RTRS1347056 Techset Composition India (P) Ltd.

, Bangalore and Chennai, India 7/1/2017

TRANSLATION STUDIES, 2017

https://doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2017.1347056

5 Nabokov’s translations and transnational canon formation

Marijeta Bozovic
AQ1 Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Yale University, USA
¶
10
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The library of scholarship on Vladimir Nabokov still circles Nabokov; translation; canon
uncomfortably around his annotated translation Eugene Onegin formation; transnational
(1964) and late English-language novel Ada, or Ardor (1969). This literature; world literature
AQ2 article examines the cultural “translation” that Nabokov attempts
¶ in his two most controversial monuments, annexing what he
15 feared was a vanishing Russian tradition to the English-language
novel. Nabokov aimed not only to enter, but to define an
international literary canon – against that of T.S. Eliot and the New
Critics – with Russian literature as a central strain. Through a
lifelong propaganda campaign, Nabokov conjured for many
readers an alluring vision of a transnational Antiterra. The article
argues that this emancipatory potential captured the imagination
20
of such writers as J.M. Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk, Azar Nafisi and W.G.
Sebald – all, in some sense, “Nabokov’s children”. It focuses on the
centrality of translation to Nabokov’s oeuvre in the light of recent
scholarship on translation theory.

25

Translation and canon formation

Nabokov threw down a four-volume gauntlet with his notorious annotated translation of
Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin. The scandal and feud that followed in its wake
30 have become legendary. Edmund Wilson in particular denounced the “bald and awkward
language that has nothing in common with Pushkin”. Wilson’s surprisingly personal (and
nationally flavored) attacks spoke of “the perversity of [Nabokov’s] tricks to startle or stick
pins in the reader” and of “his sado-masochistic Dostoevskian tendencies so acutely noted
by Sartre – he seeks to torture both the reader and himself by flattening Pushkin and
35 denying to his own powers the scope for their full play” (Wilson 1965, 3). Wilson was
certain that this Onegin was deliberate treason, for, as he complained, “[i]t had always
seemed to me that Vladimir Nabokov was one of the Russian writers who, in technique,
had the most in common with Pushkin” (5). The battle raged on, fueled by reviews, attacks
and counter-attacks. Nabokov took months to edit and revise an even more aggressively
40 literal translation, and in turn accused Robert Lowell of “mutilating defenseless dead
poets” and “doubly martyring” Osip Mandelstam; Lowell and George Steiner responded
and the feud continued for years (Boyd 1991, 508; cf. Steiner 1998).
Much like yet another of his rivals, T.S. Eliot, Nabokov believed that the literary past
shapes and haunts the present. Long before he began work on Eugene Onegin, he stated
45
CONTACT Marijeta Bozovic marijeta.bozovic@yale.edu
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 2 M. BOZOVIC

that “Pushkin’s blood” ran in his veins, as could be said of all Russian writers; with Eugene
Onegin, he battles for the supremacy of his Russian literary bloodline (Nabokov 1990b,
63). Furthermore, Nabokov clearly intended to wrest himself a space in the canon: he
aimed quite openly for literary immortality.1 This project was a key component of that
50 struggle, one of the works for which he expected to be remembered.
Elsewhere I offer a reading of Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin and Ada, his most controver-
sial monuments, as also his most ambitious and central to his canon-formation project.2
Specifically, Nabokov tries to challenge an Anglo-American-centric modernist canon with
an alternative genealogy of the Romantic and modernist novel. I examine the cultural
55 “translation” that Nabokov attempts to perform in his two most controversial works,
annexing what he feared was a vanishing Russian tradition to that of the English-language
modernist novel. Nabokov aimed not only to enter, but to define an international canon of
literary masterpieces – against that of Eliot and the New Critics – and with Russian litera-
ture as a central rather than marginal strain.
60 An agonistic struggle with the literary father, pace Harold Bloom, only partially
describes Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin. Nabokov was more interested in championing
Pushkin to Western audiences than in demonstrating his own superiority (Wilson
1965, 3–6). Every pioneer needs a predecessor, a point of origin that speaks to the legiti-
macy of the current project. If to read Nabokov’s 1964 Eugene Onegin is to read Pushkin
65 not with Nabokov but as Nabokov, the commentaries allow unprecedented access to the
AQ3 latter’s strategy regarding cultural capital and canon formation (Brown 1967, 195).3 Now
¶ that the controversy of Nabokov’s translation has faded, we can examine the annotated
Eugene Onegin as a whole and with entirely different interests from its first critics.
What we find is that Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin delivers a feint and jab against numer-
70 ous and diverse rivals. The translation grew out of Nabokov’s pedagogical frustrations: by
the end of the 1950s, Nabokov had made a tour of the American Ivies. As a professional
Russianist at Cornell and Harvard, he had practical experience and direct insight into what
kind of Russian literature was reaching American readers, and in what form; he had also
endured a number of slights from Roman Jakobson and other Slavists. Eugene Onegin rep-
75 resented a broad attack on American and Soviet scholars – but also on reigning Anglo-
American literary elites. Nabokov’s “literal” translation betrayed Pushkin far less than it
did the English language, or expectations to cleave to standard literary and lyrical usage.
In Writing Outside the Nation, Azade Seyhan reconsiders Walter Benjamin’s and
Rudolf Pannwitz’s theories of translation, critical of translations that “appropriate the
80 soul of another language and subject it to the rule of the language into which it is trans-
lated” (Seyhan 2001, 155). Seyhan asks whether
the fundamental error of the translator is that he is fixated on the arbitrarily defined higher
status of his own language. Translation should be neither a full linguistic reconstruction nor
an appropriation. Rather, it should incorporate the original language’s mode of signification.
85 Both the original and the translation should be recognizable “as fragments of a larger
language”. (ibid., 155)

