Mr. Wilson can hardly be unaware that once a writer chooses to youthen or resurrect a word, it lives again, sobs again, stumbles all over the cemetery in doublet and trunk hose, and will keep annoying stodgy gravediggers as long as that writer's book endures. In several instances, English archaisms have been used in my EO not merely to match Russian antiquated words but to revive a nuance of meaning present in the ordinary Russian term but lost in the English one. Such terms are not meant to be idiomatic. The phrases 1 decide upon aspire towards literality, not readability. They are steps in the ice, pitons in the sheer rock of fidelity. Some are mere signal words whose only purpose is to suggest or indicate that a certain pet term of Pushkin's has recurred at that point. Others have been chosen for their Gallic touch implicit in this or that Russian attempt to imitate a French turn of phrase. All have pedigrees of agony and rejection and reinstatement, and should be treated as convalescents and ancient orphans, and not hooted at as impostors by a critic who says he admires some of my books. I do not care if a word is «archaic» or «dialect» or «slang»; I am an eclectic democrat in this matter, and whatever suits me, goes. My method may be wrong but it is a method, and a genuine critic's job should have been to examine the method itself instead of crossly fishing out of my pond some of the oddities with which I had deliberately stocked it.
Let me now turn to what Mr. Wilson calls my «infelicities» and «aberrations» and explain to him why I use the words he does not like or does not know.
In referring to Onegin's not being attracted by the picture of family life, Pushkin in Four: xm: 5 uses the phrase semeystvennoy kartinoy. The modern term is semeynoy kartinoy and had Pushkin chosen it, I might have put «family picture». But I had to indicate the presence of Pushkin's rarer word and used therefore the rarer «familistic» as a signal word.
In order to indicate the archaic note in vospomnya (used by Pushkin in One: xlvii: 67 instead of vspomnya, or vspomniv, or vspominaya), as well as to suggest the deep sonorous diction of both lines (vospomnya prezhnih let romany; vospomnya, etc.), I had to find something more reverberating and evocative than «recalling intrigues of past years», etc., and whether Mr. Wilson (or Mr. N. for that matter) likes it or not, nothing more suitable than «rememorating» for vospomnya can be turned up.*
* For reasons having nothing to do with the subject of this essay I subsequently changed the translation, exact in tone but not in syntax, of those two lines (see the epigraph to my Mary, McGrawHill, New York, 1970).
Mr. Wilson also dislikes «curvate», a perfectly plain and technically appropriate word which I have used to render kriyye hecause I felt that «curved» or «crooked» did not quite do justice to Onegin's regularly bent manicure scissors.
Similarly, not a passing whim but the considerations of prolonged thought led me to render hour: ix: 5, prtvychkoy zhizni izbalovan, as «spoiled by a habitude of life». I needed the Gallic touch and found it preferable in allusive indefinitude — Pushkin's line is elegantly ambiguous — to «habit of life» or «life's habit». «Habitude» is the right and good word here. It is not labeled «dialect» or «obsolete» in Webster's great dictionary.
Another perfectly acceptable word is «rummer», which I befriended because of its kinship with ryumka, and because I wished to find for the ryumki of Five: xxix: 4 a more generalized wineglass than the champagne flutes of xxxii: 89, which are also ryumki. If Mr. Wilson consults my notes, he will see that on second thought I demoted the nonobsolete but rather oversized cups of xxix to jiggers of vodka tossed down before the first course.
I cannot understand why Mr. Wilson is puzzled by «dit» (Five: vm: 13) which I chose instead of «ditty» to parallel «kit» instead of «kitty» in the next line, and which will now,
I hope, enter or reenter the language. Possibly, the masculine rhyme I needed here may have led me a little astray from the servile path of literalism (Pushkin has simply pesnya — «song»). But it is not incomprehensible; after all, anybody who knows what, say, «titty» means («in nailmaking the part that ejects the half-finished nail») can readily understand what «tit» means («the part that ejects the finished nail»).
Next on Mr. Wilson's list of inappropriate words is «gloam». It is a poetic word, and Keats has used it. It renders perfectly the mgla of the gathering evening shadows in Four: xlvii: 8, as well as the soft darkness of trees in Three: xvi: 11. It is better than «murk», a dialect word that Mr. Wilson uses for mgla, with my sanction, in another passage — the description of a wintry dawn.
In the same passage which both I and Mr. Wilson have translated, my «shippon» is as familiar to anyone who knows the English countryside as Mr. Wilson's «byre» should be to a New England farmer. Both «shippon» and «byre» are unknown to pocketdictionary readers; both are listed in the threecentimeterthick Penguin (1965). But I prefer «shippon» for hlev because I see its shape as clearly as that of the Russian cowhouse it resembles, but see only a Vermont barn when I try to visualize «byre».
Then there is «scrab»: «he scrabs the poor thing up», bednyazhku tsaptsarap (One: xiv: 8). This tsap-tsarap — a «verbal interjection» presupposing (as Pushkin notes when employing it in another poem) the existence of the artificial verb tsaptsarapat', jocular and onomatopoeic — combines tsapat' («to snatch») with tsarapat («to scratch»). I rendered Pushkin's uncommon word by the uncommon «scrab up», which combines «grab» and «scratch», and am proud of it. It is in fact a wonderful find.
I shall not analyze the phrase «in his lunes» that Mr. Wilson for good measure has included among my «aberrations». It occurs not in my translation, which he is discussing, but in the flow of my ordinary comfortable descriptive prose which we can discuss another time.
We now come to one of the chief offenders: «mollitude». For Pushkin's Gallic nega I needed an English counterpart of mollesse as commonly used in such phrases as il perdit ses jeunes anntes dans la mollesse et la volupte or son coeur nage dans la mollesse. It is incorrect to say, as Mr. Wilson does, that readers can never have encountered «mollitude». Readers of Browning have. In this connection Mr. Wilson wonders how I would have translated chistyh neg in one of Pushkin's last elegies — would I have said «pure mollitudes»? It so happens that I translated that little poem thirty years ago, and when Mr. Wilson locates my version (in the Introduction to one of my novels*) he will note that the genitive plural of nega is a jot different in sense from the singular.
[* Despair. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 302303, 1966]