Reliable Essays (17 page)

At least he can find ‘morgue’ in the
Concise
, defined in roughly the same way Nabokov uses it, to mean ‘arrogance’. But arrogance is scarcely the first thing an English reader thinks of when he sees the word ‘morgue’. He thinks of dead bodies on zinc tables. Why not just use ‘arrogance’? The answer, I’m afraid, is that Nabokov wants to indulge himself in the Euphuism of ‘I marvelled at their modeish morgue’. (In the introduction we learn of Onegin and Lensky that ‘both are blasé, bizarre beaux’. Always the virtuoso of his adopted tongue, Nabokov never quite grasped that half the trick of composing in English is
not
to write alliteratively.)

Why use ‘trinkleter’ where ‘haberdasher’ would have done? Why ‘larmoyant’ for ‘lachrymose’? What does ‘debile’ give you that ‘feeble’ doesn’t? Why ‘cornuto’ for ‘cuckold’? Certainly the Russian word has horns which the Italian word reproduces. Unfortunately the Italian word is not in English. Nor is Nabokov correct in supposing that there is any word in
Inferno
III, 9, which might mean ‘forever’. He quibbles so relentlessly himself that you would have to be a saint not to quibble back.

On this showing, Nabokov has no call to despise those less informed translators who have had the temerity to cast their versions in rhyme. His unrhyming version sounds at least as weird as the very worst of theirs. But as a crib it is the best available, especially in this second edition, where each line matches a line in the original – even, in many cases, to the extent of reproducing the word order. Worse than useless for the reader without Russian, for the learner Nabokov’s translation would be just the ticket, if only the commentary were better balanced. But Nabokov’s ambitions as a scholar are thwarted by his creativity. He starts shaping the facts before he has fully submitted himself to them. He is immensely knowing, but knowingness is not the same as knowledge.

Expending too much of his energy on being bitchy about other writers, scholars and critics, Nabokov the commentator sounds at best like A. E. Housman waspishly editing an obscure classic. At worst he sounds like A. L. Rowse trying to carry a daft point by sheer lung-power. Calling Dostoevsky ‘a much over-rated, sentimental and Gothic novelist’ is dull if it is meant to be funny and funny if it is meant to be serious. We are told that Balzac and Sainte-Beuve are ‘popular but essentially mediocre writers’. I can’t pretend to know much about Balzac, but I am reasonably familiar with Sainte-Beuve, and if he is mediocre then I am a monkey’s uncle. Madame de Staël is thoroughly patronized (‘a poor observer’) without any mention being made of the fact that Pushkin himself thought highly of her. As for Tchaikovsky’s version of
Eugene Onegin
, it is not a ‘silly opera’. It is a great opera.

But most of this is casual snidery. Distortions of Pushkin’s meaning are less forgivable. Commenting on the exchange of dialogue between Tatiana and her nurse, Nabokov, forgetting even to mention
Romeo and Juliet
, concentrates on discrediting the official Soviet view of the nurse as a Woman of the People. Yet that view is part of the truth. When the nurse talks about being given in marriage without regard to her own wishes, she is illuminating the condition of slavery. Tatiana might not be really listening to her, but Pushkin is listening, and so should the reader be. This acute social awareness runs right through Pushkin, building up all the time, until in the later prose he provides the model for the social consciousness of all the Russian literature to come. There is nothing naive about taking cognizance of this elementary fact. Nabokov is naive in trying to avoid it. Pushkin really
is
the Russian national poet, even if the Soviet regime says so. Above all, he is the national poet of all the people who have been persecuted by that regime in the name of an ideal of justice which Pushkin’s very existence proves was once generous and merciful.

Nabokov seems determined to miss the point of what is going on even among the main characters. He tells us all about the books Tatiana has read but fails to notice her gifts of psychological penetration. He can’t seem to accept that Tatiana ends by slamming the door in Onegin’s face. He claims to detect in Tatiana’s final speech ‘a confession of love that must have made Eugene’s experienced heart leap with joy’. Incredibly, the moral force of Tatiana’s personality seems to have escaped him. Nor can he see that Onegin is arid and Lensky fruitful; that the difference between them is the same difference Pushkin saw between Salieri and Mozart; and that the outcome is the same – envy and revenge. Presuming to avoid sentimentality, Nabokov’s homage diminishes its object, limiting the reader’s view of the range of emotion which Pushkin embraced. Pushkin’s artistic personality was the opposite of Nabokov’s. Pushkin had negative capability. Not that Pushkin can be equated with Keats, even if you think of Keats’s sensibility combined with Byron’s airy manner.
Eugene Onegin
’s stature is Shakespearean: you have to imagine a Shakespeare play written with the formal compactness of a poem.

