The Tragedy of Mister Morn Read Free Page B

Nabokov writes an English which sounds distinctly foreign. There are also many places in the text, and especially in Tremens’s and Klian’s speeches, where the Russian language is being deliberately wrenched into a revolutionary strangeness.
    We have throughout resisted all temptations to tame or normalize Nabokov’s language, which often sounds as distinctive and peculiar in Russian as in our translation—or, for that matter, as in Nabokov’s own English. Indeed, there are moments in the text where we were able to draw on Nabokov’s own translation of a phrase. So, for instance, when Midia has left Morn, he uses the curious phrase letuchii dozhd’ —literally, “flying rain.” We might have been tempted to make this “fleeting rain,” were it not for the fact that one of Nabokov’s first poems, from 1917, is entitled “Dozhd’ proletel,” which Nabokov himself translated as “The Rain Has Flown,” adding in a note printed in Poems and Problems (1970) that “The phrase letit dozhd’ , ‘rain is flying,’ was borrowed by the author from an old gardener (described in Speak, Memory , Chapter 2 et passim ) who applied it to light rain soon followed by sunshine.” In the opening speech of the play, we have sought to preserve Tremens’s warlock-like tones and his elliptical, highly compressed images. So, too, when Ella in the same scene addresses the coals burning in the fireplace, she uses a strange and archaic phrase— “Chur—goret’!” —which we have translated by a phrase equally strange and archaic: “Fain burn!” (I.i. this page ). In this case we were influenced by the modern associations of the word “fain” with Shakespeare. In his translation of Pushkin, Nabokov often sought out the phrases in such poets as Byron which Pushkin had reworked into Russian; we have done the same in trying to retain the shimmering pale fire of Shakespeare’s language which is often glimpsed in Nabokov’s original Russian. This Shakespeareanism is always dominant but it often in turn absorbs and transforms the echoes of other literary exemplars, so that in Dandilio the terse aphorisms of a Voltaire or a Pope acquire Shakespearean vividness and whimsy, a richness of imagery which, conversely, deepens the fractured, syntax-defying Futurist speeches of Klian. In short, the play contains a range of registers and discourses, often overlain, and we have had to try to reproduce this in our translation.
    In a few, though not very many, instances, we have permitted ourselves to travel a fair way beyond the original Russian, where reproducing it would have resulted in entirely the wrong feel and tone, though always with the intention of expressing the essential meaning. In Act II, Tremens declares: “Segodnia otkryvaiu/moi nebyvalyi prazdnik” —literally, “Today, I will open [or, inaugurate]/my unprecedented [or, fantastic] festival [or, holiday].” Any combination of these possibilities in English would have sounded clumsy and silly; at least as importantly, none of the words in English capture the full semantic range of the Russian words, especially nebyvalyi , which dictionaries translate as “unprecedented” and “fantastic.” “Fantastic” was out because it has come in modern English to mean something excellent and admirable. What was needed was a word which would express the idea of a revolutionary rupture in history, and an element of the improbable. We finally landed on “monstrous,” which derives from the Latin monstra —nature- and history-rending portents, of the kind Tremens himself embodies. Likewise, “festival” and “holiday” both carry excessively positive and pleasurable connotations which do not do justice to prazdnik in this context. “Carnival,” we felt, with its hints of flesh and anarchy, would complement the animal idea of the “monstrous” while contrasting with its implication of the unprecedented; just as, in the Russian, there is a paradox latent in the idea of