The Translation

The Translation: 

Chapter XXI     

Kretschmar for some time grew silent.  An unparalleled longing1 was pressuring him. Perhaps, for the first time during the year of cohabitation2 with Magda, he was clearly recognizing that thin layer of filth3 which settled upon his life.  

His fate, now4 with a blinding clarity,5 pushed him into an awakening recollection: he heard a sundering call to fate and understood, that he is given a rare opportunity to sharply pull his life back into its former height6. He was coming to an understanding, that if now he will return to his wife and will be silently and inseparably by her side, then a reconnection, impossible under any other routine circumstance, will happen almost by itself.   

Some memories about that night wouldn’t leave him in peace: he was recollecting how Max suddenly glanced at him with a teary begging eyes, and then, while turning away, squeezed his arm above the elbow; he was also recollecting how he caught in the mirror an unexplainable expression on his wife’s face, pitifully hunted but still akin to a human smile. He felt at last that if this opportunity of return wouldn’t be used now,7 then very soon a meeting with Annalisa will become as unthinkable, as it was before the death of their daughter.  

Of all this he was thinking honestly, painfully and deeply, and by a peculiar logic of feeling he understood, that if he will go to the funeral, then he will remain with his wife forever. 

Having called Max earlier, he found out from the servants the place and time, and in the morning of the funeral he got up, while Magda was still asleep, and ordered his servant to prepare for him a black overcoat and a top hat. Having hastily finished his coffee, he entered Irma’s former nursery, where at the present time stood a ping-pong table. And there, juggling with one palm a little celluloid ball, he struggled to direct his thought on Irma’s childhood.  However, his thoughts were about another lively, slender and slutty girl, jumping and screaming here, leaning her breasts over the table, and stretching out with the ping pong racket. He looked at the clock it was time to go.  

He threw the ball on the table and quickly went to their bedroom to look for the last time how Magda was sleeping. Stopping for a moment by her bed, piercing with his eyes her childish face with pink bare lips and velvety rosy cheeks, Kretschmar thought with horror about the tomorrow life with his fading,8 gray-faced and faintly smelling with some Eau de Cologne, wife; and that life ideated9 itself in a form of meekly lighted long and dusty corridor, where stood a boarded-up box or a child’s stroller,10 and in the depth there was a thickening darkness.11 

Scarcely12 taking his eyes away from Magda’s cheeks and shoulders and nervously biting the nail of his thumb, he stepped away to the window. It was thawing, and automobiles were splashing puddles; on the corner was seen a light-violet tray with flowers, sunny wet sky was reflecting in the glass of the window, which was being washed by a happy disheveled maid.  

“How early are you up… Are you going somewhere?”, - Magda’s voice stretched, flipping over a yawn.13 Without turning he negatively shook his head.  

 

 

Chapter XXII 

“Bruno, cheer up”, -  she was telling him one week later. – “I understand that all this is very sad. But they all are for you a little bit alien; agree with me, you yourself feel this; and of course they   instilled hatred of you into your daughter. Don’t you think - I do sympathize with you very much; although, you know, if I could have a child, I would rather have a boy...” 

“You are a child yourself”, - he said, petting her hair.  

“Especially today you need to liven up”, - continued Magda, pursing her lips. – “Especially today. Think, after all, this is the beginning of my career; I will become famous.” 

“Oh yes, I forgot. When is this? Today, already?” 

Gorn appeared.  He got into a habit of coming around every day; and Krechmar several times had talked with him soul to soul, telling him everything which he couldn’t and wouldn’t dare tell Magda.  Gorn listened to him so well, and responded with such wise reflections, and very  

thoughtfully sympathized with him, that the recentness of their acquaintance seemed to  

Kretschmar as something completely conditional and by no means associated with the inner-spiritual-timing, during which their manly friendship developed and matured.  

“It is unacceptable to build one’s life on the sand of unhappiness”, - Gorn was conveying to Kretschmar. – “This is a sin against life itself. I had an acquaintance, sculptor, who married out of pity one aged and ugly hunchback. I don’t know exactly what happened between them, but after a year she attempted to poison herself, and he had to be sent into the Crazy house.14  An artist, in my opinion, must be lead only by the feeling of beauty, as it never lies.” 

