

The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov (1965) - benbreen
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1965/jul/15/the-strange-case-of-pushkin-and-nabokov/

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idlewords
For context, Wilson and Nabokov were friends, but this was a nearly suicidal
literary gesture by Wilson, whose Russian was as shaky as his judgement. Here
is Nabokov training his guns on Wilson in a letter to the editor, and sending
him to the bottom of the sea:

[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1965/aug/26/letters...](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1965/aug/26/letters-
the-strange-case-of-nabokov-and-wilson/)

Nabokov's Onegin translation is I believe intentionally unreadable, but as a
work of scholarship it stands alone. One of the footnotes, for example, is a
forty-page essay on the history of dueling.

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mynegation
Yes, it also struck me that, with regard to usage of Russian, most of the time
Wilson is either flat out wrong or argues about inconsequential things.

I wonder if Nabokov's translation was meant to serve as a reference for more
traditional, future translators, like Johnston and Falen, as a source of very
precise meaning. An "intermediate representation" of sorts...

~~~
idlewords
That's exactly what I think. Plus a scary head-on-a-pike to frighten those who
think you can translate poetry. It's a piece of scholarly performance art and
love letter to Pushkin all in one.

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mynegation
For a context: I am a native Russian speaker, I read "Eugene Onegin" in
original and in Charles Johnston's translation, which was done more than 10
years after the article was written. I have not read Nabokov's or Arndt's
translation, apart from the fragments in the article, but from what I
understand, Johnston's translation is closer in spirit to Arndt's, trying to
preserve Pushkin's iambic stanzas, sacrificing precise literal meaning here
and there.

From this limited experience I have to say that I very much prefer Johnston's
(or - supposedly - Arndt's) translation to Nabokov's. It is very close to the
original and - most of the time - precise _enough_, and it recreates this
unbelievable feeling of the "flying" verse one experiences reading Pushkin in
Russian.

To get a feeling what I am talking about, try to read aloud few verses from
Johnston's translation

[http://lib.ru/LITRA/PUSHKIN/ENGLISH/onegin_j.txt](http://lib.ru/LITRA/PUSHKIN/ENGLISH/onegin_j.txt)

Side note: I also enjoy poetry in English, in particular William Blake, Robert
Burns, John Keats, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson; but it took me a while to get
accustomed to an approximate rhyming as opposed to the perfect rhyming that
was used almost exclusively in classical Russian poetry, including Pushkin.
Johnston's translation follows that too.

~~~
idlewords
Have you read Falen's translation? I think he's the best translator of Pushkin
into English.

~~~
mynegation
No, I have not. I managed to find only a few stanzas of Falen online after a
quick search, so my assessment is definitely too quick and too dirty. I had an
impression that Falen's translation is similar to Johnston's, but tries to be
even closer to the original at the price of using more archaic and arcane
words (at least for non-native English speakers like me). I was immediately
thrown off by the usage of "base" as adjective meaning "dishonourable", and
"pat" as "glib". I also had to look up words, such as "prate". Not a problem
of translation per se, but rather of the expanse of my English vocabulary.
Interesting trade-off.

