Stalking Nabokov by Brian Boyd

Author:Brian Boyd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism/European/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-10-12T04:00:00+00:00

Nabokov’s note comments perceptively on the sound-link between “lyubímoy” and “drugím” in the last line, which makes the inevitability and the surprise both greater. “Drugím,” coming last, rhyming quietly and expectedly with “tomím” but also happening to echo the “lyubímoy” it is linked so closely to in sense, sets off the whole poem’s explosive emotional charge in its final word, without resorting to anything conventionally “poetic.” As Alexander Zholkovsky notes, moreover, a Russian might well expect a short poem beginning “Ya vas lyubíl” and leading up to a rhyme with “tomím” to end with the word “lyubím,” “(be)loved”; instead it ends with “drugím,” “by another,” as if to compress the difference between the “ya,” the “I” who used to love you in the poem’s first word and this “drugím,” this “other” in the poem’s last word, who perhaps will love you so well.15

Nabokov first tried to translate this poem, uncharacteristically, in 1929, when he was developing as a Russian writer and almost always translating into rather than from Russian. (The occasion was the centenary of the poem’s composition, and since Nabokov was born a hundred years after Pushkin, he was translating it at the age at which Pushkin wrote it.) The translation opens with the eyebrow-raising “I worshipped you.” Although not strictly equivalent to Pushkin, this phrase reflects the sense that the speaker has indeed worshipped the beloved “wordlessly, hopelessly,” passively, and distantly rather than actively and intimately, and its stress provides a reasonably close match for the metrical force of Pushkin’s opening “Ya vas lyubíl.” But “I worshipped you” becomes increasingly a liability as the poem progresses and it has to be repeated each time “loved” or “love” would normally return. In general, the translation sacrifices too much sense to keep Pushkin’s stresses and his alternating feminine/masculine rhymes. Nabokov chooses the same “ember”/”remember” rhyme that Duffy independently arrives at, but maintains the rhyme where Duffy abandons the effort halfway through. But his rhymes are trite (fashion-passion, true-you) and the whole poem too compliantly follows tired English verse conventions.

By the 1940s, Nabokov’s verse translations into English were far more assured and often superb. By the 1950s he had committed himself to literalism, but sometimes with uneasy compromises, if not for the sake of rhyme then for the sake of rhythm. In the case of “Ya vas lyubíl,” his “lexical” translation often seems closer than the literal translation not only to Pushkin’s words but to his power. The line “now by shyness, now by jealousy oppressed,” which I have gladly drawn on, captures the order, the sense, and, except for the tight sound patterns, the impact of Pushkin’s “To róbost’yu, to révnost’yu tomím.” For some reason Nabokov “improved” this into a literal version, “either by shyness irked or jealousy,” supposedly better English and no less accurate, yet in fact both less accurate and more awkward. The last line of the literal version does improve the last line (“as give you God to be loved by another”) of the lexical, but only

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