Beautifully written and convincingly argued, this much-welcome study of Vladimir Nabokov’s relationship to translation thoroughly integrates translation into the author’s views on art without reducing translation to an empty metaphor for all kinds of exchange. Julia Trubikhina was wise, I think, in not attempting some encyclopedic overview, focusing instead on three well-chosen and under-studied points of entry: Nabokov’s early translation into Russian of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, his novel Pale Fire, and his translation into English of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, as well as the cinematic adaptations of Nabokov’s first English novel Lolita by Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne. The three chapters are also meant to illustrate the three kinds of translation described by Roman Jakobson as intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic. This approach, Trubikhina argues in the introduction, “is effective in uncovering a profound ambiguity in Nabokov’s relationship to translation as a philosophical oscillation between the stability of meaning and the instability of meaning, the possibility of divination and deep metaphysical uncertainty” (14). Through these three case studies, which span most of Nabokov’s career, Trubikhina demonstrates that while Nabokov’s practice of translation appears to shift radically over the course of his lifetime, when read beside his “original” work, all his translation projects display a similar preoccupation with metaphysical uncertainty and the same “profoundly held ideas about art” (89).

The volume begins with an extensive introduction contextualizing the present study in the scholarly literature on Nabokov, and ends with an attempt to situate Nabokov’s views on translation within the Russian and western traditions. In the introduction, Trubikhina shows how Nabokov’s pre-occupation with citation and doubling blurs the boundaries between original writing and translation. She also addresses here the somewhat delicate question of metaphysics in the work of an archetypal modernist (some say, postmodern) writer.

In Chapter 1, Trubikhina situates Nabokov’s re-translation of Carroll’s classic work, within the tradition of Russian translations of Alice, focusing on those “fault lines” that reveal where Nabokov breaks from the prevailing norms, which saw children’s literature as primarily informative and didactic. Trubikhina argues that Carroll’s creation of “a closed language structure operating according to a strict, inviolable internal logic” (43) played a crucial role in the evolution of Nabokov’s concept of art. Indeed, I have always been struck by Nabokov’s decision to translate Alice’s name as Anya, together with his translation of land as strana, as opposed to mir or tsartvo, thus producing a quintessentially Nabokovian effect where the reader hears a distorted echo of Anya’s name in the prepositional form “v strane.” No other Russian translator does this.

Chapter 2 offers a comparative reading of Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire against his controversial translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, a reading invited not only by the texts’ contemporaneity but also by the idiosyncratic use of annotations displayed in both. In this chapter Trubikhina relies heavily on Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator,” as well as Paul de Man’s reading of Benjamin, asserting: “The ambiguity of the afterlife in Benjamin and Nabokov does not allow for any perfect equivalence or ultimate signification” (101). In Chapter 3, Trubikhina uses the concepts of metaphor and metonymy to compare Kubrick’s film adaptation of Lolita to Lyne’s, arguing very convincingly, to my mind, that Kubrick’s metonymic treatment is more faithful to Nabokov’s own philosophy of art than Lyne’s, which claimed to be closer to the original insofar as it offered a more accurate representation of the novel’s historical period, the 1940s, and a more direct treatment of the novel’s sexual thematics.

I would mention two things as critique. First, recent research into translation in Soviet Russia has revealed the so-called Soviet School of Translation to be a highly problematic and contradictory concept, one that should be used with caution. In setting up an opposition between Nabokov’s views on translation and those of the Soviet School, Trubikhina ignores the fact that Nabokov’s negative assessment of Konstantin Balmont’s translations was almost identical to that of Kornei Chukovskii, a leading translator and translation theorist in the Soviet Union who is often associated with the Soviet School. Second, while Trubikhina uses Jakobson’s conceptualization of translation to organize her study of Nabokov, she makes only passing mention of the troubled relationship between these two men. In fact, it is likely that the deterioration of their relationship—the result of divergent views on politics, literature, and translation—which was to have culminated in a joint translation of the Russian Medieval epic Slovo o polku Igoreve, influenced Nabokov’s promotion of literalist translation, as well as his defense of the Slovo as a work of art, dismissing the whole question of its authenticity, which Jakobson had so vigorously defended.