’s Onegin that “I believe he got bored doing this, so that what set out to be a literal version in fact contains a strong element of Nabokovian fantasy [emphasis in the original].”
Dmitri: “Johnston, in essence, accuses Nabokov of dishonesty.”
Here we go again.
“It would seem imperative that Johnston, once having made such an accusation, produce a few examples of the ‘Nabokovian fantasy’ he mentions,” Dmitri wrote. “I challenge him to do so.”
Paul Fussell once wrote an essay called “The Author’s Big Mistake.” I keep a copy in my desk. Fussell collected writers’ letters of outrage sent to newspapers and magazines that had published unfavorable—meaning, not favorable enough—reviews of their work. The first sentence hardly ever deviated: “I never write letters complaining about reviews. But in this one, extraordinary case…“
Dmitri simply cannot resist: “It was not my intention here to discuss Johnston’s translation…” We know what is coming next. “However, I cannot forego to point out that…” From “among innumerable examples,” Dmitri highlights one malapropism: In canto 7, stanza 32, his father had a team of horses “to the master coach are harnessed.” Johnston rendered this, “Horses and coaches are spliced in marriage.”
“Those poor horses,” Dmitri wrote. “Poor Pushkin.”1
Sir Charles had plenty of time on his hands. His distinguished diplomatic career, which never included an assignment to Russia, had ended years earlier when he left the governor-generalship of Australia. (It’s possible that he practiced Russian with his beautiful wife, Princess Natalie Bagration, the great-great-granddaughter of Czar Nicholas I.) Johnston’s rejoinder graced the TLS letters page just two weeks later:
Ever since publishing my own translation of Eugene Onegin five years ago, I have emphasized my debt to Vladimir Nabokov. I have a great respect for him, both as a Russian scholar and (except in his translation of Onegin) as a writer in English.
But because Dmitri challenged me to come up with some examples of “Nabokovian fantasy,” Johnston went on, I will be happy to oblige him.
Here are a number of words, which seem to me fantastic in the sense…that their quirkishness unnecessarily distracts the reader’s attention away from Pushkin, and makes him think about Nabokov and his strange choice of language: precognizing; devourment; dulcitude and juventude; dolent.
Which brought Johnston to the “shotman.” In canto 3 Nabokov needed to translate strelok, a “shooter” or “marksman.” He chose “shotman.”
“I looked the word up, in as heavy as possible an edition of the OED,” Johnston reported:
Finally, I learned that, among other things, a shotman is one who fires the explosive charge in a Cornish tin mine. I have met Cornish tin miners in Australia, and other parts of the world, but this seems a bit far-flung….What, I ask myself, what the devil is this Cornishman doing here, crouching in the bushes in the middle of the Government of Pskov? If that isn’t fantasy, I don’t know what is.
Dmitri—excitable Dmitri, the flashy race-car driver, the peripatetic opera singer; loyal, filial Dmitri*—roars back: “Sir Charles has obviously trundled his heaviest artillery into an obscure Cornish tin mine in search of an easy laugh.”
In the murk of his mine, Sir Charles has stumbled upon a perfect example of Nabokovian literality: a word was needed and found that was at once technically accurate, poetically evocative, and suggestive of the proper nuance in Pushkin’s strelok.
Cue the tiresome battle of the dictionaries. If only the world would toss out the OED! Webster’s first definition of “shotman” is “shooter.” Who would have thought?
Honoring the danse macabre choreography of the literary duel, Sir Charles then announced that he was quitting the field: “I have too much regard for the memory of Mr. Nabokov père to relish being provoked into a slanging match with Mr. Nabokov fils.”
Before his figurative departure, Johnston offered an example of a “Nabokovian fantasy” that “can kill stone dead the finest effects of the original.” Just as the Bollingen subeditor warned Nabokov back in 1962, his infelicity at the very end of Onegin, in the poet’s beautiful and oft-quoted farewell to the reader (8.49), had returned to haunt him: “Whoever you be my reader—/Friend or foe, I wish with you/to part at present as a pal.”
Sir Charles’s unfinal word on this subject: “The English language is trickier than it looks.”
That same year Berkeley’s Simon Karlinsky took a potshot at “Johnson” in a New York Times book review, calling his Onegin “undeservedly overpraised by critics.” Karlinsky said the 1977 translation produced “on a person closely familiar with the original the effect of a Chopin nocturne played in the tempo of a military march.”
I didn’t translate the poem for people “closely familiar with the original,” Johnston shot back. He noted that Karlinsky’s view “is shared by Dimitri Nabokov, with whom, in The Times Literary Supplement, I am at this moment conducting a high-spirited correspondence about his father’s version of ‘Eugene Onegin.’ ”2
“Incidentally,” Johnston added, “I was interested by Professor Karlinsky’s choice of language: ‘Undeservedly overpraised.’ This is a fascinating bit of English usage. Can someone be deservedly overpraised? Perhaps in California?”
The Times had seen this movie before, and declined to publish Dmitri’s riposte, which included nine side-by-side examples of how his father’s Onegin obviously trounced Johnston’s. Dmitri read the entire letter in an address to the Cornell Nabokov Festival in April 1983. It ended with the phrase, “To conclude the whole business once for all…“