When the nurse says to Tatiana nu delo, delo, ne gnevaysya, dusha moya, and I render it by «this now makes sense, do not be cross with me, my soul», Mr. Wilson in a tone of voice remindful of some seventeenth-century French — pedant discoursing on high and low style, declares that «make sense» and «my soul» do not go together, as if he knows which terms in the nurse's Russian go together or do not!
As I have already said, many of the recurring words I use (ache, pal, mollitude, and so on) are what I call «signal words», i.e., terms meant, among other things, to indicate the recurrence of the corresponding Russian word. Style, indeed! It is correct information I wish to give and not samples of «correct style». I translate ochen'milo-postupil-nash-priyatel, in the beginning of Four: xviii (which is also the beginning of the least artistic section in Four: xviiixxn), by «very nicely did our pal act», and this Mr. Wilson finds «vulgarly phrased»; but Mr. Wilson stomps in where I barely dare to tread because he is quite unaware that the corresponding Russian phrase is also trite and trivial. There simply exists no other way of rendering that genteel ochen' milo (Pushkin is imitating here a simpering reader), and if I chose here and elsewhere the signal word «pal» to render the colloquial turn of priyateV, it is because there exists no other way of expressing it. «Pal» retains the unpleasant flippancy of priyateV as used here, besides reproducing its first and last letters. PriyateV ViVson would be, for instance, a flippant and nasty phrase, out of place in a serious polemical text. Or does Mr. Wilson really think that the passage in question is better rendered by Professor Arndt? («My reader, can you help bestowing praise on Eugene for the fine part he played with stricken Tanya?»)
Mr. Wilson's last example in the series pertaining to «bad style» has to do with the end of Seven: xxxn. When rendering the elegiac terms in which Tatiana takes leave of her country home, I had to take into account their resemblance to the diction of Pushkin's youthful elegy addressed to a beloved country place («Farewell, ye faithful coppices», etc.), and also to that of Lenski's last poem. It was a question of adjustment and alignment. This is why I have Tatiana say in a stilted and old-fashioned idiom, «Farewell, pacific sites, farewell, secluded [note the old-fashioned pronunciation of the correspondent uedinennyy] refuge! Shall I see you?» «Such passages», says Mr. Wilson, «sound like the products of those computers which are supposed to translate Russian into English». But since those computers are fed only the basic Russian Mr. Wilson has mastered, and are directed by anthropologists and progressive linguists, the results would be his comic versions, and not my clumsy but literal translation.
Probably the most rollicking part of Mr. Wilson's animadversions is the one in which he offers his own mistranslation as the perfection I should have tried to emulate.
My rendering of gusey kriklivyh karavan tyanulsya k yugu (Four: xli: 11 and beginning of 12) is «the caravan of clamorous geese was tending southward» but, as I note in my commentary, kriklivyh is lexically «screamy»* and the idiomatic tyanulsya conveys a very special blend of meaning, with the sense of «progressing in a given direction» predominating over the simple «stretching» obtainable from pocket dictionaries (see also note to Seven: iv: 14). Mr. Wilson thinks that in his own version of the coming of winter in Four, part of which I quote in my Commentary with charitably italicized errors, he is «almost literally accurate and a good deal more poetically vivid than Nabokov». The «almost» is very lenient since «loudtongued geese» is much too lyrical, and «stretching» fails to bring out the main element of the contextual tyanulsya.
[* In revising my translation for a new edition I have changed «clamorous» to the absolutely exact «cronking». ]
A still funnier sight is Mr. Wilson trying to show me how to translate properly ego loshadka, sneg pochuya, pletyotsya rys'yu kak nibud' (Five: n: 34), which in my literal rendering is «his naggy, having sensed the snow, shambles at something like a trot». Mr. Wilson's own effort, which goes «his poor (?) horse sniffing (?) the snow, attempting (?) a trot, plods (?) through it (?)», besides being a medley of gross mistranslations, is an example of careless English. If, however, we resist the unfair temptation of imagining Mr. Wilson's horse plodding through my trot and, instead, have it plod through Mr. Wilson's snow, we obtain the inept picture of an unfortunate beast of burden laboriously working its way through that snow, whereas in reality Pushkin celebrates relief, not exertions. The peasant is not «rejoicing» or «feeling festive», as paraphrasts have it (not knowing Pushkin's use of torzhestvovat''here and elsewhere), but «celebrating» (the coming of winter), since the snow under the sleigh facilitates the little nag's progress and is especially welcome after a long snowless autumn of muddy ruts and reluctant cart wheels.
Although Mr. Wilson finds my Commentary overdone, he cannot help suggesting three additions. In a ludicrous display of pseudo-scholarship he insinuates that I «seem to think» (I do not, and never did) that the application by the French of the word «goddams» to the English (which 1 do not even discuss) begins in the eighteenth century. He would like me to say that it goes back to the fifteenth century. Why should I? Because he looked it up?
He also would have liked me to mention in connection with the «pensive vampire» (Three: xii: 8) of Polidori's novelette (1819) another variety of vampire which Pushkin alluded to in a poem of 1834 suggested by Merimee's well-known pastiche. But that vampire is the much coarser vurdalak, a lowly graveyard ghoul having nothing to do with the romantic allusion in Canto Three (1824); besides he appeared ten years later (and three years after Pushkin had finished Eugene Onegin) — quite outside the period limiting my interest in vampires.
The most sophisticated suggestion, however, volunteered by Mr. Wilson, concerns the evolution of the adjective krasnyy which «means both red and beautiful». May this not be influenced «by the custom in Old Russia, described in Hakluyt's Voyages, of the peasant women's painting large red spots on their cheeks in order to beautify themselves?» This is a preposterous gloss, somehow reminding one of Freud's explaining a patient's passion for young women by the fact that the poor fellow in his self-abusing boyhood used to admire Mt. Jungfrau from the window of a water closet.
I shall not say much about the paragraph that Mr. Wilson devotes to my notes on prosody. It is simply not worth while. He has skimmed my «tedious and interminable appendix» and has not understood what he managed to glean. From our conversations and correspondence in former years I well know that, like Onegin, he is incapable of comprehending the mechanism of verse — either Russian or English. This being so, he should have refrained from «criticizing» my essay on the subject. With one poke of his stubby pencil he reintroduces the wretched old muddle I take such pains to clear up and fussily puts back the «secondary accents» and «spondees» where I show they do not belong. He makes no attempt to assimilate my terminology, he obstinately ignores the similarities and distinctions I discuss, and indeed I cannot believe he has read more than a few lines of the thing.