“Death”, - he was also saying – “appears to me as a vulgar habit, which nature at present times can’t exterminate in itself to the roots.  I had an acquaintance, a young man, full of life, with the face of an angle and muscles of a panther; he cut himself opening a bottle and in a few days he died. Nothing could have been imagined as more stupid than that death, however, at the same time, at the same time, well, strange to say so, but it is so: it would be less artistic for him to survive till senility… the piquancy, the spice, the pointe of life sometimes lies namely in death.”  

Gorn in such moments would talk unstoppably, smoothly making up accidents with never existing acquaintances, picking thoughts which were not too deep for the mind of his listener, but carried certain dubious elegance. His education was motley, his mind was grasping and shrewd, his thirst for tricking people close to him was insatiable.  The only perhaps genuine in him were the subconscious faith in the idea, that everything created by people in the fields of arts and science was only more or less witty15 hocus-pocus, an alluring16 charlatanism. No matter of how important was the subject of the conversation, he was equally capable to say about it something inextricable, or funny, or crude, depending upon what his listener was anticipating. Thus when he was talking completely seriously about a book or a painting, Gorn had a pleasant feeling that he was a participant of a conspiracy, an accomplice of some genius buffoon, i.e. creator of the painting, author of the book.  Greedily following how Kretschmar (who in his opinion was a heavy, narrow-minded person with simple passions and scrupulous, too scrupulous knowledge in the area of painting) suffers, as if he believes that he reached the highest peak of human suffering, Gorn with satisfaction thought, that this was not all yet over, far not over, but only the first act of the program in this marvelous music-hall, in which the place in the director’s lounge was presented to him, Gorn. In this “establishment” neither God nor the devil were the directors.  The first one was too ancient and too venerable, and understood nothing in the new art of life; and the other one was the bloated petti-devil, who pigged on people’s sins and became unbearably boring, as boring as the last primordium yawning of a dumb criminal who knifed the money-lender. The director, who offered Gorn the lounge, was that subtle, intangible,17 duplicitous, triplicitous18 self-reflecting19 being, that chatoyant magical phantom, a shadow of multicolored balls,20 a shadow of a juggler on a theatrically illuminated stage… Such, at least, was Gorn’s supposition in those rare minutes of philosophical contemplations.21 And for that reason he could not seize22 within himself the reason of his acute addiction23 to Magda. He attempted to explain it to himself through the “physics” of Magda’s elements24 – somewhat peculiar in the smell of her skin, temperature of her body, in a particular construction25 of her eye-iris26, in a specific epithelium of her lips. Though everything was not the way it seemed. Their reciprocal ardor was routed27 in a deep kingship of their souls – not vainly was Gorn such a gifted artist, cosmopolitan, gambler… Showing up at their house, at that day, when Magda was supposed to flicker on a screen for the first time, Gorn caught a moment (handing her mantel) to tell her, that he booked a room at a certain location, where they could meet28 undisturbedly. She reacted with an angry glance, because Kretschmar was just ten steps away from them. Gorn burst with laughter and barely lowering his voice added, that he will be expecting her to come there every day at a set up time. 

 “I invite Fraulein Peters for a rendezvous, and she refuses”, – he said to Kretschmar, while they were walking downstairs… 

“Let her try to agree”, – smiled Kretschmar in response and tenderly pinched Magda’s cheek. 

“We shall see, we shall see how you can play”29 – he continued, pulling on his gloves. 

 “Tomorrow at five, Fraulein Peters” – said Gorn. 

 “The baby will go tomorrow all by herself to choose an automobile” – said Kretschmar – “so, no rendezvous.” 

 “That can wait, the automobile won’t run away from you, is it true, Fraulein Peters?” 

 Magda suddenly looked offended – “What a stupid joke!” – she exclaimed. 

 Men glanced at each other, smiling, and Kretschmar winked. 