This, I would argue, is what Nabokov’s translation and Commentary sought to do. As
Nabokov had proven his ability to write critically acclaimed English-language prose, his
Eugene Onegin by implication expressed disdain for standard literary usage – and for
90
the higher status of English. His purposefully awkward rendition was quite correctly
 TRANSLATION STUDIES 3

perceived as an assault on English-language poetry, and as a personal blow to other trans-

lators, critics and American intellectual elites. Wilson’s response, in this light, proves that
the challenge was immediately so understood by his contemporaries and rivals.
For several decades, scholarship on Nabokov and translation has followed the terms
95 of the feud and fallen into pro and contra camps. Increasingly, scholars are beginning
to approach the topic of translation with fresh eyes, and even to posit the centrality of
translation to Nabokov’s entire oeuvre (see Trubikhina 2015). However, recent exciting
turns and insights in translation theory (including the work of Lawrence Venuti and
recent scholarship by Brian James Baer in the Russian context) tend to leave
100 Nabokov aside, for reasons of language (Venuti, for example, translates primarily
AQ4 from Italian, French and Catalan) or seeming idiosyncrasy (Baer 2015; Venuti 1995,
¶ Venuti 1998). Studies of Nabokov and translation by Nabokov scholars, meanwhile,
still tend to avoid the political and theoretical challenges opened by these new
approaches, notably sidestepping the political dimensions raised by Venuti via a
105 Nietzschean and Foucauldian genealogical approach (as Venuti himself clarifies) to
the history of translation.
In this article, I attempt to address this gap by foregrounding and examining the sig-
nificance of translation to Nabokov’s canon-formation project, and by considering the
implications of such a translation practice in our era of (re-imagined) world literature.
110 In doing so, I hope to open up new ways of reading Nabokov, and to illuminate aspects
of his practice as germane to some of the key literary debates of our current moment.
Specifically, I argue that Nabokov’s translation practice challenges both Russian essential-
ist readings of classical Russian literature and the hegemonic reign of the Anglo-American
canon in ways provocative and relevant to the twenty-first century.
115

Rewriting translation
In his groundbreaking study The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, Lawr-
ence Venuti argues that the translator – certainly in Anglo-American culture – has been
120 virtually erased from view by Western conceptions of authorship and originality. A host of
legal and economic arrangements, including the ambivalent legal status of translation in
copyright law, have contributed to what amounts to a “weird self-annihilation, a way of
conceiving and practicing translation that undoubtedly reinforces its marginal status in
British and American cultures” (Venuti 1995, 7).
125 Venuti argues that the related dominance of transparency and “plain style” in the
English language, reinforced by commercial and political industries outside of literature,
has influenced every other medium:
The American poet Charles Bernstein, who for many years worked as a “commercial writer”
of various kinds of nonfiction – medical, scientific, technical – observes how the dominance
130 of fluency in contemporary writing is enforced by its economic value, which sets up accep-
table “limits” for deviation. … The authority of “plain styles” in English-language writing was
of course achieved over several centuries, what Bernstein describes as “the historical move-
ment toward uniform spelling and grammar, with an ideology that emphasizes nonidiosyn-
cratic, smooth transition, elimination of awkwardness, &c. – anything that might concentrate
attention on the language itself.” In contemporary British and American literatures, this
135 movement has made realism the most prevalent form of narrative and free, prose-like
AQ5 verse the most prevalent form of poetry. (Venuti 1995, 5)
¶
 4 M. BOZOVIC

