Timely
notes from The New Yorker’s archive. March 1, 2010 :Eighty-Five from the Archive: Vladimir Nabokov
This year is The
New Yorker’s eighty-fifth anniversary. To celebrate, over eighty-five weekdays
we will turn a spotlight on a notable article, story, or poem from the
magazine’s history. The issue containing that day’s selected piece will be made
freely available in our digital archive and will remain open until the next
day’s selection is posted.
In a Comment on the death of Vladimir Nabokov, in 1977,
John Updike wrote, The least of his writings offered a bygone sort of delight: a
sorcerer’s scintillant dignity made of every sentence a potentially magic
occasion.
That Nabokovian magic manifested itself more than fifty times
in the pages of The New Yorker, including today’s selection, “Pnin’s Day” from the issue of April
23, 1955. Here Nabokov describes the difficulties Professor Timofey Pnin, a
Russian professor at the fictional Waindell College, experiences with his
adopted language:
The organs concerned with the production of English speech
sounds are the larynx, the vellum, the lips, the tongue (that punchinello in the
troupe), and last, but not least, the lower jaw; mainly upon the jaw’s
overenergetic and somewhat ruminant motion did Pnin rely when translating in
class passages in the Russian grammar or some poem by Pushkin. If Pnin’s Russian
was music, his English was murder. He had enormous difficulty
(“dzeefeecooltsee,” in Pninian English) with depalatization, never managing to
remove the extra Russian moisture from “t”s and “d”s before the vowels he so
quaintly softened. His explosive “hat” (“I never go in a hat, even in winter”)
differed from the common American pronunciation of the adjective “hot” (typical
of Waindell townspeople, for example) only by its briefer duration, and thus
sounded very much like the German verb “hat” (has). Long “o”s with him
inevitably became short ones, his “no”acquiring for the nonce the rounded
orifice of a British or Bostonian “o” in “not,” and this was accentuated by his
Russian trick of duplicating the simple negative. (“May I give you a lift, Mr.
Pnin?” “No-no, I have only two paces from here.”) He did not possess (nor was he
aware of this lack) any long “oo;” all he could muster when called upon to utter
“noon” was the lax “o” sound of the German “nun” (“I have no classes in
afternun on Tuesday. Today is Tuesday.”)
