The Tragedy of Mister Morn Read Free Page A

Midia says her soul is attached to Morn like a child’s tongue to the metal it has licked on a frosty day (I.ii.253–56); and the feel of a cold gun muzzle pressing up against his chest reminds Morn, at a moment when he is considering suicide, of the “lacquer tube” a doctor once pressed against his chest (III.i. this page ). In Ella that domesticity is articulated with a freshness that is essential to the total effect of the play, and it is telling that she often expresses herself in gestures—twirling, stroking the air—rather than in the destructive speechifying of Tremens, Klian, and Ganus.
    As all of the above indicates, Morn presents some extraordinary difficulties to its translators. The task of translating it is all the more daunting because Nabokov was himself one of the most prominent modern critics of lazy and careless translation. As a young man, Nabokov had written elegant, readable translations of a range of English and French authors, from Carroll and Keats to Ronsard, Byron, and Shakespeare. In America, in the 1940s, he also produced verse translations into English of some of Pushkin’s little tragedies, of Fyodor Tyutchev, Mikhail Lermontov, and Afanasy Fet. Yet he began to stress the near-impossibility of successful translation, describing it in Chapter 7 of his 1947 novel Bend Sinister by the following extravagant analogy:
It was as if someone, having seen a certain oak tree (further called Individual T) growing in a certain land and casting its own unique shadow on the green and brown ground, had proceeded to erect in his garden a prodigiously intricate piece of machinery which in itself was as unlike that or any other tree as the translator’s inspiration and language were unlike those of the original author, but which, by means of ingenious combinations of parts, light effects, breeze-engendering engines, would, when completed, cast a shadow exactly similar to that of Individual T—the same outline, changing in the same manner, with the same double and single spots of suns rippling in the same position, at the same hour of the day.
    Or, as he put it still more tersely, and (to a translator) intimidatingly, in his poem “On Translating ‘Eugene Onegin’ ” (1955):
What is translation? On a platter
A poet’s pale and glaring head,
A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter,
And profanation of the dead.
    That translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin , which was published in 1964 alongside three volumes of commentary, is famous, or notorious, for its defiant fidelity to rendering the exact and complete meaning of the original text at the expense of readability or elegance in English—a fidelity that Nabokov called “the servile path.”
    Our policy has been to prioritize accuracy to Nabokov’s language, wherever possible, but we have not sought to produce a crib, as Nabokov did in his translation of Eugene Onegin . Rather we have aimed to find words, phrases, and rhythms which do justice both to the exact shades of meaning and to the very various tones and registers of Nabokov’s Morn —and to finish with a text that re-creates at least some of the power and beauty of the original, both in private reading and in performance. Our goal has been to produce a text that does not sound like a translation, but like the play that Nabokov would have written had he written Morn in English in 1923. That ideal is not entirely speculative, given that we do have some poems and essays which Nabokov wrote in English in the early 1920s, as well as the example of his own translations of his early Russian work into English, and his own writings in English. Nabokov read and wrote English from an early age, studied in Cambridge from 1919 to 1922. and was regarded by the other Russian émigrés as strongly oriented towards England and the English language. There are places in Morn , especially in the speeches of the title character, where the Russian hints of English—as, conversely, in Pnin and Lolita ,