
What the feud between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson says about translation - lermontov
http://www.chronicle.com/article/Word-Wars/238993
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flurie
I have not read Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin, but this piece led me
to wonder if he was an inspiration for Stanley Lombardo's translation of the
Iliad and the Odyssey, which are stark departures from previous translations
that eschew meter in favor of clarity and meaning.

(As a side note, those translations are fantastic, and I highly recommend
them.)

~~~
leephillips
I've read it and own the two-volume paperback version (someone made the
mistake of asking me what I wanted for Christmas a few years ago).

The actual poem left me completely cold (and it's the only version I've ever
read). The footnotes and everything else are fascinating. Everything in
Nabokov's own voice is always, and everywhere, a joy to read. He was, as he
tried to explain, creating a reference work, an aid to scholars and students,
not a translation to "enjoy". You turn to it to find out what Pushkin wrote in
his poem, rendered into English, as accurately as possible. Wilson just failed
to understand the purpose of this work and his criticisms were irrelevant.

I'm interested in people's opinions of the Lombardo translations. Looking for
a version of the Illiad to read.

~~~
flurie
Thanks for the explanation. That makes more sense, and that's definitely not
what Lombardo did with his Iliad. Lombardo stresses clear and accurate
intention rendered into English. He retains a verse form, but it's blank
verse. It's very much a spirit of the verse translation over the letter. For
example, he'll drop epithets here and there, assuming you don't need to know
for the thirtieth time that Achilles is the son of Peleus, but he doesn't drop
all of them so that you get to see them. It is by no means perfect, but I've
read multiple translations (Pope, Fitzgerald, Fagles). The Pope is kind of
wonderful for what it is, but it's dated and extremely loose in order to fit
his verse form, and I would not recommend it as a first translation. I do
recommend the Lombardo as a first translation. It's worth noting that no
translation truly does justice to the original language, but I don't think
that possible or even necessary.

~~~
leephillips
Thank you. I really appreciate your comments about the Iliad translations.

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FabHK
Just a book recommendation: If you want to get a feel for Nabokov (and his
depth), have a look at the "Annotated Lolita" \- the editor points out so many
details and allusions as to make your head spin.

[https://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Lolita-Revised-
Updated/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Annotated-Lolita-Revised-
Updated/dp/0679727299)

For something ever so slightly lighter, consider "Pnin"; for some heavy (but
delightful) going, consider "Pale Fire". Bring time and a drink.

~~~
rublev
Do you have any tips/advice related to Dostoevsky? Editions? Annotations? I'll
take anything.

~~~
sharp11
I read Garnett and P/V translations side by side for a while and found P/V to
be remarkably more vivid.

~~~
shatov
We've been using both P/V and Garnett on this Goodreads group for "Demons".
The prose of P/V is often more arresting and grabs one's interest more
readily; Garnett is also quite good in most places, and has the advantage of
being available on Gutenberg for copy/paste.

[https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/207716-dostoevsky-
demon...](https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/207716-dostoevsky-demons)

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tetromino_
As someone bilingual in Russian and English, I have to say that translating
between the two languages is quite hard.

* English has a fixed word order: "man bites dog" != "dog bites man". Russian allows words to be reordered, phrases split and interleaved, to achieve the desired emphasis, flow, or emotional impact.

* English has a flexible information structure: the topic and the focus can be in any order. In literary Russian, the information structure is fixed: the focus goes at the end of the phrase.

* The English verb system (emphasizing the relative order of events) and Russian verb system (emphasizing the aspect and manner of action) map rather poorly onto each other in either direction.

* One language may require a positive statement where the other requires a negative statement - and vice versa, with no general pattern. Compare English "the best movie ever" and the Russian equivalent "лучше фильма не видел" (literally, "a better movie [than this one] I have not seen")...

* Technical English loves to agglutinate random roots together to make a new word. Unpacking and serializing the result in Russian typically results in something long, awful, and bureaucratic-sounding.

