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The Translator's Doubts: Vladimir Nabokov and the Ambiguity of Translation . By Julia Trubikhina . Cultural Revolutions: Russia in the Twentieth Century. Boston : Academic Studies Press , 2015. 248 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $79.00, hard bound.
Book Reviews
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...