Intercultural/lingual Mediation: Vladimir Nabokov's Pushkin and The Art of Translation

Abstract

Vladimir Nabokov’s vision of multilingualism is central to an understanding both of his own fiction and of his work as a translator. Taking a cue from Nabokov’s theoretical interventions on translation and his view of exile as a stage for the creative fusion of past and present through the work of memory and imagination, this paper aims at exploring the integrity between Nabokov writer, critic and translator as reflected in his version of Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, and his own novel The Gift. My reading of Nabokov’s texts is informed by two complementary perspectives. Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of linguistic homelessness, and his concept of dialogue, will help me to consider Nabokov’s multilingual approach to writing and translation as emphatically singular forms of artistic expressions inspired by others’ words. Willard van Orman Quine’s ideas about the indispensability and indeterminacy of translation will allow me to examine the topos of translation as an imaginary encounter in Nabokov’s fiction written in exile. In light of Bakhtin’s and Quine’s perspectives, I will discuss Nabokov’s vision of translation, shaped by his trilingual childhood and émigré experience, his version of Pushkin’s text as a daring performative response to a major poet, and a concept of translation as intercultural/ lingual mediation and communication in Nabokov’s last Russian novel.