Arguing, with Jacques Derrida, that both text and translation are always already derivative,
Venuti suggests that
both consist of diverse linguistic and cultural materials that neither the foreign writer nor the
translator originates, and that destabilize the work of signification, inevitably exceeding and
140 possibly conflicting with their intentions. … Meaning is a plural and contingent relation, not
an unchanging unified essence, and therefore a translation cannot be judged according to
mathematics-based concepts of semantic equivalence or one-to-one correspondence.
Appeals to the foreign text cannot finally adjudicate between competing translations in the
absence of linguistic error, because canons of accuracy in translation, notions of “fidelity”
and “freedom,” are historically determined categories. (13–14)
145
Venuti repeatedly draws our attention to the historically determined and political dimen-
sions of translation, as practiced in the uneven global distributions of cultural and real
capital. By translating and publishing vast numbers of English-language books, publishers
“have exploited the global drift towards American political and economic hegemony since
150 World War II, actively supporting the international expansion of British and American
cultures” (12). Among other resultant hegemonic effects, this gives translation “enormous
power in the construction of identities for foreign cultures, and hence it potentially figures
in ethnic discrimination, geopolitical confrontations, colonialism, terrorism, war” (14).
Venuti suggests, however, that foreignizing translations may serve as forms of resist-
155 ance, even against the “ethnocentrism and racism, cultural narcissism and imperialisms”
AQ6 that supposedly transparent translations elegantly obscure (Venuti 1995, 16). Such trans-
¶ lations eschew plain style and fluency to instead flaunt and reveal their partiality, under-
mining the prevailing values of neo-liberal Anglo-American culture. Ultimately, Venuti
calls for an explicitly politicized and historically aware approach to translation:
160
[I]nscribing the foreign-language text with values that are current in the receiving culture …
is also dehistoricizing: the various conditions of translated texts and of their reception are
concealed beneath concepts of transcendental subjectivity and transparent communication.
A symptomatic reading, in contrast, is historicizing: it assumes a concept of determinate sub-
jectivity that exposes both the ethnocentric violence of translating and the interested nature
165 of its own historicist approach. (32)

A host of influential critics – including several key figures associated with world literature
as a rethinking of the comparative literature project in American academia – have followed
in Venuti’s wake. Emily Apter’s The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature
aims to rethink translation studies in a theoretical framework that emphasizes the role
170 played by translation in war, canon struggles, “experiments with nonstandard language,
and the status of the humanist tradition of translatio studii in an era of technological lit-
eracy” (Apter 2005, 3; see also Walkowitz 2015).
Searching for a zone of critical engagement to connect “the ‘l’ and the ‘n’ of transLation
and transNation”, Apter emphasizes cultural caesura, transmission failures, and “neigh-
175 boring” as a “traumatic proximity of violence and love” (Apter 2005, 5, 247). She writes:
As Georgio Agamben has observed … , “we do not have, in fact, the slightest idea of what
either a people or a language is.” The Gypsy case, for Agamben, reveals the shaky ground
on which language nomination rests. In affirming that “Gypsies are to a people what argot
is to language,” Agamben unmasks standard language names as specious attempts to
180 conceal the fact that “all peoples are gangs and coquilles, all languages are jargons and
argots.” (243)
 TRANSLATION STUDIES 5

Following Agamben’s model, Apter arrives at creolization as emblematic of a new com-

parative literature based on translation: Creole, broadly understood, potentially “heralds
a condition of linguistic postnationalism and denatures monolingualization (showing it
to be an artificial arrest of language transit and exchange)” (245).
185 In step with such interrogations of translation practice as a critique of cultural essenti-
alism, Brian James Baer in Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature turns
symptomatic reading to the canon(s) of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian litera-
ture. While the “tyranny of the national”, he finds, indeed helps to explain “a number of
phenomena in the field of Russian literary studies”, to examine Russian literature through
190 the lens of translation today is to “interrogate the continued investment of literary studies
in Romantic nationalism and to challenge the imperative to monolinguize cultures” (Baer
2015, 14):
The idea of Russian national identity being constructed through translation anticipates post-
modern notions of identity as performed, not given, and of translation as a transformative
195 event in the target culture, not a pale copy of an original. … Challenging the monolingualiza-
tion of literary studies is, one could argue, especially important in the context of Russian
culture, where Peter’s reforms and imperial realities produced an enormous number of bilin-
guals and a culture marked by hybridity. The nationalist privilege of the monolingual
through the ideology of one language-one people has, however, constructed this hybridity,
at least among Russia’s elite, as a problem, a symptom of the elite’s “split identity,” of its
200
alienation from the folk, and of Russia’s failed nationalist project. Even the cosmopolitan
Lotman, in his work on Russian elite culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century, promoted the “conviction that the French-speaking nobility lacked an authentic cul-
tural identity” – with authentic here meaning national. (12–15)

New scholarship has the potential to challenge not only the marginality of translation and
205
bilingualism to mainstream studies of Russian literature, but to thereby “deconstruct the
exclusive binaries produced by Romantic nationalism” (15).
Jan Walsh Hokenson and Marcella Munson’s study, The Bilingual Text: History and
Theory of Literary Self-Translation, draws attention to nonconformist bilinguals through-
out the ages who have thrived on the dissimilarities between languages and cultural prac-
210
tices, arriving at idiosyncratic and creative forms of stylistic expression. They cite Nabokov
AQ7 as a prime example:
¶
How does one delimit, define, and not least, interrelate the social groups being addressed by
the bilingual text? Sometimes it is evident that they are largely two separate, monolingual
groups, like Nabokov’s Russian and English readers. … Nabokov, for example, struggled to
215
adapt his Oxbridge English to the American market, while his Russian was losing pace
with a half century of change in his native country. His biographers show that he also
chortled at the linguistic puzzles and puns between versions that would, he knew, fascinate
and frustrate a third group, the significant spectrum of Anglo-Russian exiles and academic
scholars who would help guarantee his posterity as a bilingual author of transnational
220
fictions. (Hokenson and Munson 2006, 12)

