Dear Ole,
This is a very good question because it shows how fast certain trivial
things are forgotten. What Khodasevich meant was, of course, not a
chandelier but an electric bulb with luminous intensity of 16
candles. The term "svecha" (candle power) is obsolete now but
in the past (at least in the Soviet Union)bulbs were marked by their
"candle power," from 16 candles (the lowest) to 100
candles (the highest). Khodasevich wrote the poem in 1921 in Petrograd
when energy was in short supply and people were allowed to use only
low-intensity electric bulbs. I made a short Internet search and in five
minutes found several other mentions of 16-candle bulbs in Russian prose
of the period.
I don't know why Nabokov translated "16-candle" as
"60-watt." Probably he wanted the reader to imagine a standard
and not very bright source of light. 40 or even 20-watt bulb, I think,
would
be closer to the dim 16-candle sun that lighted Khodasevich's room
in The House of Art (see its description in Nina Berberova's The
Italics Are Mine, 134--135). In any way, Dalsgaard's
"correction" is erroneous and misleading.
Alexander Dolinin
At 03:03 PM 3/17/05 -0800, you wrote:
Dear Don,
I don't know if my attempt to send this query to the list was lost in
the
flurry of mails, or deleted because it was ignorant. If the reason
was
ignorance, please delete again.
Dear List
I need the help of someone familiar with Khodasevich’s poetry and
of
course, someone familiar with Nabokov's oeuvre.
I am writing a review of a Danish book, a luxurious literary history
of
the Russian emigration Mette Dalsgaard Den tunge lyre: Ruslands
emigrant
litteratur 1917-1985. En litteraturhistorisk fremstilling.
København:
Gyldendal, 2005.
The book contains one of the finest, of the few, Danish portraits
of
Nabokov, though done in somewhat heavy strokes of the brush. But in
the
passage concerning Khodasevich, Dalsgaard has a footnote which raised
my
eyebrows. It concerns Khodasevich’s poem Ballada, and runs as follows
(in
my hasty translation):
“Vladimir Nabokov translated the poem into English. Peculiarly,
however,
he rendered “the sun with the sixteen candles” in the first stanza as
“a
60 watt bulb”. It is probably Nabokov’s authority which caused this
version to appear in diverse English anthologies, monographies, and
literary histories” (89).
Now, I am not skilled in transliteration and therefore I cannot render
the
line in Latin letters, but Khodasevich’s poem appears both in Russian
and
English in David M. Bethea’s Khodasevich: His Life and Art.
(Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1983) on pp. 238-240. There the English translation is
done
by Bethea who also translates the words from the last line of the
first
stanza as “a sixty-watt sun”, and not, as Dalsgaard mis-quotes
Nabokov’s
version, “a sixty-watt bulb”.
Dalsgaard’s version of the opening verse is: “Jeg sidder i mit
runde
kammer/ Og ser fra min skrivebordsstol/ På himlens stukornamenter/ Og
den
sekstenarmede sol” (125). In English this, roughly, becomes: “I sit in
my
round chamber/ And look from my writing chair/ At heaven’s stucco
ornaments/ And the sixteen-armed sun”. Clearly Dalsgaard perceives
the
Russian line as concerning a chandelier of some sort.
What I wonder is:
- Did both Nabokov and Bethea
mistranslate Khodasevich? I very much
doubt that.
- Does the “sixteen candles/lights”
of the Russian text refer to a
specific Russian light bulb or any such light source, of which
Dalsgaard
is in the dark? And if so: which?
I do have a selection of Khodasevich’s poetry (Moscow 1991) and
Betehea’s
book at hand, but I have to admit that my Russian is very scant.
I will welcome any comment.
Best Wishes,
Ole Nyegaard, Aarhus University, Denmark.
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