A number of earnest simpletons consider Mr. Wilson to be an authority in my field («he misses few of Nabokov's lapses», as one hasty well-wisher puts it in a letter to The New York Review on August 26), and no doubt such delusions should not be tolerated; still, I am not sure that the necessity to defend my work from blunt jabs and incompetent blame would have been a sufficient incentive for me to discuss that article, had I not been moved to do so by the unusual, unbelievable, and highly entertaining opportunity that I am unexpectedly given by Mr. Wilson himself of refuting practically every item of criticism in his enormous piece. The mistakes and misstatements in it form an uninterrupted series so complete as to seem artistic in reverse, making one wonder if, perhaps, it had not been woven that way on purpose to be turned into something pertinent and coherent when reflected in a looking glass. I am unaware of any other such instance in the history of literature. It is a polemicist's dream come true, and one must be a poor sportsman to disdain what it offers.
As Mr. Wilson points out with such disarming good humor at the beginning of his piece, he and I are old friends. I fully reciprocate «the warm affection sometimes chilled by exasperation» that he says he feels for me. When I first came to America a quarter of a century ago, he wrote to me, and called on me, and was most kind to me in various matters, not necessarily pertaining to his profession. I have always been grateful to him for the tact he showed in not reviewing any of my novels while constantly saying flattering things about me in the so-called literary circles where I seldom revolve. We have had many exhilarating talks, have exchanged many frank letters. A patient confidant of his long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian language and literature, I have invariably done my best to explain to him his monstrous mistakes of pronunciation, grammar, and interpretation. As late as 1957, alone of our last meetings, in Ithaca, upstate New York, where I lived at the time, we both realized with amused dismay that, despite my frequent comments on Russian prosody, he still could not scan Russian verse. Upon being challenged to read Evgeniy Onegin aloud, he started to perform with great gusto, garbling every second word, and turning Pushkin's iambic line into a kind of spastic anapest with a lot of jaw-twisting haws and rather endearing little barks that utterly jumbled the rhythm and soon had us both in stitches.
In the present case, I greatly regret that Mr. Wilson did not consult me about his perplexities, as he used to in the past. Here are some of the ghastly blunders that might have been so easily avoided.
«Why», asks Mr. Wilson, «should Nabokov call the word netu an old-fashioned and dialect form of net. It is in constant colloquial use and what I find one usually gets for an answer when one asks for some book in the Soviet bookstore in New York». Mr. Wilson has mistaken the common colloquial netu which means «there is not», «we do not have it», etc., for the obsolete netu which he has never heard and which as I explain in my note to Three: hi: 12, is a form of net in the sense of «not so» (the opposite of «yes»).
«The character called yo», Mr. Wilson continues, «is pronounced . . . more like 'yaw' than like the 'yo' in 'yonder.'« Mr. Wilson should not try to teach me how to pronounce this, or any other, Russian vowel. My «yo» is the standard rendering of the sound. The «yaw» sound he suggests is grotesque and quite wrong. I can hear Mr. Wilson — whose accent in Russian I know so well — asking that bookseller of his for «Miertvye Dushi» («Dead Souls»). No wonder he did not get it.
«Vse», according to Mr. Wilson (explaining two varieties of the Russian for «all»), «is applied to people, and vsyo to things». This is a meaningless pronouncement. Vse is merely the plural of ves' (masculine), vsya (feminine), and vsyo (neuter).
Mr. Wilson is puzzled by my assertion that the adjective zloy is the only one-syllable adjective in Russian. «How about the one-syllable predicative adjectives?» he asks. The answer is simple: I am not talking of predicative adjectives. Why drag them in? Such forms as mudr («is wise»), glup («is stupid»), ploh («is very sick indeed») are not adjectives at all, but adverbish mongrels which may differ in sense from the related adjectives.
