Bozovic, Marijeta. Nabokov’s Translations and Transnational Canon-Formation. 2017

The library of scholarship on Vladimir Nabokov still circles uncomfortably around his annotated translation Eugene Onegin (1964) and late English-language novel Ada, or Ardor (1969). This article examines the cultural “translation” that Nabokov attempts in his two most controversial monuments, annexing what he feared was a vanishing Russian tradition to the English-language novel. Nabokov aimed not only to enter, but to define an international literary canon – against that of T.S. Eliot and the New Critics – with Russian literature as a central strain. Through a lifelong propaganda campaign, Nabokov conjured for many readers an alluring vision of a transnational Antiterra. The article argues that this emancipatory potential captured the imagination of such writers as J.M. Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk, Azar Nafisi and W.G. Sebald – all, in some sense, “Nabokov’s children”. It focuses on the centrality of translation to Nabokov’s oeuvre in the light of recent scholarship on translation theory.