This leads to the third point: while having genius and knowledge he must possess the gift of mimicry and be able to act, as it were, the real author's part by impersonating his tricks of demeanor and speech, his ways and his mind, with the utmost degree of verisimilitude.
I have lately tried to translate several Russian poets who had either been badly disfigured by former attempts or who had never been translated at all.
The English at my disposal is certainly thinner than my Russian; the difference being, in fact, that which exists between a semi-detached villa and a hereditary estate, between self-conscious comfort and habitual luxury. I am not satisfied therefore with the results attained, but my studies disclosed several rules that other writers might follow with profit.
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I was confronted for instance with the following opening line of one of Pushkin's most prodigious poems: Yah pom-new chewed-no-yay mg-no-vain-yay
I have rendered the syllables by the nearest English sounds I could find; their mimetic disguise makes them look rather ugly; but never mind; the "chew" and the "vain" are associated phonetically with other Russian words meaning beautiful and important things, and the melody of the line with the plump, golden-ripe "chewed-no-yay" right in the middle and the
"m's" and "n's" balancing each other on both sides, is to the Russian ear most exciting and soothing —a paradoxical combination that any artist will understand.
Now, if you take a dictionary and look up those four words you will obtain the following foolish, flat and familiar statement: "I remember a wonderful moment." What is to be done with this bird you have shot down only to find that it is not a bird of paradise, but an escaped parrot, still screeching its idiotic message as it flaps on the ground? For no stretch of the imagination can persuade an English reader that "I remember a wonderful moment" is the perfect beginning of a perfect poem. The first thing I discovered was that the expression "a literal translation" is more or less nonsense. "Yah pom-new" is a deeper and smoother plunge into the past than "I remember," which falls flat on its belly like an inexperienced diver; "chewed-no-yay" has a lovely Russian "monster" in it, and a whispered "listen,"and the dative ending of a
"sunbeam,"and many other fair relations among Russian words. It belongs phonetically and mentally to a certain series of words, and this Russian series does not correspond to the English series in which "I remember" is found. And inversely,
"remember,"though it clashes with the corresponding "pom-new" series, is connected with an English series of its own whenever real poets do use it. And the central word in Housman's "What are those blue remembered hills?" becomes in Russian "vspom-neev-she-yes-yah," a horrible straggly thing, all humps and horns, which cannot fuse into any inner connection with "blue," as it does so smoothly in English, because the Russian sense of blueness belongs to a different series than the Russian "remember" does.
This interrelation of words and non-correspondence of verbal series in different tongues suggests yet another rule, namely, that the three main words of the line draw one another out, and add something which none of them would have had separately or in any other combination. What makes this exchange of secret values possible is not only the mere contact between the words, but their exact position in regard both to the rhythm of the line and to one another. This must be taken into account by the translator.
Finally, there is the problem of the rhyme. "Mg-no-vain-yay" has over two thousand Jack-in-the-box rhymes popping out at the slightest pressure, whereas I cannot think of one to "moment." The position of "mg-no-vain-yay" at the end of the line is not negligible either, due as it is to Pushkin's more or less consciously knowing that he would not have to hunt for its mate.
But the position of "moment" in the English line implies no such security; on the contrary he would be a singularly reckless fellow who placed it there.
Thus I was confronted by that opening line, so full of Pushkin, so individual and harmonious; and after examining it gingerly from the various angles here suggested, I tackled it. The tackling process lasted the worst part of the night. I did translate it at last; but to give my version at this point might lead the reader to doubt that perfection be attainable by merely following a few perfect rules.
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L'Envoi
I have led you through the wonderland of one century of literature.
That this literature is Russian literature cannot much matter to you since you cannot read Russian—and in the art of literature (I understand it as an art) language is the only reality that divides this universal art into national arts. I have continuously stressed the point in this —and other courses—that literature belongs not to the department of general ideas but to the department of specific words and images.
Tolstoy (1828-1910) and Chekhov (1860-1904) are the last writers we could study in detail. Some of you cannot help noticing that from them to our times—or, less pompously, to my time—there is still a space of fifty years left. Some of you may wish to explore those years.
A first difficulty for the American student is that the best artists of the age (1900 to 1950) are so abominably translated.
The second difficulty for the American student is that in search for a very few masterpieces, most of them in verse (a few poems by Vladimir Mayakovski and Boris Pasternak), he has to wade through an amorphous and monster mass of mediocre stuff whose only purpose is political.
The period itself falls into two parts, roughly
1900-1917 1920-1957
The first period reveals a definite flourishing of all art forms. The lyrical poems of Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921) and an extraordinary novel by Andrey Bely (1880-1934), Petersburg (1916), are its most conspicuous ornaments. These two men are experimenters in form, sometimes difficult to understand even for a Russian intelligent reader, and hopelessly mutilated in English versions. In other words, it would be prodigiously difficult for you to tackle these two without knowing the language.
The second part of the period (1920-1957) I have sketched for you in the beginning of this course. It is the period of increasing governmental pressure, of writers guided by governmental decrees, of poets inspired by the political police, of decline in literature. Dictatorship is always conservative in art—so no wonder that such Russian writers who did not escape from Russia produced a kind of literature that is far more bourgeois than the most bourgeois English or French literature.
(Only at the very beginning of the Soviet period was there an attempt on the part of propaganda to make people believe that avant-garde politics were somehow synonymous with avant-garde art.) A great number of artists went into exile, and, as it becomes very clear today, the main wonders of Russian literature of our time have been produced by expatriates. This, however, is a somewhat personal subject, and it is here that I shall stop.
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APPENDIX: Nabokov's notes for an exam on Russian literature
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