* Russian loves hard-to-translate impersonal statements (следует, нельзя), and its system of diminutives/augmentatives doesn't have a nice correspondence in English.

* It is very often difficult to find a translation that matches both the intended meaning and the "feel" (positive, negative, common, unusual, colloquial, old-fashioned, scientific) of a word.

And that's even before you attempt to replicate a particular poetic rhyme and
meter in a language less well suited for it.

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emilecantin
As someone dabbling in translation (I'm currently translating an English-
language book my wife uses in homeschooling our kids to French), I have to say
that it's much harder than it looks.

Despite having a pretty good command of both languages, some things just don't
really apply. For instance, there was a lengthy discussion about CE, AD, and
BCE dates, but in French we pretty much only use "av. J.C." and "ap. J.C"
(before and after Jesus Christ), so I had to trim it down a lot.

Keeping the appropriate tone throughout is pretty hard, too.

~~~
Freak_NL
Getting the tone of voice right is especially tricky in my experience. As a
reader I always find translations harder to 'accept'; I am always left
wondering where the author's work stops and the translator's starts,
especially with the translated renditions of dialects and socio-economically
stratified language.

Alas, there are only so many languages one can manage to read effectively in.
For some languages, such as Russian or ancient Greek, I will likely remain
dependent on translators.

On the topic of the ongoing migration to CE/BCE in English; I have no French
lingual experience to speak of, but aren't ÈC (Ère commune) and ÈV (Ère
vulgaire) equivalent to CE and BCE respectively?

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mcguire
" _Beam’s book does not really belong to the Russian translation wars. It is
better assigned to that burgeoning field in the humanities, affect or emotion
studies (subsets: shame studies, insult studies, disappointment, and regret
studies)..._ "

That is one way to put lipstick on the flamewar-as-entertainment pig.

As for the argument itself, I applaud Nabokov's contextual literalism, but if
the result is rough and uneven where the original was lyrical, I don't know
that the author would thank him.

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alphonsegaston
Nabokov's intention in translating Onegin was obviously to create something
like the circumstances of "Pale Fire." It has always struck me as funny that
this is brought up as some kind of critical debate about approaches to
translation, when it was more along the lines of performance art.

~~~
chch
I've always assumed the opposite, where Pale Fire was a sort of self-parodical
novel, playing on Nabokov's realization of his own eccentricities.

Although Pale Fire came out in 1962 and Nabokov's Onegin in 1964, he had been
working on Onegin translation since at least 1950, according to a piece he
wrote in 1955, yclept 'Problems of Translation: "Onegin" in English'. A
favorite quote of mine from that Partisan Review article:

"I want translations with copious footnotes, footnotes reaching up like
skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of
one textual line between commentary and eternity."[1]

I highly recommend giving the article a read if you haven't come upon it, and
are interested in hearing his theory (and distaste for "substitut[ing] easy
platitudes for the breathtaking intricacies of the text") in his own words!

Performance art it may well still be! But, a performance involving writing
precise treatises well before Pale Fire was released.

[1][http://hgar-srv3.bu.edu/collections/partisan-
review/search/d...](http://hgar-srv3.bu.edu/collections/partisan-
review/search/detail?id=326017) , the article starts on page 496/148.

~~~
alphonsegaston
Thanks for the link!

Yes, I should have been more clear in original post. I think Onegin, Pale
Fire, and his other critical writings on translation are all part of the same
artistic performance. We tend to look at writers/artist through this kind of
atomizing lens, distinguishing one work from another in a kind of consumptive
mode. Each book as a product to be evaluated in relation to others, it's
techniques separate from the experience of the work. I think this says more
about the circumstances of art under Capitalism than a writer's/artist's
subjectivity, especially in the case of someone like Nabokov, who was so
obviously fond of meta-narratives and intertexuality.

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adricnet
This is an interesting and thought-provoking read. Thank you for posting it.