On technique Nabokov gives us what we had a right to expect from the man who invented John Shade. (If only Shade, instead of Charles Kinbote, had written this translation!) There is a long disquisition on prosody which is ruined by pseudo-science. (The spondee is proved mathematically not to exist.) But when Nabokov calls Pushkin’s tetrameter ‘an acoustical paradise’, and takes time to examine the miracle of simple words producing great sonorities, he is writing criticism of the first order. He is also good on trees, houses, carriages, visitors’ books, methods of travel, manners – although even here he can’t resist going over the top. He finds himself saying that Pushkin was not especially sympathetic with the Russian landscape. There is a certain pathos about that, as if Nabokov were trying to insert himself into the physical reality of the old, lost Russia that will never now return. A doomed attempt and a superfluous one, since by pointing to the source of its literary tradition Nabokov has helped remind us of the Russia that really
is
undying, and in which his place is now secure.

New Statesman
, 1977: previously included in
From the Land of Shadows
, 1982

Postscript

Edmund Wilson was no fool, but his magisterial self-confidence could make him do foolish things, and one of the most foolish was to lay himself open to Nabokov’s genius for aggressive pedantry by suggesting that Nabokov might have lost his grip on the Russian language. Wilson was merely a gifted amateur student of languages. Nabokov was a Russian, and thus well qualified to make Wilson’s pontifications on the subject look ridiculous. In the subsequent outburst of hilarity, it was forgotten that Wilson had generously helped Nabokov to secure his position in the United States. It was also forgotten that Nabokov himself was capable of the misplaced self-confidence of the autodidactic crank. For an appreciation of the resources Nabokov could bring to his prose when writing fiction, there is nothing better than Martin Amis’s introduction to the Everyman reissue of
Lolita
. But I still think Kingsley Amis had a point when he took a passage of that novel apart and detected as much self-admiration as evocation. Nabokov would have to be rated as a writer of sublime talent if he had composed nothing else except
Speak, Memory
. But there is such a thing as getting so close to language that you can no longer keep your distance from what you are writing about with it, and that awkward propensity really shows up in Nabokov’s version of
Eugene Onegin
.

I was careful, when reviewing it, not to claim too much knowledge of the original and thus fall into the same trap in which Wilson’s corpse already lay impaled, with plenty of bamboo stakes left unoccupied for further victims. But I wouldn’t have needed a word of Russian – except perhaps
nyet
– to know that something weird was going on. Nabokov had scrupulously registered the minor meanings from moment to moment but the grand meaning (or moral: there is no other word for it) he had either missed or misinterpreted. Why he should have done so remains a puzzle, but the clue might lie somewhere in the absurdity of his remarks about Tchaikovsky’s opera. Among Russians familiar with both opera and poem, there are not many who would say that either makes the other trivial: in the light of historical events, they would rather count their blessings, and leave the two masterpieces in fruitful, complementary contention. Nabokov admitted that he had a tin ear for music, so why did he not disqualify himself in this instance? The answer might be elementary: he couldn’t bear the competition. If he thought an area was his, he would turn his full firepower on anyone else who strayed into it. He was solipsistically proprietorial about Russia, the novel, and art itself. Perhaps forced exile encourages that condition. But we can’t expect every great artist to have a great soul. If more of them were like Verdi, we could read artists’ biographies for uplift; but we would be so repelled by Wagner that we would forget to listen, or by Picasso that we would forget to look.

2001

The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays of Eugenio Montale
edited and translated by Jonathan Galassi, Ecco Press
Prime alla Scala
by Eugenio Montale, Mondadori

If Eugenio Montale had never written a line of verse he would still have deserved his high honours merely on the basis of his critical prose. The product of a long life spent clearing the way for his poetry, it is critical prose of the best type: highly intelligent without making mysteries, wide-ranging without lapses into eclecticism or displays of pointless erudition, hard-bitten yet receptive, colloquial yet compressed. The only drawback is that it constitutes a difficult body of work to epitomize without falsifying.