In discussing the word pochuya Mr. Wilson confuses it with chuya («sensing») (see my letter about this word in the New Statesman, April 23, 1965) and says that had Pushkin used pochuyav, only then should I have been entitled to put «having sensed». «Where», queries Mr. Wilson, «is our scrupulous literalness?» Right here. My friend is unaware that despite the different endings, pochuyav and pochuya happen to be interchangeable, both being «past gerunds», and both meaning exactly the same thing.
All this is rather extraordinary. Every time Mr. Wilson starts examining a Russian phrase he makes some ludicrous slip. His didactic purpose is defeated by such errors, as it is also by the strange tone of his article. Its mixture of pompous aplomb and peevish ignorance is hardly conducive to a sensible discussion of Pushkin's language and mine — or indeed any language, for, as we shall presently see, Mr. Wilson's use of English is also singularly imprecise and misleading.
First of all it is simply not true to say, as he does, that in my review of Professor Arndt's translation (The New York Review of Books, August 30, 1964) «Nabokov dwelt especially on what he regarded as Professor Arndt's Germanisms and other infelicities of phrasing, without apparently being aware of how vulnerable he himself was». I dwelled especially on Arndt's mistranslations. What Mr. Wilson regards as my infelicities may be more repellent to him for psychological reasons than «anything in Arndt», but they belong to another class of error than Arndt's or any other paraphrases casual blunders, and what is more Mr. Wilson knows it. I dare him to deny that he deliberately confuses the issue by applying the term «niggling attack» to an indignant examination of the insults dealt out to Pushkin's masterpiece in yet another arty translation. Mr. Wilson affirms that «the only characteristic Nabokov trait» in my translation (aside from an innate «sadomasochistic» urge «to torture both the reader and himself», as Mr. Wilson puts it in a clumsy attempt to stick a particularly thick and rusty pin into my effigy) is my «addiction to rare and unfamiliar words». It does not occur to him that I may have rare and unfamiliar things to convey; that is his loss. He goes on, however, to say that in view of my declared intention to provide students with a trot such words are «entirely inappropriate» here, since it would be more to the point for the student to look up the Russian word than the English one. I shall stop only one moment to consider Mr. Wilson's pathetic assumption that a student can read Pushkin, or any other kussian poet, by «looking up» every word (atter all, the result of this simple method is far too apparent in Mr. Wilson's own mistranslations and misconceptions), or that a reliable and complete Russko-angliyskiy slovar'not only exists (it does not) but is more easily available to the student than, say, the second unabridged edition (1960) of Webster's, which I really must urge Mr. Wilson to acquire. Even if that miraculous slovar' did exist, there would still be the difficulty of choosing, without my help, the right shade between two near synonyms and avoiding, without my guidance, the trapfalls of idiomatic phrases no longer in use.
Edmund Wilson sees himself (not quite candidly, 1 am afraid, and certainly quite erroneously) as a common sensical, artless, average reader with a natural vocabulary of, say, six hundred basic words. No doubt such an imaginary reader may be sometimes puzzled and upset by the tricky terms 1 find it necessary to use here and there — very much here and there. But how many such innocents will tackle KO anyway? And what does Mr. Wilson mean by implying I should not use words that in the process of lexicographic evolution begin to occur only at the level of a «fairly comprehensive dictionary»? When does a dictionary cease being an abridged one and start growing «fairly» and then «extremely» comprehensive? Is the sequence: vest-pocket, coat-pocket, great-coat-pocket, my three book shelves, Mr. Wilson's rich library? And should the translator simply omit any reference to an idea or an object if the only right word — a word he happens to know as a teacher or a naturalist, or an inventor of words — is discoverable in the revised edition of a standard dictionary but not m its earlier edition or vice versa? Disturbing possibilities! Nightmarish doubts! And how does the harassed translator know that somewhere on the library ladder he has just stopped short of Wilson's Fairly Comprehensive and may safely use «polyhedral» but not «lingonberry»? (Incidentally, the percentage ot what Mr. Wilson calls «dictionary words» in my translation is really so absurdly small that I have difficulty in finding examples.)