Even Professor Muchnic, who in a recent issue of The New York Revtew of Books delicately takes Mr. Guy Daniels apart as if he were an unfamiliar and possibly defective type of coffee machine, neglects to point out that in both versions of Lermontov's poem which she quotes — Daniels' effort and Baring's very minor (pace Mirski) poem — the same grotesque imp blows a strident trumpet. For we have here an admirable example of one of those idiomatic freaks that for reasons of mental balance foreigners should not even try to rationalize. Lermontov's Russian goes: Sosedka est' u nib odna . . . Kak vspomnish', kak davno rasstaliis And the literal sense is: «They have a certain neighbor [fern.] . . . Oh, to think how long ago we parted!» The form vspomnish' looks like the second person singular of «remember», but in this intonational arrangement it should be the first person in literal translation since it is addressed by the speaker to himself. Now, both versionists being ignorant of idiomatic Russian did not hesitate to use the second person (though actually the result gives a painfully didactic twist to the sentence, which should have made the translator think twice). Baring's version (which Professor Muchnic, I am sorry to say, calls «a wonderfully precise reproduction of the sense, the idiom») runs: «We had a neighbor . . . and you remember I and she ..». While the more humble Daniels translates: «There was a girl as you'll recall..». I have italicized the shared boner. The point is not that one version is better than the other (frankly there is not much to choose between the two); the point is that unwittingly both use the same wrong person as if all paraphrasts were interconnected omphalically by an ectoplasmic band.
Despite the violent attitude towards literalism, I still find a little surprising the intensity of human passions that my rather dry, rather dull work provokes. Hack reviewers rush to the defense of the orthodox Soviet publicists whom I «chastise» and of whom they have never heard before. A more or less displaced Russian in New York maintains that my commentary is nothing but a collection of obscure trifles and that besides he remembers having heard it all many years ago in Gorki from his high-school teacher, A. A. Artamonov.
The word «mollitude», which I use a few times, has been now so often denounced that it threatens to become almost a household word, like «nymphet». One of my most furious and inarticulate attackers seems to be an intimate friend of Belinski (born 1811), as well as of all the paraphrasts I «persecute». The fury is, I suppose, pardonable and noble, but there would be no sense in my reacting to it. I shall also ignore some of the slapstick — such as a little item in The New Republic (April 3, 1965) which begins «Inspector Nabokov has revisited the scene of the crime in L'affaire (Jnegutne» and is prompted by a sordid little grudge of which the editor, presumably, had no knowledge. A reviewer writing in the Novyy Zhurnal (No. 77), Mr. Moris Fridberg — whom I am afraid I shall be accused of having invented — employs a particularly hilarious brand of bad Russian (kak izvestno dlya lyubogo studenta, as known «for» every student) to introduce the interesting idea that textual fidelity is unnecessary because «in itself the subject-matter of [Pushkin's] work is not very important». He goes on to complain that I do not say a word about such Pushkinists as Modzalevski, Tomashevski, Bondi, Shchyogolev, and Gofman — a statement that proves he has not only not read my commentary, but has not even consulted the Index; and on top of that he confuses me with Professor Arndt whose preliminary remarks about his «writing not for experts but students» Mr. Fridberg ascribes to me. A still more luckless gentleman (in the Los Angeles Times) is so incensed by the pride and prejudice of my commentary that he virtually chokes on his wrath and after enticingly entitling his article «Nabokov Fails as a Translator» has to break it off abruptly without having made one single reference to the translation itself. Among the more serious articles there is a long one in The New York Times Book Review, June 28, 1964, by Mr. Ernest Simmons, who obligingly corrects what he takes to be a misprint in One: xxv: 5; «Chadaev», he says, should be «Chaadaev»; but from my note to that passage he should have seen that «Chadaev» is one of the three forms of that name, and also happens to be Pushkin's own spelling in that particular line, which otherwise would not have scanned.
For obvious reasons I cannot discuss all the sympathetic reviews. I shall only refer to some of them in order to acknowledge certain helpful suggestions and corrections. I am grateful to John Bayley (The Observer, November 29, 1964) for drawing my attention to what he calls — much too kindly, alas — «the only slip» in my commentary: uAuf alien Gipfeln» (in the reference to Goethe's poem) should be corrected to « Ueber alien Uipfeln». (1 can add at least one other: My note to Two: xxxv: 8 contains a silly blunder and should be violently deleted.) Anthony Burgess in Encounter has suddenly and conclusively abolished my sentimental fondness for FitzGerald by showing how he falsified the «witty metaphysical tentmaker's» actual metaphors in «Awake] for morning in the bowl of Night . . . «. John Wain, in The Listener (April 29, 1965), by a sheer feat of style has made me at once sorry for one of my «victims» and weak with laughter: «This [the discussion of prosody], by the way, is the section in which Arthur Hugh Clough gets described as a poetaster; the effect is like that of seeing an innocent bystander suddenly buried by a fall of snow from a roof . . . «. J. Thomas Shaw, in The Russian Review (April 1965), observes that I should have promoted Pushkin after his graduation to the tenth civil rank («collegiate secretary») instead of leaving him stranded on the fourteenth rung of the ladder; but I cannot find in my copy the misprinted Derzhavin date which he also cites; and I strongly object to his listing James Joyce, whom I revere, among those writers whom I condemn «in contemptuous asides» (apparently Mr. Shaw has dreadfully misunderstood what I say about Joyce's characters falling asleep by applying it to Joyce's readers). Finally, the anonymous reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement (January 28, 1965) is perfectly right when he says that in my notes I do not discuss Pushkin's art in sufficient detail; he makes a number of attractive suggestions which, together with those of two other reviewers and several correspondents, would make a fifth volume, or at least a very handsome Festschrift. The same reviewer is much too lenient when he remarks that «a careful scrutiny of every line has failed to reveal a single careless error in translation». There are at least two: in Four: xliii: 2T the word «but» should be deleted, and in Five: xi: 3, «lawn» should be «plain».
The longest, most ambitious, most captious, and, alas, most reckless, article is Mr. Edmund Wilson's in I he New York Review of Books (July 15, 1965)*, and this I now select for a special examination.
* This is the text readers should consult. It is reprinted in an abridged, emended, and incoherent form in Edmund Wilson's A Window on Russia Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1972.