Indeed, as Julia Trubikhina demonstrates in her recent monograph, The Translator’s

Doubts: Vladimir Nabokov and the Ambiguity of Translation,
[i]t is hard to separate Vladimir Nabokov from the act of translation, in all senses of the
word. … Just as Nabokov’s Russian prose seemed “strange” to his contemporaries despite
225
the indisputable mastery and finesse of his Russian language, his English-language works
 6 M. BOZOVIC

since the 1940s struck readers as either brilliant and witty or, on the contrary, precious or
“maddeningly opaque,” but always written in a language “alien in details of lexical usage,”
whose “primary rhythms … go against the natural grain of English and American speech.”
(Trubikhina 2015, 11–12)4
230 Trubikhina offers the following overview of the scholarship on Nabokov and translation:
In the 1970s, straightforward investigations of the use of the Russian language in Nabokov’s
English novels and comparisons of his Russian and English prose dominated. The 1980s and
1990s in turn contributed studies on the relationship between self-translation and autobio-
graphy, and on bilingualism and exile, as well as a number of studies on specific texts and
235 aspects of translation. The more recent publications on Nabokov and translation continue
the investigation of bilingualism, self-translation, and exile (the latter involving inevitable
comparisons between Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky, who received the Nobel Prize in Litera-
ture in 1987, as well as parallels to other linguistic exiles, such as Milan Kundera), while also
drawing on the more specific issues of hybridity, mimesis, and erasure. Since the early 1990s,
Nabokov’s presence on the Internet (both the English-language Internet and its Russian
240 segment) has been actively shaping the reception of Nabokov’s text and the direction of
Nabokov Studies. (16)

Trubikhina ultimately argues that, while Nabokov’s own translation practices changed
dramatically over the course of his career (from the extremely lyrical and looser early
translations of Russian Romantic poetry to the unapologetic prosaic awkwardness of
245
the revised Eugene Onegin), his attachment to the idea of a “ ‘true,’ ‘metaphysical’ language
– ever elusive and ever present – remains surprisingly constant” (207). Trubikhina thereby
relies on Nabokov’s own writings about translation to differentiate his later translation
practice from the “poststructuralist and deconstructionist theories of language of Paul
de Man, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida” (221–222).
250
While I agree with Trubikhina’s conclusion that Nabokov as translator had ample
doubts, as evidenced by his tellingly changeable translation styles over the course of his
long career, I take as my subject the opposite of her metaphysical concerns. My interest
is less in Nabokov’s performative statements about translation – which often relied on
Romantic and mystifying rhetoric about language – and instead in the more subversive
255
social elements of his practice. As is not uncommon, Nabokov tends to be far less
complex in his performative declarations on the nature of art (just as in his performed
politics) than in his fiction. He veers further and further away from Romantic origins
in his late works, revealing – perhaps even despite his previous assumptions – the de-
essentializing centrality of translation to his work.
260

Nabokov’s scandals of translation

In the Commentary to Onegin, Nabokov’s careful studies of Pushkin’s West European
influences time and again insist on undermining the “Russianness” of the cornerstone
265
of the classical Russian literary canon. Against the grain of critical discourse, he asserted:
Pushkin’s composition is first of all and above all a phenomenon of style. … It is not “a
picture of Russian life”; it is at best the picture of a little group of Russians, in the second
decade of the last century, crossed with all the more obvious characters of western European
romance and placed in a stylized Russia, which would disintegrate at once if the French props
270 were removed and if the French impersonators of English and German writers stopped
prompting the Russian-speaking heroes and heroines. The paradoxical part, from a
 TRANSLATION STUDIES 7

translator’s point of view, is that the only Russian element of importance is this speech, Push-
kin’s language, undulating and flashing through verse melodies the likes of which had never
been known before in Russia. (Nabokov 1975, 1:7)

While Nabokov in his polemics around the Onegin translation reiterated his preference for
275 literalness and (claims of) fidelity, in his own memoirs, in the Russian Lolita and in the
forewords to his English translations of earlier Russian work he emphasized precisely
the breaks and complexities of working between languages. These paradoxes were simpli-
fied and dramatized for a popular audience rather than theorized; however, Nabokov
nevertheless highlights problems in authorship (which he tends to present elsewhere in
280 the gilded, defensive émigré form that would prompt Jameson to call him a belated mod-
ernist).5 It is precisely as a translator that Nabokov still appears the most unorthodox and
contemporary.
While struggling with the early stages of Ada, Nabokov completed his translation of
Lolita into Russian. The experience was not entirely positive: if the afterword to the
285 English Lolita emphasized the private tragedy that “I had to abandon my natural idiom,
my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of
English” (Nabokov 1991, 316–317), the new Russian afterword revealed an equally
strong but opposite reaction:

290 Alas, that “marvelous Russian language” that I thought awaited me somewhere, blossoming
like a faithful springtime behind a tightly locked gate whose key I had kept safe for so many
years, proved to be nonexistent, and beyond the gate are nothing but charred stumps and the
hopeless autumnal vista, and the key in my hand is more like a jimmy. (Boyd 1991, 490)

Nabokov’s laments require decoding. It seems unlikely that rusty Russian was entirely to
295 blame, and his contention in the melancholy afterword, that Russian is “a good ‘From’
language but a terrible “Into” one”, is unconvincing (Boyd 1991, 491). Nostalgia longs
for a lost time rather than merely a lost place: Nabokov’s enchanted garden is not only
the Russian language, but the Russian language of a different era (see Boym 2002). In
translating 1950s Americana “back” into his mother tongue, the writer faced the linguistic
300 repercussions of the turbulent twentieth century. Should Lolita speak pre-revolutionary
Russian in 1965?
Another translator might have been tempted to interpolate contemporary Russian (and
hence Soviet) jargon, shading Lo into a delinquent Young Pioneer. By translating Lolita
himself, Nabokov forestalled such cleverness. The Russian Lolita is instead recognizably
305 a translation, unmistakably a novel from tam (“over there”, or abroad). Michael
Cummins notices a strange kinship precisely with Nabokov’s Onegin, “that indefatigably
clumsy, ‘literal’ translation of Pushkin’s masterpiece” (Cummins 1977, 354). In both,
Nabokov the translator “gives us a reading of a great classic of literature, a literal copy ‘ren-
dering as closely as the associative and syntactical capability of another language allows,
310 the exact contextual meaning of the original’ ” (354). The result is more anachronistic
than archaic, blurring into a cultural collage. Nabokov remained deliberately vague
about the intended audience for a Russian Lolita, mentioning that it might find the
same readers as had Osip Mandelstam’s verse. Yet anxiety over the readership is
embedded into this newly Russian prose: as Cummins notes, “the new Lolita has exegesis
315 right in the body of the text. The reader is coached in English poetry, taught the mechanics
of the Bronx cheer and hopscotch” (354).
 8 M. BOZOVIC

If the decline of the pre-revolutionary Russian literary tradition had not sufficiently
preoccupied Nabokov before, the Russian Lolita illuminated matters starkly – there was
no returning to the garden. However, the Russianized American place names and
hybrid cultural landscapes must have suggested a creative escape. If the Eden was no
320 more, he could write a new Garden into existence by translating culture in the other direc-
tion. The Russo-American world of Ada would resurrect the grand tradition of the Russian
novel, but in English and on New World soil. It is this most difficult and speculative of
Nabokov’s post-national fictions that interests me the most: Ada, his other great failure
in the eyes of many critics, thematizes its own post-national status as a work of world
325 (rather than English or Russian) literature in ways that Lolita and Pnin do not. Again,
and tellingly, critics responded with rage that only the multilingual could catch its puns
and references – not the “normal” English reader.
George Steiner wrote in an early review, “At a first reading Ada … seems to be self-
indulgent and at many points irredeemably overwritten. But with a writer of this reach,
330 first readings are always inadequate. Lived with, the layer cake in Ada may prove a culinary
find” (Steiner 1970, 124–125). Richard Rorty concluded that if Nabokov’s middle period
found a balance between the “initial maximum difficulty of synthesis and eventual trans-
AQ8 parency”, with Ada “he becomes merely idiosyncratic” (Rorty 1989, 161). Michael Wood,
¶ evoking Edward Said’s and Theodor Adorno’s notions of late style, sees Ada as an odd mix
335 of mastery and apparent ineptness, and points out that Nabokov was 70 by the time of
publication. For Wood, Ada is “a sickly and elaborate world, a sort of hell which
parades as paradise” (Wood 1997, 206). In a more recent reading, Eric Naiman summar-
izes wittily: “More than any other book by Nabokov, Ada equates complexity with com-
plicity … do we want to be the type of person who appreciates this type of writing?”
340 (Naiman 2010, 266).
Soon after the highly public Onegin feud, Ada opens with a hook, announcing in the
first line that it will play all manner of games with the Russian literary tradition. Ada
begins with an infamous inversion:
“All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike”, says a
345
great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, trans-
figured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880). That pronouncement has
little if any relation to the story to be unfolded now, a family chronicle, the first part of which
is, perhaps, closer to another Tolstoy work, Detstvo i Otrochestvo (Childhood and Father-
land, Pontius Press, 1858). (Nabokov 1990a, 1)
350
This first two-sentence paragraph is ominously dense, beginning with a parody of mistran-
slation, attributed, though the wordplay in the fictional translator’s name, to a cross
between George Steiner and Robert Lowell (the latter guilty of re-martyring Mandelstam,
the former of theorizing away the crime). It continues with the preposterous verb “trans-
figured”, the title in Russian and in gross English mistranslation, and the tempting provo-
355
cation that Part One may be “close to” Tolstoy. After assessing the response, Nabokov
added in the first of Vivian Darkbloom’s notes that this opening alluded to the “transfig-
urations (Mr. G. Steiner’s term, I believe) and betrayals to which great texts are subjected
by pretentious and ignorant versionists” (591).
Nabokov’s own transfigurations – overtly flamboyant and idiosyncratic efforts to trans-
360
plant Russian literature to new soil – do more than invent a Russo-American New World.
 TRANSLATION STUDIES 9

