Dear Mr. Nabokov, Editors and listmembers,

May I suggest that the odious epithet referred to the radical nature of VN’s ONEGIN? The reader, who has indeed always presumed to determine what the writer’s goals should or should not be (at least as far as he, the reader, was concerned), is conditioned to do so by the pre-existing tradition of literary translation. VN was radical in that he deliberately aimed to produce an unreadable translation, to sacrifice “smoothness,” elegance, idiomatic clarity, meter, rhyme, and sometimes even syntax (translating his “Zametki perevodchika” I, p. 602 in the Symposium edition) – all of which means to sacrifice the reader’s comfort, time, and – one would expect – peace of mind. Sacrificing readability in favor of precision is perverse with respect to pretty much all translations before and maybe even after VN, if we consider those translations as a pre-conceived norm. This quality of VN’s version may well have gone unnoticed if it hadn’t been truly monumental and hard to dismiss. I believe Mr. Dickstein spoke on behalf of the norm, and not, I don’t think, in any categorically judgmental sense that the term “perverse” would have had in ordinary discourse. Culture freely admits of all kinds of non-conformity, and that constitutes one of its greatest values. I’m not in a position to say whether Mr. Dickstein was aware of it, but this is how I understood his “perverse” when I was reading his article.

Best regards,

Sergey Karpukhin