Nabokov and Heine

Vladimir Nabokov's “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”: A Study in the Ethics and Effects of Literary Adaptation

THE focus of attention here is Nabokov's translation of Alfred de Musset's dramatic lyric, La Nuit de decembre. The specific instance of an early poetic translation is taken as a starting point for an account of Nabokov's relationship to this French Romantic poet, and beyond that for an examination of the larger context of the relationship that Nabokov's translations have to the main body of his work, and the bearing this relationship has on the vexed question of the primacy of form or feeling, artifice or reality, in his creative writing. The discipline and constraint of translation was one way in which the young Nabokov chose to interact with other writers. He related to their experience and related their telling of it to his reading of others. Themes, imagery, turns of phrase which he encountered in a writer he re-used in his own early verse and transferred to renderings he made of other poets. What merits attention in the light of Nabokov's later much advertised profession of privacy and the current critical concern to place him at the cross-roads of modernism and post-modernism, is that his first allegiance was to the romantics and neo-romantics, that is to artists whose emotions were more often than not on open public display and whose colourful lives had equal prominence alongside their works. Such a writer was Musset. His was the 'mask' that Nabokov first adopted to tell of emotions and experiences which touched him most nearly and which were to remain the mainspring of his creative activity: the memory of his first love, the death of his father and the loss of Russia. It only remains to add the constraint on writing in his native

J. Grayson

Papers

The french connexion : Nabokov and Alfred de Musset : ideas and practices of translation