In keeping with his research and his cultural-ambassadorial agenda in Eugene Onegin,
Nabokov maintained that the Russian canon was always richly interwoven with English
and French literary sources, as well as the other way around in the generations subsequent
to Pushkin. Ada’s Romantic roots reach beyond Onegin down to Pushkin’s illustrious pre-
365 cursors, similarly working with and against earlier Russian, French and English texts.
Pushkin focused his energies on the authors from whom he most wanted to learn: as
Nabokov argued in his Commentary, the two most marked Western sources in Onegin
are Byron and Chateaubriand. While Ada’s allusions seem to lead in all directions, it
too leans on Byron and Chateaubriand, emphasizing the roots shared with Pushkin and
370 insisting on an interpenetrating and international genealogy for the poetic novel. A
pattern emerges of great English, French and Russian triads; it repeats with Dickens, Flau-
bert and Tolstoy; and finally, with Joyce, Proust and Nabokov himself.
Nabokov had no interest in fitting into someone else’s anthology of Russian writers, but
provided his own transnational genealogy in the Onegin project and again in the family
375 trees of Ada. Nabokov’s canon reveals an implied trajectory for the Russian Romantic
and modernist novel, extending from Pushkin to culminate unexpectedly in a late-twen-
tieth-century hybrid, written mostly in English and after 50 years of emigration. Eugene
Onegin sought to establish Pushkin as a model for how a great artist could escape cultural
marginalization into the relatively autonomous alterity of art. Ada, Nabokov’s final act of
380 alchemy with Russian literature, replaces more familiar republics of letters (cf. Casanova
2007) with transnational and meta-literary Antiterra.
Nabokov’s motivations for disrupting national essentialism were of course self-serving,
stemming in no small part from his bleak views of Soviet and émigré Slavist scholarship
alike. His mode as well as motivation for competing with American elites like Edmund
385 Wilson for the role of arbiter elegantiarum differentiate him also from later postcolonial
transnational writers such as Salmon Rushdie and Junot Diaz (see Trousdale 2010). And
yet the comparison may illuminate the political dimensions of the former as much as the
elite positioning of the latter.

390
Nabokov in the era of world literature
Despite – or perhaps, because of – the controversy that he unfailingly inspired in the last
two decades of his life, Nabokov has been acknowledged as the “first among Russian-born
literati to attain the ‘interliterary stature of a world writer’ ” (Shapiro 2009, 101). An
395 unconventional but influential cultural ambassador, he re-imagined the international rel-
evance of the Russian literary tradition, and the literary canon as a complex web of inter-
mingled transnational culture, as well as the stylistic and thematic possibilities of the late-
twentieth-century transnational novel. Russia’s liminal position both inside and outside
European culture presents in some sense an advantage; and Nabokov presents a model
400 for how outsider cultural producers might break into and decenter networks of cultural
capital.
In What is World Literature, David Damrosch suggests that “world literature is not an
infinite, ungraspable canon of works but rather a mode of circulation and of reading, a
mode that is as applicable to individual works as to bodies of material, available for
405 reading established classics and new discoveries alike” (Damrosch 2003, 5; cf. Pizer
2006; Prendergast 2004). As Mads Rosedahl Thomsen argues in Mapping World
 10 M. BOZOVIC

Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures, “[i]t is only within

the last decades that the concept of culture has gradually been more and more widely
defined as non-essentialist, hybrid and contingent, something that has not been reflected
in the practice of literary history, but which in all likelihood is one of the main reasons
410 behind the renewed interest in world literature” (Thomsen 2008, 3). Goethe’s dream of
a world literature, or Weltliteratur, has been re-imagined for a new era; similarly, Nabo-
kov’s works – and Nabokov’s endeavors at canon-formation via translation and transna-
tional fiction – may be read increasingly in such company and context.6
Working within the literary medium, Nabokov managed not only to escape margina-
415 lization himself, but, through his literary output and lifelong aesthetic propaganda cam-
paign, to reconfigure the playing field. His oeuvre and his transnational status have
permeated world literature and captured the imagination of the Iranian-born Azar
Nafisi, Turkish Orhan Pamuk, South African J.M. Coetzee, and the German exile W.G.
Sebald, to name only a few contemporary practitioners. Writers who feel distant from
420 the traditional centers of cultural capital find in Nabokov an inspiration, and read him
in ways as disparate as do Nafisi, who found in Lolita a moving allegory of the subjugation
of women (as in her 2003 memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran), and Pamuk, who in The
Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist (2010) argues for the primacy of the visual description
in terms often borrowed from Nabokov, but also from the Islamic tradition of illustrating
425 books with ornate miniatures (Nafisi 2003; Pamuk 2010).
By the late-twentieth and twenty-first century, Nabokov has become as much of a sym-
bolic value to international artists and writers as Pushkin had been to him. Nabokov is
maddening or enticing, but by now he is also a symbol – of a densely allusive and
parodic prose style, of a rare virtuoso bilingualism, of an uncompromising stance on artis-
430 tic autonomy, and even of a mode of aestheticized existence. Nabokov has even been
accused of ruining a generation of English-language writers, infected by his baroque
style and mask of autonomy. However, the list of world writers who have paid him
homage includes, besides Afizi, Pamuk, Coetzee and Sebald, also such writers as Salman
Rushdie, Umberto Eco and Roberto Bolaño. Many of these authors, despite having
435 vastly different aesthetic, ethical or political projects, are nevertheless eager to declare
themselves children of Nabokov.
The disruptive centrality of translation to his entire oeuvre may help to explain how
Nabokov came to serve as an unexpected inspiration and fountainhead for such seemingly
disparate – and often overtly political – work. For Nabokov’s canon proves borders to be
440 permeable across cultures and languages. Ultimately, rather than merely replacing one
dominant Anglo-American canon with a more European but equally rigid model, Nabo-
kov’s idiosyncratic practice invites similar self-fashioning. Many contemporary cultural
critics set great store by writers who have grown up in Nabokov’s library, while discount-
ing Nabokov as the relic of an earlier age. But moving against the grain of critical dis-
445 course, we can choose to mine Nabokov for unexpectedly emancipatory elements and
recast Ada’s new world as a forerunner of transnational literatures. Ada reads differently
in an era of Creoles, when so many readers are themselves hybrids and geographical in-
betweens.
Recently, a number of monographs and articles have reread Nabokov’s works against
450 the critical grain, making important interventions and questioning the prevalent ahistori-
cism of Nabokoviana (see Hägglund 2012; Naiman 2010; Norman 2012; White,
 TRANSLATION STUDIES 11

AQ9 forthcoming). Just as every era invents its own Pushkin, so it appears high time for a new
¶ Nabokov. If battles within his own lifetime (in the impoverished émigré years in interwar
Europe; and in the McCarthyist America of the 1950s) encouraged the familiar and defen-
sive polished Russian aristocratic posture, Nabokov’s attacks on national essentialism and
455 the dull hegemony of English-language fluency have never appeared more modern.

Notes
1. “I shall be remembered by Lolita and my work on Eugene Onegin”, Nabokov stated in a 1967
460 interview for the Paris Review, included in Strong Opinions (Nabokov 1990b, 106).
2. I develop the canon-formation argument at length in Nabokov’s Canon: From Onegin to Ada
(Bozovic 2016). The paper on which the present article is based (presented at the conference
“Translation in Russian Contexts: Transcultural, Translingual and Transdisciplinary Points
of Departure” at Uppsala University, 3–7 June 2014) contributed to chapter 3 and to the con-
clusion of the monograph.
465 3. Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of literature offers key concepts to parse the social facts of cul-
tural differentiation. Cultural capital is a “form of knowledge, an internalized code or a cog-
nitive acquisition which equips the social agent with empathy towards, appreciation for or
competence in deciphering cultural relations and cultural artifacts” (Johnson 1993, 7). The
terms “habitus”, “strategy” and “trajectory” recognize the author as an agent without
falling into reductive intentionality. “Habitus” describes the dispositions acquired through
470 social context, schooling and long exposure that become second nature, a “feel for the
game”. “Strategy” refers to orientation or practice, and is shaped relationally by the position
of the agent in the cultural field; “trajectory” suggests the changing positions and strategies of
the same agent over time (see Bourdieu 1984, 72, 183, 189). Cf. Guillory 1993.
4. Cf. Hokenson and Munson 2006, 183–184: “Though it was recognized that Nabokov shared
comic grotesquery and thematic daring with Dostoevsky, Gogol and others, and used Russian
475 with the finesse of Pushkin, some émigré critics considered his prose ‘foreign’ and ‘un-
Russian,’ just as some American critics later found his English contrived.”
5. Frederic Jameson reads Nabokov as reflecting “the misfortune to span two eras and the luck
to find a time capsule of isolation or exile in which to spin out unseasonable forms” (Jameson
2003, 305).
6. Cf. Omry Ronen, “The Triple Anniversary of World Literature: Goethe, Pushkin, Nabokov”:
480 “it becomes clear how Goethe envisioned world literature. It certainly was not to be simply a
collection of the so-called great books from all over the world. Rather, it would be a great
synthesis of national literary achievements attained in practice at what Goethe called a mar-
ketplace of spiritual commerce, in which a key part would be played by the translator and the
interpreter … . [Goethe] arrived at a definition of world literature not as a mechanical
accumulation of books, a sum total of various national literatures, but as a system of inter-
485
literary and intercultural choices, reflections and refractions” (Ronen 2003, 173–174).

