The Metaphysical “Affinity of the Unlike”: Strategies of Nabokov’s Literalism

Abstract

The Metaphysical “Affinity of the Unlike Strategies of Nabokov’s Literalism Julia Trubikhina N E W Y O R K U N I V E R S I T Y In his 1937 French lecture “Pouchkine, ou le vrai et le vraisemblable,” Nabokov claimed that the truth of another’s life is inaccessible because thought inevitably distorts whatever it tries to encompass. However, the intuitions of afictionalized biography motivated by love for its subject might convey a“plausible” life bearing mysterious affinity for “the poet’s work, if not the poet himself.”* This relatively earlystatementonthissubjectbyNabokov,madeduringcelebrationsofPushkin’s deathcentennial,becomespoignantinlightofNabokov’snovelPaleFireandhis monumental endeavor of translation and critical commentary—Eugene Onegin— some twenty years later. In Pale Fire, Shade, the author of the eponymous poem, writes: “Man's life as commentary to abstruse /Unfinished poem. Note for further use”2(Poem939-40).TheproblematicofthisarticlehingesonlinkingNabokov’s novelPaleFire,whosecentralfocusistheprocessoftranslationviatheappropri¬ ation of the original, to Nabokov’s “fiber-translation,” the pinnacle of his literal¬ ism—the translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Keeping in metaphysicaluncertaintynotonlydefinesNabokov’sfiction,butshouldbe extendedtohisliterarytranslation,IlookcloselyathowtheIndexandCommen¬ tary to Nabokov’s Onegin function. Ishow how the process of translation in a broadsenseofthiswordbecomesatrip“down[Pushkin’s]secretstem,”tousethe words from Nabokov’s poem about translating Onegin—the meticulous search forPushkin’sEuropeansources.Thusrerootedbackintoitssources,theoriginal becomes “secondary” in its own right. Finally, Ifocus on how literalism is achieved and on the criteria for its assessment. m i n d t h a t The Allegorical Mode of Translation TranslationforNabokovhasalwaysbeenavehicleforexpressinghisown,pro¬ foundlyheldideasaboutart.Whilehispracticeoftranslationundergoessignifi¬ cantchangesinthecourseofhiscareer,hisadherencetotheideaofsome“true” “metaphysical”language—everelusiveandeverpresent—remainssurprisingly constant. While Nabokov’s defense of the technical implications of literalism is wellknownfromthetheoreticalsquabblesthatensuedafterOnegin’spublication, it is important to remember that, philosophically, literalism is always related to the metaphysical absolute. In the following symptomatic comment, Nabokov directlyrelatedthisphilosophicalagendatothepracticalchoiceshewasmaking whiletranslatingOnegin.Inhiscommentarytoverses1-4ofstanza39,chapter4, lntertexts,Va\. 12, No. 1-2 2008 ©Texas Tech University Press 5 6 I N T E R T E X T S Nabokov makes aconnection between Pushkin’s stanza and an autobiographical allusion disguised as atranslation of Chenier. (The allusion is to aspecific illicit relationship Pushkin had with apeasant girl on his Mikhailovskoe estate.) Nabokov, defending his translation of the object of Onegin’s bucolic affections as awhite-skinnedgirl”—astrangeandleastobviouschoice—writes: Pushkin’s line 3[“poroi belianki chernookoi...”] is, by the bye, an excellent illus¬ tration of what Imean by literalism, literality, literal interpretation. Itake “literal¬ ism’ to mean “absolute accuracy.” If such accuracy sometimes results in the strange allegoric scene suggested by the phrase “the letter has killed the spirit,” onlyonereasoncanbeimagined:theremusthavebeensomethingwrongeither withtheoriginalletterorwiththeoriginalspirit,andthisisnotreallyatranslator’s concern. Pushkin has literally (i.e. with absolute accuracy) rendered Chenier’s une blanche” by belyanka, and the English translator should reincarnate here both Pushkin and Chenier. It would be false literalism to render belyanka (“une blanche”) as “a white one”—or, still worse, “a white female”: and it would be ambiguoustosay“fair-faced.”^{EugeneOnegin2:464-65) Suchunderstandingof“absoluteaccuracy,”inwhichunifiedvisionbecomesa allofmirrors,whosereflectionsdoubleandtripleadinfinitum,isverymuchin ine with Nabokov’s unusual metaphysics. He knew, as Brian Boyd observes, “the ^wtieth-century fashion for mordant metaphysical skepticism” (Boyd, aokovs Pale Fire 286) and dealt with the metaphysics, as well as metaphysical uncertainty, on the “scholiastic” level, as in Pale Fire—“an intimation of concealed design, the coy expression of an unjustifiable trust, ahint of what might lurk wthintheintimatetextureofthings”(258).Hesitationbetweendifferent ermeneutic possibilities creates the Nabokovian metaphysical uncertainty but oesnoteliminatetheexistenceofprecisepatternsofsignification.Histextisan endless interplay between the stability of meaning and the instability of meaning, wnewpossibilitiesopeningupeverytimesomestabilityseemstobeachieved, ecause the metaphysical mysteries cannot be explained or articulated,’* definitive interpretation is never an option, but their presence can be made known through recreationofthecreationgesture,”throughinscribingthemintothe“texture”of awork of fiction—Shade’s „ ^ not text, but texture” (“Pale Fire” Poem 808). Taking a shortcutintothediscussionofthenatureofallegorybywayofElizabethBronfensOverHerDeadBody ,Iwouldarguethattheallegoricalmode,asatropeof metaphysical uncertainty-a “withdrawal ffom any semantically fixed encoding” (45),notonlydefinesNabokov’sfiction,butshouldbeextendedtohisliterary translation.OnecandubNabokov’stranslationofOneginasanallegoricaltrans¬ lation (or metonymical, since it always avoids the final coincidence between signifier and signified) that, by displacing Pushkin’s original into commentary and criticism speaking in other terms, of other things”—allows the translator to engageinthesamegestureastheoriginalbysignifyinghistext’snoncoincidence TRUBIKHINA: The Metaphysical “Affinity of the Unlike’ 5 7 with itself. In what follows Iintend to explore the specific ways in which such mode of translation works in Nabokov’s Onegin. Drawing on de...