A Nabokov moment...

One of the happy side-effects of Ed Czerwinski's little talk with me in the library at SUNY/Stony Brook, which resulted in my declaring a second major in Russian Language & Literature, was a serious introduction to the work of Vladimir Nabokov, who became one of my favorite writers. (In truth, he probably became one of my favorite writers because he was so enthusiastically conveyed to us by our professor, but I digress—)

Despite my enjoyment of Nabokov, there are times, however, when I find myself a little intimidated by the depth and breadth of his erudition. Take, for example, his translation—which people love or hate, but rarely are indifferent to—of Alexander Pushkin's verse novel Eugene Onegin. Or more accurately, the Commentaries and Notes that Nabokov wrote to his translation. Compare:


In this connection, it makes sense to refer to a poem of Nabokov's, published in The New Yorker, which leads me to veer off, momentarily, on a tangent, to wonder whether a crowd—listening to a speech being delivered by some important foreign dignitary in Manhattan's Times Square who says "After my visit to your great city, I feel I am truly the New Yorker"—would think the speaker believes himself to be a magazine?...

Where was I? Oh, yes. In 1955, Nabokov's poem On translating "Eugene Onegin" was published in The New Yorker. It's one of my favorites.

What is translation? On a platter
A poets pale and glaring head,
A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter,
And profanation of the dead.
The parasites you were so hard on
Are pardoned if I have your pardon,
O, Pushkin, for my stratagem:
I traveled down your secret stem,
And reached the root, and fed upon it;
Then, in a language newly learned,
I grew another stalk and turned
Your stanza, patterned on a sonnet,
Into my honest roadside prose—
All thorn, but cousin to your rose.

Reflected words can only shiver
Like elongated lights that twist
In the black mirror of a river
Between the city and the mist.
Elusive Pushkin! Persevering,
I still pick up Tatiana's earring,
Still travel with your sullen rake.
I find another man's mistake,
I analyze alliterations
That grace your feasts and haunt the great
Fourth stanza of your Canto Eight.
This is my task -- a poet's patience
And scholiastic passion blent:
Dove-dropping on your monument.

This, of course, led me to hunt down that "Fourth stanza of [Eugene Onegin's] Canto Eight."

Но я отстал от их союза
И вдаль бежал... Она за мной.
Как часто ласковая муза
Мне услаждала путь немой
Волшебством тайного рассказа!
Как часто по скалам Кавказа
Она Ленорой, при луне,
Со мной скакала на коне!
Как часто по брегам Тавриды
Она меня во мгле ночной
Водила слушать шум морской,
Немолчный шепот Нереиды,
Глубокий, вечный хор валов,
Хвалебный гимн отцу миров.

Someday, when I have the time—and more important, the inclination—I may take a stab at translating this stanza. What is immediately germane is that to my non-native ear, there is little of what I would identify as "alliteration" in the verse. So let me turn to Nabokov—where I find that his comments and notes on just this one stanza cover a bit more than six pages of text.

Writes Nabokov: "The alliterations are built around the vowel a (which is also the sound of the unaccented o), and the consonants l, s, z, k." And yes, now I see it, especially as Nabokov shows these occurrences schematically (shown here in slightly modified for the first half dozen lines):

[1] . . . al . . za
[2] . . . al . a-za .
[3] ka . as . lask . . za
[4] . . sla . ala . . .
[5] . al . . . askaza
[6] ka . as . askala . ka . kaza

---

So, you may ask, what has started me off on a Nabokov jag this Sunday morning? And why call it a "Nabokov moment"? Because from time to time, some seemingly inconsequential thing blossoms into a "Wow" moment that tickles my fancy.

Yesterday, I posted a query to the ru_translate community about that strange sentence, "Как загнать свинью в коноплю, я знал давно." Based on the comments to my query, I conclude that my original gut interpretation—"I've known the basics of my craft for some time"—is probably close enough to the mark to work.

However, one respondent came up with a link to a text that explained how, back in the day, in Russia, cobblers would work hemp into pig bristle so as to create a thread with strong and durable ends that could be used for sewing shoes.

Однако дратва без щетинок еще не дратва, а полдратвы. Льняные концы ее, исходя на нет, кончаются тончайшими волосками. Свиная же щетина, если она настоящая, имеет особое свойство: щетинку можно расщепить, разодрать надвое вдоль. Сапожник на глазах у мальчишки берет из пучка щетинку, расщепляет ее до половины, вставляет в этот расщеп конец дратвы и осторожно скручивает его сначала с одной из щетинных половинок, затем с другой. Готово!

But cobbler's thread without bristle is not yet cobbler's thread, but only partway finished. As its flaxy ends taper, they terminate in the very thinnest of filaments. Pig bristle, if it's genuine, has a particular property: it can be split or torn in half along its length. In front of the kid's eyes, the shoemaker takes a bristle from out of a tuft, splits it in half, inserts the end of the cobbler's thread into this split and then carefully twists it first around one of the bristle halves, then around the other. Now, it's ready!

[my sight translation]

Nabokov moments come in all shapes and sizes. From arcane references to Dryden and the "shores of Tauris," to explanations of how to manufacture, by hand and using materials gathered from the ground and the backs of animals, thread suitable for sewing footwear.

There just isn't enough time to take it all in!

Cheers...

P.S. The timing isn't right, but it occurs to me that this is the stuff of what "inside baseball" is all about!