Note on contributor
Marijeta Bozovic is assistant professor of Slavic languages and literatures, affiliated with film and
490 media studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Yale University. A specialist in twen-
tieth- and twenty-first-century Russian and East European cultures with broad comparative inter-
ests, she is the author of Nabokov’s Canon: From Onegin to Ada (Northwestern University Press,
2016), and the co-editor (with Matthew Miller) of Watersheds: Poetics and Politics of the Danube
River (Academic Studies Press, 2016) and (with Brian Boyd) of Nabokov Upside Down (Northwes-
tern University Press, 2017). She is currently working on her second monograph, Avant-Garde
495 Post–: Radical Poetics After the Soviet Union. All of Bozovic’s projects – including work on Vladimir
Nabokov’s English-language texts, contemporary Russian protest poetry, digital humanities
 12 M. BOZOVIC

approaches to émigré archives, Danube and Black Sea studies – share a commitment to the study of
transnational cultural flow, politics and aesthetics, cultural capital and its geographical distri-
butions. Bozovic is the co-editor of the academic journal Russian Literature; the co-curator of
the “Poetry after Language” colloquy for Stanford University’s ARCADE digital salon; and a con-
temporary film and literature reviewer for The Los Angeles Review of Books.
500

Disclosure statement
AQ10 No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
¶
505
References
Apter, Emily. 2005. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Baer, Brian James. 2015. Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature. Bloomsbury
510 AQ11 Academic.
¶ Bourdieu, Pierre. 1987. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Translated by
AQ12 Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
¶ Boyd, Brian. 1991. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Boym, Svetlana. 2002. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.
Bozovic, Marijeta. 2016. Nabokov’s Canon: From Onegin to Ada. Evanston: Northwestern
515 University Press.
Brown, Clarence. 1967. “Nabokov’s Pushkin and Nabokov’s Nabokov.” In Nabokov: The Man and
His Work, edited by L. S. Dembo, 195–208. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Casanova, Pascale. 2007. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Cummins, George M. 1977. “Nabokov’s Russian Lolita.” SEEJ 21 (3) (Autumn 1977): 354–365.
520 Damrosch, David. 2003. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press.
AQ13 Eliot, T. S. 1976. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen.
¶ Guillory, John. 1993. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Hägglund, Martin. 2012. Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
525 Hokenson, Jan Walsh, and Marcella Munson. 2006. The Bilingual Text: History and Theory of
Literary Self-Translation. New York: Routledge.
Jameson, Frederic. 2003. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Johnson, Randal. 1993. “Pierre Bourdieu on Art, Literature, and Culture.” In Pierre Bourdieu, The
Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, edited by Randall Johnson. New York:
530 AQ14 Columbia University Press.
¶ Nabokov, Vladimir. 1975. trans. with commentary. Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Alexandr
Pushkin. Rev. ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Nabokov, Vladimir. 1990a. Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. New York: Vintage International.
Nabokov, Vladimir. 1990b. Strong Opinions. New York: Vintage.
Nabokov, Vladimir. 1991. “On a Book Entitled Lolita.” In The Annotated Lolita, edited by Alfred
535 AQ15 Appel Jr. New York: Vintage.
¶ Nafisi, Azar. 2003. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. New York: Random House.
Naiman, Eric. 2010. Nabokov, Perversely. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Norman, Will. 2012. Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time. New York: Routledge.
Pamuk, Orhan. 2010. The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist. Translated by Nazim Dikba.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
540 Pizer, John. 2006. The Idea of World Literature: History and Pedagogical Practice. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press.
 TRANSLATION STUDIES 13

Prendergast, Christopher, ed. 2004. Debating World Literature. London: Verso.

Ronen, Omry. 2003. “The Triple Anniversary of World Literature: Goethe, Pushkin, Nabokov.” In
Nabokov at Cornell, edited by Gavriel Shapiro, 172–181. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Seyhan, Azade. 2001. Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
545 Shapiro, Gavriel. 2009. The Sublime Artist’s Studio: Nabokov and Painting. Evanston: Northwestern
University Press.
Steiner, George. 1970. “Extraterritorial.” TriQuarterly 17 (Winter 1970): 119–128.
Steiner, George. 1998. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl. 2008. Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and
550
Transnational Literatures. London: Continuum.
Trousdale, Rachel. 2010. Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination: Novels of Exile and
Alternate Worlds. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Trubikhina, Julia. 2015. The Translator’s Doubts: Vladimir Nabokov and the Ambiguity of
AQ16 Translation. Academic Studies Press.
¶ Venuti, Lawrence. 1998. The Scandals of Translation. New York: Routledge.
555
Venuti, Lawrence. 2008. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. 2nd ed. New York:
AQ17 Routledge.
¶ Walkowitz, Rebecca. 2015. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World
Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.
White, Duncan. 2017. Nabokov’s Bibliopoetics: Between Late Modernism and the Market. Oxford:
560
AQ18 Oxford University Press.
¶ Wilson, Edmund. 1965. “The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov.” New York Review of Books 4
(12) (Jul. 15, 1965): 1–11.
Wood, Michael. 1997. The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.

565

570

575

580

585