| Self-translation occupies a significant place in Vladimir Nabokov's oeuvre. Not only was his decision to adopt English as his literary language prompted by his translation of his Russian novel Otchayanie ( Despair 1937), but also he eventually translated or co-translated all nine of his Russian novels into English, most of which appeared after the success of Lolita.; In the present work I argue that Nabokov's self-translations are best understood through careful study of the cultural and discursive contexts attending both the composition of the original work and its translation. I analyze two instances of self-translation: Otchayanie (1934) and its two English translations, both titled Despair (1937 and 1966); and Lolita (1955), translated by Nabokov into Russian in 1967, the only two novels that Nabokov translated by himself. In violating the literalist edicts that accompanied his translation of Eugene Onegin , Nabokov placed aesthetic considerations and target audience and culture at the forefront of his concerns. Nabokov's self-translation strategies included paratext, palimpsest, pre-emption, patterning, and parody. Together, these strategies served simultaneously to construct and instruct a new audience with a different cultural competence, and to bring an overarching aesthetic coherence to Nabokov's corpus.; Chapter Two explores Pushkin's poem "Pora, moi drug, pora...," the central intertext in Otchayanie/Despair, in the context of two wider Pushkin discourses---emigre debates of the 1930s concerning the relevance of Pushkin to the future of Russian literature, and the controversy in 1960s American letters over Nabokov's literal translation of Eugene Onegin. In Chapter Three I argue that on the road from Otchayanie (1934) to 1966's Despair, the target of Nabokov's satire shifted from Otto Weininger's sexual ideas and their Symbolist reinterpretation in the Russian emigration to Freudian discourse and hermeneutics, pervasive in 1960s America. In Chapter Four I take issue with the assumption that the Russian Lolita should be treated principally as an exegesis of the original, focusing instead on intertextuality and cultural context. I single out for examination the translation of temporal markers, French phrases, and a richly allusive passage known as the "paper chase," and advance a novel solution to a well-known, but puzzling temporal discrepancy in Lolita. |