The doorkeeper,30 who was at that moment talking to the mailman, looked at Kretschmar with curiosity. “It’s hard to believe,” - said the doorkeeper, when the three passed by them – “that he recently lost his daughter…” 

“And who’s the second man?” – asked the mailman. 

“How should I know. She got a fellow to help him, that’s all I know. I feel ashamed, you know, when other tenants see her kind…  (swearing). He was such a decent, respectable gentleman, you know… rich and very well-doing… who could imagine that he would bring in such a wench31 – at least, he could’ve found someone burly32, rounder, with better stature…if he absolutely had to…” 

XXVII (excerpt) 

“No-matter what Germann thought of, he found the toothache enveloped him every minute. He tried to take his mind off it by considering that the dentist to whom he was going was a master of his craft and probably had some artistic relation to those tragic ruins, those enamel Erechtheions and Parthenons, which he saw beneath the gleaming purple dome of the human palate, where the profane were conscious only of a decayed tooth; or that the female bloated but light as puff pastry – who served behind the counter of the confectioner’s shop at the corner – the one with the bead-curtain in place of a door – (she lived in a white muslin hell spotted with the black corpses of flies) had smiled at him yesterday, and that she would probably feel soft and spongy like whipped cream, if one tried to embrace her; 

But still the tooth-pain enveloped his every thought and that every thought lay, as it were, cradled in this pain and was inseparably bound up with it, as a snail is bound up with its shell. 

When Germann focused his whole consciousness on this pain and tried to kill the nerve with the ultra-violet ray of understanding, he experienced for a few seconds an apparent relief, but he perceived at once that he had no control over this ray. 

 

Preface (afterward) 

 

My intent as I approached this translation of  Camera Obscura (Original Russian title: Камера обскура) was to achieve what I believe to be an accurate translation true to the author’s intentions as I see them. This novel was written by Vladimir Nabokov and serialized in Sovremennye Zapiski in 1932. 

Winifred Roy made the first English translation of Camera Obscura, which was published in London in 1936 by Johnathan Long.  Nabokov is credited as Vladimir Nabokoff-Sirrin.  He disliked Roy’s translation so much that he essentially rewrote the book in English in 1938 under the name Laughter in the Dark. 

From the Russian text I can rewrite text-manipulation, the missed Nabokov symbolism, imagery, metaphoric and meta-textual elements. Several crucial episodes of this novel I will bring to an English audience. This novel is on several levels “responding" to Nietzsche’s ideas. Nabokov entwined multilayered meanings into an elaborate fabric of his text; and the deepest layer covertly bears upon his dialog with Nietzsche, whose concepts Nabokov signifies through symbol, metaphor and imagery. The English translator of "Camera Obscura" saw this work as pulp fiction and failed to recognize its poly-semantic value. Nabokov’s at times ironic and bitter and sometimes supportive interpretations of Nietzschean dictums and maxims ultimately address a sophisticated contemporaneous readership and target a fragile ascendant bourgeoisie in crisis. Translators who could not find cultural substitutions or loan words often omitted metaphors and symbols in Nabokov's works. What has been omitted overall if we may venture into the deep waters of “author’s intent” is Nabokov capturing the “voice” of sophisticated European readers with his intertextual style in a popular serialized novel format.  Why would comparison of teeth to the Parthenon, or the extended metaphor of Eagle and Snake be omitted.  Perhaps we can speculate that Roy and editors at Long publishing sought to capture an American audience less concerned with an intellectual text and more concerned with “externalized desires” to use Gertrude Stein’s quip about America. 

Nabokov’s theory of translation I would adopt as my own because of my reverence for “close reading” which has been drilled into me since I was an undergraduate.   His theory of literal translation is 

1. The personality and views of the translator must not impinge upon the work. Otsebyatina (from your own head, a neologism) is condemned.   

2. The translator should endeavor to reproduce exactly the lexical and stylistic features of the original, with all its imperfections, he should not attempt to emend, improve, up-date that original. He should not sacrifice accuracy for conventional notions of ‘readability’ or ‘smoothness’.33 

Having a translation guideline from the author himself is motivating.