The Name
What is my name to you? 'T will die:
a wave that has but rolled to reach
with a lone splash a distant beach;
or in the timbered night a cry ...
'T will leave a lifeless trace among
names on your tablets: the design
of an entangled gravestone line
in an unfathomable tongue.
What is it then? A long-dead past,
lost in the rush of madder dreams,
upon your soul it will not cast
Mnemosyne's pure tender beams.
But if some sorrow comes to you,
utter my name with sighs, and tell
the silence: "Memory is true -
there beats a heart wherein I dwell."
Commentary
Translation by Vladimir Nabokov.
Infuriatingly, I can’t find any online resources which carry parts of Nabokov’s translation of “Eugene Onegin” - but “The Name” is at least a translation of Pushkin… The obvious advantage those translating from their native tongue have is that they can retain the feel of the original - there’s something peculiarly Russian about this, and “timbered night” is a lovely phrase. You can almost smell them, or hear them rustling!
Nabokov is, predictably, amusingly nasty about people whose methods of translation he disagrees with. I’ve appended (an abbreviated) part of a longer essay which you can read at
http://magazines.enews.com/classic/nabokov080441.html
- always assuming you aren’t irritated by his style - it’s worth it, though, as some of the examples he uses are worryingly believable, and when he describes reading a translation of Gogol’s short story “Overcoat” as leaving him “with the impression that I am witnessing a murder and can do nothing to prevent it”, you rather know what he means.
Then, of course, you remember that another translator of Pushkin - Walter Arndt - called Nabokov’s version of “Onegin”: “…the sad ritual murder performed for the purposes of an ever more insatiable lexical necrophilia.” Perhaps you start to think that it’s a strange business, translation.
There’s also a poem called “On Translation) which he wrote in tetrameter sonnets (like those in Eugene Onegin) to defend his decision to translate the work in free verse. It’s at http://www.tetrameter.com/nabokov.htm
— Nick
[Nabokov on Translation]
Three grades of evil can be discerned in the queer world of verbal transmigration. The first, and lesser one, comprises obvious errors due to ignorance or misguided knowledge. This is mere human frailty and thus excusable. The next step to Hell is taken by the translator who intentionally skips words or passages that he does not bother to understand or that might seem obscure or obscene to vaguely imagined readers; he accepts the blank look that his dictionary gives him without any qualms; or subjects scholarship to primness: he is as ready to know less than the author as he is to think he knows better. The third, and worst, degree of turpitude is reached when a masterpiece is planished and patted into such a shape, vilely beautified in such a fashion as to conform to the notions and prejudices of a given public. This is a crime, to be punished by the stocks as plagiarists were in the shoebuckle days.
The second, and much more serious, sin of leaving out tricky passages is still excusable when the translator is baffled by them himself; but how contemptible is the smug person who, although quite understanding the sense, fears it might stump a dunce or debauch a dauphin! Instead of nestling in the arms of the great writer, he keeps worrying about the little reader playing in a corner with something dangerous or unclean. Perhaps the most charming example of Victorian modesty that has ever come my way was in an early English translation of “Anna Karenina.” Vronsky had asked Anna what was the matter with her. “I am beremenna” (the translator’s italics), replied Anna, making the foreign reader wonder what strange and awful Oriental disease that was; all because the translator thought that “I am pregnant” might shock some pure soul, and that a good idea would be to leave the Russian just as it stood.
But masking and toning down seem petty sins in comparison with those of the third category; for here he comes strutting and shooting out his bejeweled cuffs, the slick translator who arranges Scheherazade’s boudoir according to his own taste and with professional elegance tries to improve the looks of his victims.
– http://magazines.enews.com/classic/nabokov080441.html
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
gskur · 27 September 2002
Until I finished reading the poem and got to the author’s name “– Alexander Pushkin,” I had no idea what I was reading here! Sorry to disappoint you, friends! It is NOT an “at least a translation of Pushkin…”-—it is, at best, JUST a translation of Pushkin, and a bad one, at that. It reeks of Nabokov, and there is not a whiff of Pushkin here! Attributing this English verse to the great Russian poet is very misguided.