For a long time Montale’s English translators added to the difficulty by not being able to read much Italian or, sometimes and, not being able to write much English. Then a few competent, if restricted, selections emerged. But the problem remained of transmitting Montale’s critical achievement in its full, rich and all too easily misrepresented subtlety. Now Jonathan Galassi has arrived to save the day. His style does not always catch Montale’s easy rhythm, but much of the time he comes close, and the explanatory notes on their own would be enough to tell you that he has mastered all the necessary background information. One of the most active of Montale’s previous translators was under the impression that Dante employed the word
libello
to mean ‘libel’ instead of ‘little book’. A dedicated and knowledgeable student of the tradition from which he emerged, Montale was a stickler for detail, so Mr Galassi’s wide competence comes as a particular refreshment. In all his phases as a poet, from the early, almost Imagist toughness to the later anecdotal relaxation, Montale started with the specific detail and let the general significance emerge. His prose kept to the same order of priority, so it is important that the details be got right. Galassi had several volumes of prose to consider, all published late in the poet’s life.
Sulla Poesia
of 1976 is the principal collection of literary criticism as such, and indeed one of the most interesting single collections of literary essays in modern times, but the earlier
Auto da Fé
of 1966 (Montale must have been unaware that Elias Canetti had given the English version of
Die Blendung
that same title) is its necessary complement, being concerned with the question of mass culture – a question made more vexing for Montale by the fact that, although he didn’t like mass culture, he did like popular culture and thought that élite culture would kill itself by losing touch with it.

There are also some important discursive writings on literature in
Fuori di Casa
(1969), the book about being away from home, and the
Carteggio Svevo/Montale
(1976), which chronicles Montale’s early involvement with the novelist whose merits he was among the first to recognize, and whose concern with the artistic registration of the inner life helped encourage Montale in the belief – crucial to his subsequent development – that what mattered about modern art was not its Modernism but the way it allowed private communication between individuals, the sharing of deep secrets in a time of shallow rhetoric. In addition, there is the abundant music criticism, but most of that, at the time this book was being prepared, was not yet available in book form, so Mr Galassi largely confined himself to the general articles on music scattered through the volumes mentioned above.

Even with so considerable a restriction, however, there was a lot to choose from. The
richesse
must have been made doubly embarrassing by Montale’s habit of returning to the same point in essay after essay in order to elaborate it further, so that there is a real danger, if you settle on a single essay in order to demonstrate how he has aired a given topic, of getting the idea that he glosses over difficulties in passing, whereas in fact one of his salient virtues was to stay on the case, sometimes for decades on end, until he had it cracked. To sample him is thus almost always to belittle him: it is misleading, for example, to have him speaking as an anti-academic unless you also have him speaking as an appreciator of solid scholarship, and no representation of Montale as the hermeticist young poet can be anything but a travesty unless he is also allowed to speak as the reasonable man who didn’t just end up as the advocate of appreciability, but who actually started out that way. One of the big compliments Mr Galassi should be paid is that, given this very real problem, he has selected well. All the books are fairly represented, most of the main different emphases in Montale’s stable but manifold critical position are touched upon if not covered, and the quiet giant comes alive before us, as a personality and a mind.

To an extraordinary extent the two things were co-extensive. Like one of those periods in Chinese history when Confucian self-discipline and Taoist impulsiveness nourished each other, Montale’s inner life was both naively fruitful and sophisticatedly self-aware. It makes him great fun to read, as if the smartest man in the world were a friend of the family, one of those good uncles who aren’t avuncular. In Italian the title essay of the book was called ‘Tornare nella Strada’ (‘Back into the Street’), but the term ‘second life’ recurs throughout the piece and comes right from the centre of Montale’s essentially generous artistic nature. No poet could be more learned about the cultural heritage of his own country and his learning about the cultural heritage of other countries is impressive too, but he says, and obviously believes, that it is not the appeal of art to adepts that interests him most. It is not the first life that matters, but the second life, when a theme from an opera gets whistled in the street, or a phrase from a poet is quoted in conversation. This view might sound crudely populist or even philistine when excerpted, but as argued in a long essay, and fully considered during a long career, it proves to be a highly developed exposition of the elementary precept that art must be appreciable, even if only by the happy few. It doesn’t have to be immediately appreciable, and indeed in modern times any attempt to make it so is likely to be just a coldly intellectualized programme of a different kind, but if it rejects the possibility of being appreciated then it disqualifies itself as art. ‘The piece goes on and on,’ he says regretfully of Schoenberg’s
Ode to Napoleon
, ‘but it does not live during the performance, nor can it hope to do so afterward, for it does not affect anything that is truly alive in us.’