http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n23/letters
London Review of Books: Nabokov slips up
Valentin Lyubarsky wonders ‘who is at fault here, Nabokov or his translators’, in the quotation from Pushkin which we have rendered, in Letters to Véra: ‘They say that misfortune is a good school. Yes, true. But happiness is the best university’ (Letters, 6 November). Lyubarsky notes, ‘What is translated as “Yes, true” should have been translated as “Quite possible”, if Nabokov was quoting Pushkin correctly.’ He wasn’t. Although Nabokov was quoting fairly accurately from memory, he remembered Pushkin’s ‘mozhet byt’’ (‘perhaps’) as ‘Da eto tak’, which we rendered accurately as ‘Yes, true’. Had Lyubarsky seen Letters to Véra, he would have found that the note to this letter translates Pushkin’s original remark in context, including the ‘perhaps’.
Brian Boyd
Auckland, New Zealand
Olga Voronina
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York