Probably most Nabokov-List participants speak more than
two or three languages and have the opportunity to read his writings
both in their original language and then in their translations. When I read Nabokov in different languages, I find that
his novels retain an unmistakable nabokovian quality ( soul?), but are
almost always independent creations.
Jorge Luis Borges shows us how even when we are
familiar with a poem's rendering in its original, our times are so distinct from
the poet's that the insidious variation of metaphors and personal
experience totally alter one's precise apprehension of a poet's
words. In olden times words such as "tunor"
expressed simultaneously Thunder and Thunor: words were magic and, the poet, a
warrior animist.This "magic" feeling irrecoverable, as Borges
shows. Languages and readers change with the times.
A friend of mine once told me that he feels
differently when he says to his girl-friend of the moment: "I love
you", "Ich liebe Dich", "Je t'aime", probably because one of these languages,
only one, is his girl-friend's mother-language, but not his own...
Keats had to read Homer through Chapman but in his
poem, we find a rendering of his experience at first hand: we can witness
his emotion but not in relation to any Ulyssean adventures but as
it rises from Keat's own primordial experience
with words ( Borges underlines the word "first" in Keat's verse "on
first looking into Chapman's Homer...").
Even if a translation makes a poem more elegant and,
perhaps like in Fitzgerald's Khayyám, works it into something new and even
more beautiful, the original should never be muted because it brings up a poet's
unique witnessing of a mental event, the voice of a developping subjectivity
gaining shape in words that reach us from a real past made into our present.
This is, perhaps, what Nabokov also intended when he translated Eugene Onegin.
And yet, in my opinion, to read other translations ( interpretations) of EO
should add new perspectives and feelings that can only appear when we allow
the sway of the narrative take over.