NABOKV-L post 0011240, Fri, 18 Mar 2005 14:51:34 -0800

----- Forwarded message from dolinin@wisc.edu -----
Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2005 02:01:38 -0600
From: dolinin <dolinin@wisc.edu>

Dear Ole,
This is a very good question because it shows how fast certain trivial
things are forgotten. What Khodasevich meant was, of course, not a
chandelier but an electric bulb with luminous intensity of 16 candles. The
term "svecha" (candle power) is obsolete now but in the past (at least in
the Soviet Union)bulbs were marked by their "candle power," from 16
candles (the lowest) to 100 candles (the highest). Khodasevich wrote the
poem in 1921 in Petrograd when energy was in short supply and people were
allowed to use only low-intensity electric bulbs. I made a short Internet
search and in five minutes found several other mentions of 16-candle bulbs
in Russian prose of the period.

I don't know why Nabokov translated "16-candle" as "60-watt." Probably he
wanted the reader to imagine a standard and not very bright source of
light. 40 or even 20-watt bulb, I think, would
be closer to the dim 16-candle sun that lighted Khodasevich's room in The
House of Art (see its description in Nina Berberova's The Italics Are Mine,
134--135). In any way, Dalsgaard's "correction" is erroneous and misleading.

Alexander Dolinin


At 03:03 PM 3/17/05 -0800, you wrote:
>Dear Don,
>I don't know if my attempt to send this query to the list was lost in the
>flurry of mails, or deleted because it was ignorant. If the reason was
>ignorance, please delete again.
>
>Dear List
>I need the help of someone familiar with Khodasevich’s poetry ­ and of
>course, someone familiar with Nabokov's oeuvre.
>I am writing a review of a Danish book, a luxurious literary history of
>the Russian emigration ­ Mette Dalsgaard Den tunge lyre: Ruslands emigrant
>litteratur 1917-1985. En litteraturhistorisk fremstilling. København:
>Gyldendal, 2005.
>The book contains one of the finest, of the few, Danish portraits of
>Nabokov, though done in somewhat heavy strokes of the brush. But in the
>passage concerning Khodasevich, Dalsgaard has a footnote which raised my
>eyebrows. It concerns Khodasevich’s poem Ballada, and runs as follows (in
>my hasty translation):
>
>“Vladimir Nabokov translated the poem into English. Peculiarly, however,
>he rendered “the sun with the sixteen candles” in the first stanza as “a
>60 watt bulb”. It is probably Nabokov’s authority which caused this
>version to appear in diverse English anthologies, monographies, and
>literary histories” (89).
>
>Now, I am not skilled in transliteration and therefore I cannot render the
>line in Latin letters, but Khodasevich’s poem appears both in Russian and
>English in David M. Bethea’s Khodasevich: His Life and Art. (Princeton:
>Princeton UP, 1983) on pp. 238-240. There the English translation is done
>by Bethea who also translates the words from the last line of the first
>stanza as “a sixty-watt sun”, and not, as Dalsgaard mis-quotes Nabokov’s
>version, “a sixty-watt bulb”.
>
>Dalsgaard’s version of the opening verse is: “Jeg sidder i mit runde
>kammer/ Og ser fra min skrivebordsstol/ På himlens stukornamenter/ Og den
>sekstenarmede sol” (125). In English this, roughly, becomes: “I sit in my
>round chamber/ And look from my writing chair/ At heaven’s stucco
>ornaments/ And the sixteen-armed sun”. Clearly Dalsgaard perceives the
>Russian line as concerning a chandelier of some sort.
>
>What I wonder is:
>- Did both Nabokov and Bethea mistranslate Khodasevich? ­ I very much
>doubt that.
>- Does the “sixteen candles/lights” of the Russian text refer to a
>specific Russian light bulb or any such light source, of which Dalsgaard
>is in the dark? And if so: which?
>
>I do have a selection of Khodasevich’s poetry (Moscow 1991) and Betehea’s
>book at hand, but I have to admit that my Russian is very scant.
>I will welcome any comment.
>Best Wishes,
>Ole Nyegaard, Aarhus University, Denmark.
>
>----- End forwarded message -----

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