Word: nabokovs
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Horned or Cornute. Nabokov's own enormous word skill gives the translation felicity. But his very range of language allows him to choose words which, although exact in meaning, do not give the flavor of the original, generally because they are too highflown or arcane. The simple Russian word for "horned" (Ch. 6, XXXIX) becomes "cornute," which means horned but is not a simple English word. Simple words for "sweetness" and "youth" become "dulcitude" and "juventude" in English (Nabokov excuses himself somewhat abashedly by pointing out that the sense of the couplet-a sneer at moon-June versifying-requires...
...must be said that this rare suppression of the Nabokov literary personality is limited to the translation itself, and that the translation occupies only part of one volume of a four-volume work. Most of the remainder is a vast, outrageous, scholarly, funny, instructive and wholly characteristic mass of notes, offering 1) an exhaustive, line-by-line commentary on the text, variants of the text, and the difficulties of translation; 2) an exhaustive, line-by-line digression from this commentary, of which an elegant three-page defense of pedantry is typical; 3) a complete course in Russian and English prosody...
Occasionally (as when Nabokov solemnly offers as a talisman the lines that happen to fall at the exact center of the work), the notes are extreme enough to be worthy of Professor Kinbote, the demented footnoter of Nabokov's own Pale Fire...
Scholar's Craft. But such scholarly capering should not obscure the worth of Nabokov's commentary. The translation can be enjoyed but not really understood without it. And Nabokov, who learned his craft during years of professing at Wellesley and Cornell, is not merely a translator; he is also a truly remarkable teacher. He keeps the students awake...
Doubtless Nabokov will not win the war against paraphrased translation, which is his main concern. Perhaps it should not be won-not all paraphrases are profanations-but certainly it should be fought. But translators should be reminded that uprooting a masterpiece is not a job to be undertaken lightly ("Poetry is what is lost in translation," Robert Frost once observed); students, for their part, should be warned that a translation must never be read with complete trust...