Subject
Nabokov on Gogol: A Query (fwd)
Date
Body
From: Rodney Welch <RWelch@scjob.sces.org>
How translatable is Nikolai Gogol?
I ask this question as a non-Russian-reading fan of both
Gogol and Nabokov who is nonetheless a bit confused as to the
high claims the latter makes for the former's short story "The
Overcoat."
I have read the story several times in different English
translations and enjoyed it immensely. What confuses me, though,
is that whenever I read Nabokov's notes his claims are so
incredibly high that he seems to be reading another story
altogether.
Granted, every time I read his lectures on other books and
stories I learn something new, or see something I had not seen
before. Certainly this was true of "Dead Souls," a book I grew to
love.
But Gogol's "The Overcoat" is another matter. I can make out
and appreciate the absurd world of Akaky Akakeivich Bashmachkin,
but Nabokov sees dimensions to it that, even with his guiding
hand, I cannot quite make out.
He speaks of sentences which "explode in a wild display of
nightmare fireworks," or a passage which "all of a sudden leaves
the tracks and swerves into the irrational where it really
belongs," or, most especially, "a door bursts open and a mighty
wave of foaming poetry rushes in only to dissolve in bathos, or
to turn into its own parody, or to be checked by the sentence
breaking and reverting to a conjuror's patter, that patter which
is such a feature of Gogol's style." He goes on to state that
Gogol's "four-dimensional" literary style is comparable to
Einsteinian physics.
Am I alone in thinking that these fine phrases seem to
describe the lecturer a good deal more than the subject? Nabokov
says that after reading Gogol one's eyes may be gogolized; my
suspicion is that Nabokov's view of him is considerably
nabokovized, and that he tends to refashion him in his own mold.
If there was one point Nabokov made over and over when he
discussed literary translation, it was this: there's no
substitute for the real thing. A translation can come close but
no further; when literature metamorphoses from one languge to the
next it inevitably loses a good deal of its mortal flesh.
Is "The Overcoat" so bound up in language that certain of
its merits will always be denied English readers? The
translations I've read are quite often at odds.
How translatable is Nikolai Gogol?
I ask this question as a non-Russian-reading fan of both
Gogol and Nabokov who is nonetheless a bit confused as to the
high claims the latter makes for the former's short story "The
Overcoat."
I have read the story several times in different English
translations and enjoyed it immensely. What confuses me, though,
is that whenever I read Nabokov's notes his claims are so
incredibly high that he seems to be reading another story
altogether.
Granted, every time I read his lectures on other books and
stories I learn something new, or see something I had not seen
before. Certainly this was true of "Dead Souls," a book I grew to
love.
But Gogol's "The Overcoat" is another matter. I can make out
and appreciate the absurd world of Akaky Akakeivich Bashmachkin,
but Nabokov sees dimensions to it that, even with his guiding
hand, I cannot quite make out.
He speaks of sentences which "explode in a wild display of
nightmare fireworks," or a passage which "all of a sudden leaves
the tracks and swerves into the irrational where it really
belongs," or, most especially, "a door bursts open and a mighty
wave of foaming poetry rushes in only to dissolve in bathos, or
to turn into its own parody, or to be checked by the sentence
breaking and reverting to a conjuror's patter, that patter which
is such a feature of Gogol's style." He goes on to state that
Gogol's "four-dimensional" literary style is comparable to
Einsteinian physics.
Am I alone in thinking that these fine phrases seem to
describe the lecturer a good deal more than the subject? Nabokov
says that after reading Gogol one's eyes may be gogolized; my
suspicion is that Nabokov's view of him is considerably
nabokovized, and that he tends to refashion him in his own mold.
If there was one point Nabokov made over and over when he
discussed literary translation, it was this: there's no
substitute for the real thing. A translation can come close but
no further; when literature metamorphoses from one languge to the
next it inevitably loses a good deal of its mortal flesh.
Is "The Overcoat" so bound up in language that certain of
its merits will always be denied English readers? The
translations I've read are quite often at odds.