This follows up in detail on the review of Alex Beam’s The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson and the end of a beautiful friendship. You can read my (not entirely positive) review here.
The dust-up of the feud, and the spectrum of reviews, seems unsatisyingly damning for Beam. So, as a final word on the exchange, he brings in a deus ex machina in the form of Alexander Gerschenkron. We are told that Gerschenkron – the “known as ‘The Great Gerschenkron’ … a mythic figure … feared no-one, not the Bolsheviks, not the Nazis … certainly not Vladimir Nabokov”. In Beam’s account, Gerschenkron attacks every aspect of Onegin – the translation, the commentary, and the scholarship in a “merciless takedown” – Nabokov never replied, and quietly incorporated his changes into the revision.
This account should trouble us, as it brings convenient closure for Beam and allows him to avoid having to examine the scholarship in detail. How accurate is it?
A damning review?
It turns out if you actually read the Gerschenkron article, a rather different impression is given.
Gerschenkron was a polymath, and had a cultured Russian’s knowledge of Pushkin; but he was by profession a political economist and we should be wary of accepting his as some kind of authority on Onegin. He makes numerous substantial points: on literalism vs verse translation, Nabokov’s dubious preference for the St. Petersberg pronounciation over Muscovite, and his adherence to the iambic form. But reading through Gerschenkron’s article – A Manufactured Monument (Modern Philology, Vol. 63, No. 4 1966) – we find that Gerschenkron is less critical than implied, is largely repeating existing criticisms, and has made a number of errors.
We find that Gerschenkron is less critical than implied, is largely repeating existing criticisms, and has made a number of errors.
Beam frankly dishonestly truncates the praise in Gerschenkron’s statement on literalism. In The Feud he quotes:
Nabokov’s translation can and should be studied … but it cannot be read
Beam, The Feud Ch 8, ellipsis in original
The full quotation is:
Nabokov’s translation can and should be studied, but despite all its cleverness and occasional brilliance it cannot be read
Gerschenkron, A Manufactured Monument (emphasis mine)
In fact, Gerschenkron is sometimes almost gushing in his praise:
Nabokov’s translation … has admirable qualities … a superb understanding of the original text … I must confess that it is only now, thanks to Nabokov’s help, that I have become aware of certain ambiguities in Pushkin’s text.
On the other hand, there is Nabokov’s incomparable mastery of the English vocabulary … the result is a translation that is indeed the most correct translation imaginable.
With this Commentary a much more understanding reading of the novel in Russian as well as English is possible.
Gerschenkron, A Manufactured Monument
The praise is sometimes qualified – but none whatsoever makes it into Beam.
The usual charges
Gerschenkron joins the standard criticism of Nabokov’s use of rare words, and makes a decent case for some examples capturing the wrong sense. Most of these are the same terms that had already been batted around, and defended by Nabokov in his earlier Reply: “mollitude”, “Sapajous”, etc.
Gerschenkron argues these are not literal – but then his central case decries Nabokov’s literalism. Though we never really get to the nub of the virtues or otherwise of literalism, there is certainly an argument here, but this is not the “malodorous infestation of malapropisms” that Beam seems to invent out of nowhere (the verse he cites may be literal and clunky, but does not contain any malapropisms, and neither does Gerschenkron say it does).
Scores to settle
Gerschenkron also makes the usual objections to Nabokov’s opionions on major writers: all of which had been raked over before. When Nabokov characterises Brodskii and Chizhevskii as “worthless commentators”, he is robust, chiding him for “pounding on every little error.” But then Gerschenkron immediately goes on to call Brodskii “silly”; it is Chizhevskii whose repuation he is out to save.
Chizhevskii was a fellow Harvard professor, an associate of Roman Jakobson who had once prevented Nabokov being granted a professorship there. Gerschenkron describes him as a “very considerable scholar of great erudition” and dedicates a good page to his “keener sense of the evolution of Russian language”. There is a definite sense of score-settling on Gerschenkron’s part here: something that made Nabokov’s blending of Gerschenkron and Chizhevskii into Gerschizhevskii more defensible.
Nabokov’s errors?
The famous “errors” that needed to be corrected bears closer inspection.
It an attempt to send up Nabokov’s pedantry, the full extent of them are documented when Gerschenkron finds a passage where:
he [Nabokov] actually manages to make at least three mistakes in his comment on Ochakov. He actually writes: At this time and later, the Moldavian [?] town and Russian port, some forty miles west [wrong again: East!] from Odessa … became Russian by the treaty of 1792 [wrong again: 1791!]. He also indicates a miscited German title, Romanian word and reference to Juvenal.
Gerschenkron, A Manufactured Monument
But it’s worth checking these more closely.
- Even brief research suggests that it’s perfectly reasonably to refer to Ochakov as Moldavian town: it was ruled by a Moldavian king in the 15th century, and was largely inhabited by “Moldavians”, which was how Russians often referred to Romanians.
- It does lie to the East of Odessa; but the treaty of Jassy was signed on the 19th Jan 1792, Gregorian calendar. Now, this corresponds to 29th Dec 1791 in the Julian calendar – but, as Nabokov clearly notes in his foreword, dates pertaining to events outside Russia use the new style (i.e. Gregorian) system, and Iasi where the treaty was signed is certainly outside Russia. Nabokov is right after all here, and the treaty of Jassy is cited as 1792 in Britannica, the encyclopedia of the Ottoman empire (not to mention Wikipedia).
- The Juvenal citation is indeed out by 100 lines, and Nabokov has “fride” as the Romanian word for “fried” instead of “frige”, but the published German title (“Auf den zwischen Ihre Röm. Kaiserl. Majestät und der Pforte 1718 geschlossenen Frieden”) appears to be exactly as cited by Nabokov (Gerschenkron doesn’t indicate what he thought it should be).
So make that a 50% success rate (3 for 6): Gerschenkron is not as careful as he has been made out to be.
Details, and precision, do matter – and all the participants really knew this.
Of course, the point is supposed to be that this kind of pedantry is pointless – but Gerschenkron’s insistence that any such errors are really “perfect trifles” which Nabokov should have forgiven when attacking other translators rings rather false (we must be rather sceptical of his claim that the Juvenal mis-citation was the first and only, of many thousand, he looked up and happened to be wrong. Gerschenkron must have pored over these references for hours).
Details, and precision, do matter – and all the participants really knew this. In Beam any subtly is lost – these become “many other errors, which Nabokov was forced to correct”. Nabokov did correct the Juvenal citation (and the treaty date!) but didn’t change the others. He certainly did not make widespread changes in the revision based on Gerschenkron, as (as we have seen) the majority of the criticisms are those of style, not fact.
The last word?
Upon examination, we see that Gerschenkron’s “merciless takedown” is far more nuanced – and his reputation for infallibility far exaggerated – than suits Beam’s story. Other than the usual grousing about rare words and famous authors, Gerschenkron doesn’t really add a great deal to the substantial discussion of literal translation.
This is perhaps why Gerschenkron’s paper is little discussed academically. This of course mean that this post is heavily arcane (doubtless Beam would find scholarship of this sort intrinsically amusing). But I think it’s an interesting illustration of how much can be revealed by looking at the actual sources. Beam is guilty of selective quotation which distorts – and does a disservice to – what Gerschenkron does have to say.