As we’ve no doubt come to discover in our efforts working with French, the entire exercise of translation is one beset by compromises and imperfections, strategic adjustments, additions and elisions and all the rest. There is–this is all to say–no such thing as a perfect translation, and indeed, in order to render even a passable one (which often feels like the best one can do), many decisions and changes have to be made. In no arena of translation is this balancing act more an issue than in poetry, where formal aspects–aesthetics, rhythm, style–are paramount, and the mission of the translator necessarily includes a lot more than a literal re-rendering of content. Thanks to this daunting complexity that poetry denotes for the would-be re-renderer (not to mention all the messy social and political dimensions present in the navigation of languages and cultures), to undertake and complete a poetic translation can constitute a fairly controversial act, sometimes spill over into real aggression, with real principles on the line. One such case is that of Vladimir Nabokov and his 1965 translation of Pushkin’s epic poem Eugene Onegin.
Nabokov, famously erudite and known for his acrobatic prose style in Russian, English and probably every other language, undertook his translation after publicly lambasting a translation of Onegin by Walter Arndt, wherein Arndt did his best to faithfully render the original’s complex rhyming scheme (iambic pentameter) and stanza form. Nabokov regarded Arndt’s efforts as a fool’s errand, believing it was impossible to maintain fidelity to the original content and replicate its poetic structure at the same time. The only way, he contended, to accurately re-render the poem into English would be to do away with all considerations of form (using free verse, in effect) and focus entirely on maintaining a literal, word-to-word fidelity to the original text–which decision, of course, proved to be far more controversial than Arndt’s own.
The reviews for Nabokov’s Onegin (published in 1965 in four lengthy volumes, two of which contained only annotations!) were a bit bewildered to say the least, and one article in particular–by the enormously influential critic Edmund Wilson in the New York Review of Books–sparked a venomous spat between the two writers, and the dissolution of their then-strong friendship. Wilson’s original review is full of harsh criticism for Nabokov and his “unnecessarily clumsy style, which seems deliberately to avoid point and elegance.” Wilson, no slouch in the wit department himself, piles on dig after dig, at one point noting that “The commentary, the appendices, and the scholarly presentation suffer in general from the same faults as Nabokov’s translation—that is, mainly from a lack of common sense.”
So naturally Nabokov responded with his own rant, published in the form of a letter to the magazine a month or so later, taking Wilson to task, offered as a precursor to an eventual “complete account of the bizarre views on the art of translation which have been expressed by some critics of my work on Pushkin.” In the meantime, Nabokov lays into Wilson’s own mistakes of Russian and assumes a tone of total incredulity that the latter would dare correct a native speaker, casting himself as “a patient confidant of [Wilson’s] long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian language,” noting that his friend couldn’t read Onegin without “garbling every second word and turning Pushkin’s iambic line into a kind of spastic anapaest,” and responding to a particular criticism with a terse “I do not think Mr. Wilson should try to teach me how to pronounce this or any other Russian vowel.”
Anyway, even if you have no particular horse in this race and don’t care one way or the other about literal fidelity vs. style approximation in translation, these letters are pretty extraordinary, and worth reading just to see these two giants duking it out in a public tete-a-tete. Of course, Wilson responded to the response, the debate raged on, but you get it; Nabokov’s admittedly eccentric decision to render Pushkin’s iambics into free verse had in effect resulted in a pretty major scandal (as far as translation scandals go, at least). His Onegin is still regarded as an anomaly in the annals of translation (probably because there hasn’t been any writer since with his unique combination of off-the-charts intelligence and strict, old-school literary principles), but his resolve never shifted an inch. In case you were still at all unclear on where he stood on translation, he even wrote a poem (in the form of so-called Pushkin stanzas!) entitled “On Translating Eugene Onegin.” Here is its none-too-subtle opening: “What is translation? On a platter / A poet’s pale and glaring head, / A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter, / And profanation of the dead.”
French and the city 