Nothing’s more fun than arguing with the dead, so we decided to argue with Nabokov. Old Vova thought he was right at everything, which is respectful and admirable, but, despite truly being right about many things, was still wrong about quite a few. He considered the fact he had to abandon Russian and write in English his personal tragedy — something we’d rather agree on — however his choice was more pragmatic than artistic. In Nabokov’s world, mid 20th century USA, hardly continuing writing in Russian and then self-translating or getting translated was productive, hardly it was possible for him to be a writer::public-figure if he kept writing in Russian, for he had no access to Russian literary scene outside of Soviet Union simply because it didn’t exist without the likes of samizdat (self-publishing) and tamizdat (out-there-publishing), the scale of which, sadly, would hardly satisfy Nabokov’s ambition. In our times, it’s very different, an author is freer than ever to publish anything anywhere in any language — even if some “where”s aren’t accessible, there are always other “where”s. His position is, however, still relatable, for we do know, too, that self-translation is practically writing two (or maybe 1.8 books) at a time. His multilinguality from an early age made him also remarkably well positioned to choose English as his primary writing language, and hardly he suffered writing in English fluency-wise. So, for someone like us, who achieved a decent level of English only in their mid-20s, it’s only possible to comprehend a part of his tragedy, the artistic one, the whatifness, the doubt that the final work created either in Russian or English is not its best version because we picked the wrong language at the start, so for us, the choice isn’t pragmatic but purely artistic. For Nabokov it was partially true as well. We can’t get into his head but looking at his oeuvre and written accounts of his beliefs, he was a proponent and practitioner of so-called Russian-into-English untranslatability, the main point of our disagreement with him.
Untranslatability is a respectable and philosophically and philologically defensible literary stance. It can be both word-level untranslatability, in which we say that a word in other language can sometimes have no direct alternative in another language, and cultural context-level untranslatability, in which we say that some things we write about can’t be parsed by people who don’t have lived experience for it, it is, in a way, can only be felt and no explanation would suffice. Another, no less important, is form-level untranslatability, such as the way something is written, e.g. syntax, prosodic qualities, tone, register, etc. can be lost in translation so it would never live up to the original. All three stances (perhaps there are more) are legit only if we speak about a text as the main artefact that undergoes translation, that the goal is to recreate the text in another language as perfectly as possible. All of which raises the suspicion that “untranslatable” might be the wrong frame entirely.
Nabokov was pretty much the patron saint of Russian->English untranslatability. Worth mentioning tho, he probably didn’t believe in the opposite, because, for one, he translated his LOLITA himself with a straight face and, mind thee, that wasn’t the best of translations — three decades in the US can do worse than that to a man. Regarding Ru->En he was ruthless, denying translatability, as it seemed, at all levels: meaning, context, form, etc. belief that peaked at his own translation of EUGENE ONEGIN, a potentially heroic but rather doomed proposition that Pushkin in English must sound like a clinical autopsy or not be Pushkin at all, such as no rhyme and no meter, the verse flattened into a literal prose pony, and walls of text filled with exhaustive commentary, or rather a pre-emptive response to everyone who’d dare prefer something more singable.
On the word level, he had a canonical list of untranslatables, an interesting and in many ways agreeable bunch, including: poshlost’ (vulgarity-but-deeper, rather a philistine vulgarity, lack of taste vulgarity), toska (cosyish anguish, melancholic longing, often nostalgic), byt (everyday existence, routines sucking in), and istina (metaphysical, absolute truth). TULUBAIKAPORIA has footnotes for two of those: toska in Episode 15, istina in Episode 2, both — could be said — are even amongst the central concepts of the novel.
In his translation of Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin”, Nabokov describes toska as follows:
No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.
But of course, what doesn’t exist in English, might exist somewhere else, such as there’s the Portuguese “saudade”, the Welsh “hiraeth”, the Finnish “kaiho”, and likely others, all of which are almost perfect approximations of “toska”.
Same with istina — semantically it stands further from simply “the factual/empirical truth”, closer to “the absolute/transcendent/metaphysical truth”, the kind of truth one might find at the bottom of a well or a bottle or never at all. In the same way, German philosophy differentiates between “Richtigkeit” (correctness, factual accuracy) and “Wahrheit” in its deeper Heideggerian sense of “unconcealment” or “aletheia”; similarly, Greek distinguishes “aletheia” (disclosure, uncovering) from “doxa” (opinion); Sanskrit offers “satya” (unchangeable truth) versus “vyavahārika” (conventional truth).
So what does the book actually do with this Nabokovian translation wisdom? In reality, we could do two things: 1) concede the gap, Nabokov’s stance, the slap-a-footnote-and-move-on; Episode 4 does that once, with the Signal; 2) coin: don’t translate anything, anglicise it and let original roots grow English appendages (khondria, drebbeden, shabootnous, coffa, etc.), a move the late-Nabokov, four-volume-you-can’t-just-translate-EUGENE-ONEGIN Nabokov (hello Sir Charles Johnston) wouldn’t like, but the early-Nabokov, NIKOLAI-GOGOL-monograph Nabokov did all the time (remember his poshlust?); 3) translate the vibe, such as a translator has to recreate the affective texture from scratch: the rhythm, the syntax, the prosody, so the original voice can sing and a reader of the English text can hear it. Our main approach — after all, the texture is the meaning.
At Nova Nevédoma we believe that what’s translated isn’t the text but something behind the text, the spirit of the text, the consciousness dwelling in the text, so to say, a Platonic form of the text, not the words (literal translation) and not “the meaning” (fucking hell, what’s that even), but a transcendent “feeling” emotional / intellectual, something the text aims to create in the reader’s head, a noöspheric entity / parasite even. Hope it’s clear!
We listen and learn from Vladimir Vladimirovich, but with the figure like him the important thing is not to learn too much.