Line 13: Why does the adaptation read «there the Siberian river is glass»? Perhaps, because the techyot (flows) of the text gives tekla in the past tense feminine, and its form stekla (flowed down) also happens to be the genitive case of steklo (glass) — a really outstanding howler, it my supposition is correct, and an inexplicable cliche, if it isn't.
Line 14, «pine», sosna: the adapter has «fir tree», another plant altogether. This is a mistake often committed on both sides of the Bering Strait (and condoned, I note, by Dr. Segal).
Line 16: «or slaver in the wolf trap's steel jaw» (Lowell) — an ending that snaps as it were the very backbone of Mandelshtam's poem
I am well aware that my laborious literal reproduction of one of the masterpieces of Russian poetry is prevented by the rigor of fierce fidelity from parading as a good English poem; but I am also aware that it is true translation, albeit stiff and rhymeless, and that the adapter's good poem is nothing but a farrago of error and improvisation defacing the even better poem it faces in the anthology. When I think that the American college student of today, so docile, so trustful, so eager to be led to any bright hell by an eccentric teacher, will mistake that adaptation for a sample of Mandelshtam's thought («the poet compares the sheepskin sent him from abroad to the wolf hide he refuses to wear»), I cannot help feeling that despite the good intentions of adapters something very like cruelty and deception is the inevitable result of their misguided labors.
Although some of the English versions in Miss Carlisle's collection do their best to follow the text, all of them for some reason or other (perhaps in heroic protection of the main offender) are branded Adaptations». What, then, is there especially adaptive or adaptational in an obvious travesty? This I wish to be told, this I wish to comprehend. «Adapted» to what? To the needs of an idiot audience? To the demands of good taste? To the level of one's own genius? But one's audience is the most varied and gifted in the world; no arbiter of genteel arts tells us what we can or can't say; and as to genius, nowhere in those paraphrases is the height of fancy made to fuse with the depth of erudition, like a mountain orbed by its reflection in a lake — which at least would be some consolation. What we do have are crude imitations, with hops and flutters of irresponsible invention weighed down by the blunders of ignorance. If this kind of thing becomes an international fashion 1 can easily imagine Robert Lowell himself finding one of his best poems, whose charm is in its concise, delicate touches («. . . splinters fall in sawdust from the aluminum-plant wall . . . wormwood . . . three pairs of glasses . . . leathery love») adapted in some other country by some eminent, blissfully monolingual foreign poet, assisted by some American expatriate with a nottooextensive vocabulary in any language. An outraged pedant, wishing to inform and defend our poet, might then translate the adaptation back into English («. . . I saw dusty paint split and fall like aluminum stocks on Wall Street . . . six glasses of absinthe . . , the football of passion»), I wonder on whose side the victim would be.
Written on September 20, 1969, and published on December 4, 1969, in The New York Review of Books. I fervently hope that this little essay managed to reach the poet's widow in Soviet Russia.
7. ANNIVERSARY NOTES
My first intention was to write an elaborate paper on this TriQuarterly number (17, Winter 1970, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois) which is dedicated to me on the occasion of my seventieth birthday. I soon realized, however, that I might find myself discussing critical studies of my fiction, something I have always avoided doing. True, a festschrift is a very special and rare occasion for that kind of sport, but I did not wish to create even the shadow of a precedent and therefore decided simply to publish the rough jottings I made as an objective reader anxious to eliminate slight factual errors of which such a marvelous gift must be free; for I knew what pains the editors, Charles Newman and Alfred Appel, had taken to prepare it and remembered how firmly the guest coeditor, when collecting the ingredients of this great feast, refused to show me any plum or crumb before publication.
BUTTERFLIES
Butterflies are among the most thoughtful and touching contributions to this volume. The old-fashioned engraving of a Catagramma-like insect is delightfully reproduced twelve times so as to suggest a double series or «block» of specimens in a cabinet case; and there is a beautiful photograph of a Red Admirable (but «Nymphalidae» is the family to which it belongs, not its genus, which is Vanessa — my first bit of carping).
ALFRED APPEL, JR.
Mr, Appel, guest coeditor, writes about my two main works of fiction. His essay «Backgrounds of Lolita» is a superb example of the rare case where art and erudition meet in a shining ridge of specific information (the highest and to me most acceptable function of literary criticism). I would have liked to say more about his findings but modesty (a virtue that the average reviewer especially appreciates in authors) denies me that pleasure.
His other piece in this precious collection is «Ada Described». I planted three blunders, meant to ridicule mistranslations of Russian classics, in the first paragraph of my Ada: the opening sentence of Anna Karenin (no additional «a», printer, she was not a ballerina) is turned inside out; Anna Arkadievna's patronymic is given a grotesque masculine ending; and the title of Tolstoy's family chronicle has been botched by the invented Stoner or Lower (I must have received at least a dozen letters with clarifications and corrections from indignant or puzzled readers, some of them of Russian origin, who never read Ada beyond the first page). Furthermore, in the same important paragraph, «Mount Tabor» and «Pontius» allude respectively to the transfigurations and betrayals to which great texts are subjected by pretentious and ignorant versionists. The present statement is an amplification of Mr. Appel's remarks on the subject in his brilliant essay «Ada Described». I confess that his piece was a great pleasure to read, but one error in it I really must correct: My Baltic Baron is totally and emphatically unrelated to Mr. Norman Mailer, the writer.
SIMON KARLINSKY
Mr. Karlinsky's «N. and Chekhov» is a very remarkable essay, and I greatly appreciate being with A. P. in the same boat — on a Russian lake, at sunset, he fishing, I watching the hawk-moths above the water. Mr. Karlinsky has put his finger on a mysterious sensory cell. He is right, I do love Chekhov dearly. 1 fail, however, to rationalize my feeling for him: I can easily do so in regard to the greater artist, Tolstoy, with the flash of this or that unforgettable passage («. . . how sweetly she said: 'and even very much' « — Vronsky recalling Kitty's reply to some trivial question that we shall never know), but when 1 imagine Chekhov with the same detachment all I can make out is a medley of dreadful prosaisms, readymade epithets, repetitions, doctors, unconvincing vamps, and so forth; yet it is his works which I would take on a trip to another planet.
In another article — on «N.'s Russified Lewis Carroll» — the same critic is much too kind to my Anya in Wonderland (1924). How much better I could have done it fifteen years later! The only good bits are the poems and the wordplay. I find an odd blunder in the «Song of the Soup»: loban'{a. kind of bucket) is misspelt by me and twisted into the wrong gender. Incidentally, I had not (and still have not) seen any other Russian versions of the book (as Mr. Karlinsky suggests I may have had) so that my sharing with Poliksena Solovyov the same model for one of the parodies is a coincidence. I recall with pleasure that one of the accidents that prompted Wellesley College to engage me as lecturer in the early forties was the presence of my rare Anya in the Wellesley collection of Lewis Carroll editions.