In Collaboration with the Author": Some Traces of Self-Translation in Nabokov's Short Stories

Abstract

Abstract: Vladimir Nabokov's pre-war Russian language short stories were translated into English, whether by his son Dmitri or by others, but, in the novelist's lifetime, always "in collaboration with the author." The extent of this collaboration sometimes amounts to self-translation, that is, not to improving the text but to changing its details, the way a translator has no right to do while the author is entitled to revisions. Most often such changes were made in the awareness of the horizons of the new audience; but they also reflect modified attitudes to the material and suggest which meanings it was important for Nabokov to emphasize and which it was important for him to preclude. We discuss such traces of self-translation in three of Nabokov's short stories. The changes made in the 1973 "Torpid Smoke" (" Tyazhyolyy dym ," 1935) help to set the story in the times of the Weimar republic rather than after the Nazi 1933 takeover of power, thus forestalling interpretations that could compete with the main theme. The changes in the 1976 "Details of a Sunset" (original published as "Katastrofa" in 1924) enhance the valorization of joy, confronting the wide-spread stigma on the sense of happiness as silly. The changes made in the 1947 "Spring in Fialta" (the original published in 1938) are, however, more closely associated with Nabokov's current concerns, in the period of translation, rather than with those in the year of composition.