Let's look at the following quatrain quoted by Mr Nemser in his
review:
Of the four-foot
iambus I've grown
tired.
In it writes everyone. To boys this
plaything
'Tis high time to abandon ...
This translation
half-apes poetry (why not "I've grown tired of the four-foot iambus"?),
it half-apes rhyme (grown, everone, abandon) and half-apes Pushkinian
enjambement. Is this any way to translate the untranslatable Pushkin?
Didn't Nabokov himself describe his translation as "monkey's chatter,
the poet's head upon a platter"? Nemser, myself and others only beg to
agree.
It reminds me that
there is actually quite a bit of evidence that Nabokov's facility with
English had an interesting way of occasionally disappearing. Has no one
postulated that this might explain his refusal to be interviewed ad
libitum? More than a few passages in the essays on literature are
awkwardly expressed, and the level of literary criticism they proffer
is on the whole amateurish. The real usefulness they present is to
those of us trying to understand Nabokov himself. Well, that's my
opinion - - don't all hit me at once!
I will continue to remind the List that Nabokov is not above
criticism and I will continue to protest indignant bad-mouthing of
anyone who dares to point out a foible, and I will continue to remain
now and forever the fatally flawed
Carolyn Kunin