Nine years prior to the appearance of Nabokov's Onegin, The Partisan Review1 published an essay by Nabokov, titled “The Art of Translation: Onegin in English,” which amounted to a manifesto concerning the possibilities of Onegin in translation and the translator’s self-imposed standards for his own version of the novel:To translate an Onegin stanza does not mean to rig up fourteen lines with alternate beats and affix to them seven jingle rhymes starting with pleasure-love-leisure-dove. Granted that rhymes can be found, they should be raised to the level of Onegin’s harmonies but if the masculine ones may be made to take care of themselves, what shall we do about the feminine rhymes? When Pushkin rhymes devy (maidens) with gde vy (where are you?), the effect is evocative and euphonious, but when Byron rhymes “maidens” with “gay dens,” the result is burlesque … .So here are three conclusions I have arrived at: 1. It is impossible to translate Onegin in … Vladimir Nabokov, "Problems of Translation: Onegin in English," Partisan Review, no. 22 (1955): 512. 123. Cited in Brower, On Translation, p. 97. 124, in http://litimag.oxfordjournals.org/content/14/3/277.extract (Onegin in English: Against Nabokov by Anna Razumnaya )
Nabokov as Translator: Passion and Precision
Brian Boyd
[ ] Why could Nabokov be such an exceptional translator? With his usual modesty, he said he had “a perfectly normal trilingual childhood”: he read and wrote Russian, English and French by the time he was seven. By the time he was fourteen he had also read all of Tolstoy, all of Shakespeare, and all of Flaubert in the original languages. By the end of his career he had been called the greatest stylist ever in English prose, and the foremost stylist in Russian prose; and he also wrote for the best French literary magazines.[ ] In his own role as translator, Nabokov aimed not for the foothills but the peaks. He translated especially the greatest poem of modern Russia, Pushkin’s novel in verse Evgeniy Onegin, which occupies a place in Russian literature something like the combined place of Chaucer and Shakespeare in English literature, and he translated the greatest poem of medieval Russia, Slovo o polku Igoreve, The Song of Igor’s Campaign. His translation of Eugene Onegin, about 250 pages long, was surrounded with another 1500 pages of notes. The commentary has been called the best commentary ever made to a poem; and the translation, perhaps the best translation ever made of poem. Nabokov’s English notes on this Russian poem have been translated into Russian for the sake of Russian scholars. His English translation of Pushkin’s poem is so accurate that the best Dutch translation of Eugene Onegin so far derives not from Pushkin’s Russian but only from Nabokov’s English version, by someone with no Russian. Nabokov also wrote to James Joyce asking if he could translate Ulysses into Russian—arguably the greatest novel of the twentieth century. He signed a contract to translate into English Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, arguably the greatest nineteenth century novel, if not ever. Circumstances meant that he finished neither of these projects, but he started translating young and he continued to translate all his life[ ] ….
Two Opposing Views of Literary Translation: Nabokov vs. Borges
Martin Boyd - Dialogos - Intercultural Services.
http://dialogos.ca/2013/06/two-opposing-views-of-literary-translation-nabakov-vs-borges/
… “Nabokov begins an article on his experience of translating Pushkin’s Onegin with a vituperative attack on any translation judged as “readable[ ] His call for “footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers” … is hardly a recipe for great literature. It is thus perhaps hardly surprising and that translation scholar Willis Barnstone describes his translation of Onegin as “unread and hard to read” [clip].As an antidote to Nabokov’s extremism I would like to propose the perspective of Argentine author and translator Jorge Luis Borges [ ] In his article on the translation of Arabian Nights, Borges offers an entertaining account of various European translators of this classic work of literature, who took such extreme liberties with their source that they would surely have sent poor Nabokov into a fit of rage. But for Borges, the French translator Dr. Mardrus, whose translation of a ten-word sentence in the original Nights into a seven-line paragraph is guilty of at least three of Berman’s “deformations” (clarification, expansion and ennoblement), should be praised, not for his fidelity (obviously), but for “his happy and creative infidelity”… [ ] Borges’ assessments of these translations suggest a very different perspective on the role of translation, not as an instrument to be used to hurl the source text violently at the target language, but as a medium of exchange, through which source text and target culture may be mutually enriched [ ]…” Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Translators of the Thousand and One Nights”. Translation Studies Reader. L. Venuti (ed.). London: Routledge, 1999. 34-48.
Nabokov, Vladimir. “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English”. Translation Studies Reader. L. Venuti (ed.). London: Routledge, 1999. 71-83.