I can't comment on Verses and Versions at all, nor did I mean to. I only found out about it because of recent postings regarding the Nemser review. In my clumsy way I wished to point out that Nabokov in spite of his many great achievements is still open to criticism. My own enormous disappointment with his translation of Evgeniy Onegin (was it VN who liked to called it "One Gin"?) is at the root of it.

You know, it reminds me of why I studied Russian in the first place. One major impetus came from something Nabokov wrote - - I think it was an afterword to Lolita, something to do with Lolita anyway. He wrote that if you weren't able to read Pushkin in his original language it was like going your whole life without ever hearing the music of Mozart. My memory is doubtless flawed, but that's how I recollect it.

I couldn't stand the thought of a life without Mozart, and I invested quite a number of years (and tears) in learning Russian. And Nabokov was right - - Pushkin  simply cannot be appreciated in any other language. But there was one person who could have given the non-Russian speaker a taste of Pushkin's verse (and I think he did actually achieve this in some of his own poems) and that person gave us