There might be “something peculiarly Russian about this…” writing (not to my ear, though), and I do agree that “‘timbered night’ is a lovely phrase…” etc., indeed, but it is all just Nabokov’s fantasy! There is no such thing in Pushkin’s writing.
It is true that “…the obvious advantage those translating from their native tongue have is that they can retain the feel of the original…” That is, if the translator knows how to do it! Nabokov proved himself incapable of that. It is also true, however, that the obvious disadvantage those reading translations from their native tongue have is that they can easily tell a fake… Here you have it, my friends.
On a good note, the above mentioned link
[broken link] http://magazines.enews.com/classic/nabokov080441.html has a brilliantly written article by Nabokov. Well, when he is good, he is very, very…
Gene
Gene Skuratovsky · 24 April 2003
Re: My jumbled note above – sorry for that! Here it is again:
Until I finished reading the poem and got to the author’s name “– Alexander Pushkin,” I had no idea what I was reading here! Sorry to disappoint you, friends! It is NOT an “at least a translation of Pushkin”–it is, at best, JUST a translation of Pushkin, and a bad one, at that! It reeks of Nabokov, and there is not a whiff of Pushkin here! Attributing this English verse to the great Russian poet is very misguided!
There might be “something peculiarly Russian about this” writing (not to my ear, though), and I do agree that “‘timbered night’ is a lovely phrase” indeed, but it is all just Nabokov’s fantasy! There is no such thing in Pushkin’s writing.
It is true that “the obvious advantage those translating from their native tongue have is that they can retain the feel of the original.” That is, if the translator knows how to do it! Nabokov proved himself incapable of doing that well.
It is also true, however, that the obvious disadvantage those reading translations from their native tongue have is that they can easily tell a fake. Here you have it, my friends!
On a good note, the above mentioned link has a brilliantly written article by Nabokov. Well, when he is good, he is very, very…
Gene
Andrey Frizyuk · 20 August 2004
This bagatelle is not the best in Pushkin’s ouevre (far from it) and yet there is an interesting story behind it. The poem was written impromptu for the album of mysterious Katarzyna Sobanska as a last farewell before the poet’s marriage. Very little is known about Katarzyna - that she was 10 years Pushkin’s senior, that she belonged to the cream of Polish nobility and that she was brought up in the house of her aunt, the legendary Princess Lubomirska (of the French Revolution fame). Rather tall and plump and married for a third time, she was adored by Adam Mizkiewicz and many other notable persons, but her relationship with Pushkin is particularly intriguing. By all appearances quite indifferent to both Pushkin and Mickiewicz, she was hired by the police chef Count von Benckendorff to spy upon both suspect poets. Her correspondence with Pushkin doesn’t servive except the only letter, written shortly before the marriage, in which the poet hints that he could break his
engagement with his future wife at Katarzyna’s first command. There is no evidence that the letter was ever sent. The extant draft is perhaps the only true love letter in a sizable corpus of Pushkin’s
correspondence. Anna Akhmatova maintained that Katarzyna was the only real love of Pushkin; and that it was her who inspired with her sultry looks his greatest novel, Eugene Onegin. Later in life Katarzyna grew jealous of her younger sister Eveline Hanska for having married Honore de Balzac; she settled in Paris in the 1840s and almost had the eminent critic Sainte-Beuve marry her. Her last years were spent in extreme reticence; she changed her name and severed all relations with her brother Count Rzewusski (a Tsar’s minister and one of the richest people in Russia). By the time (1885) when she died in one of the poorest quarters of Paris, nobody could recall that she had been the brightest star of Odessa society in the late 1810s and early 1820s.
With best wishes for your marvellous site,
Andrei in Russia