Nabokov's Genital Cabinet

Recently, on Nick Hanford's interesting and sexy new blog, he raised some questions about the meaning of "value" in art:

"But value? It seems to have a completely different feel. It’s not a fluid word or even really malleable. The only way it changes is if one is looking at the physical or the emotional. But the word still can be traced directly back to “worth.” The word has this tactile attachment that one can feel and know. There’s something inherent in the word “value” that is traced back to worth. Something that has value must have worth. It doesn’t always have to be a monetary worth, but maybe a sentimental or emotional worth.

"So what would they shift the meaning of this word to? I can’t even wrap my head around what value would mean if it didn’t have a direct tie to worth. Maybe they are simply talking of a shift from the main monetary definition of value to that of a more emotional attachment. Get away from the spectacle of value, if that makes any sense."

This got me to thinking about the precise value of beauty, or rather, what intrinsic qualities authors look for when they go out spelunking for Keats' elusive siamese twins Beauty & Truth. First of all, looked at in the typical sense, as a pair of intertwined and codependent eidos or whatever you want to call them, it seems to me that they fall apart into abstraction. We're not Catholic priests here, we can take a teeny little step back from the mystic angle and try to puzzle out what the exact relationship is-- at which point the polite Romantic applause stops and people start getting angry.

Is beauty a quality of truth? Is something beautiful because it conforms to the pattern of the universe, because it reflects the mysterious symmetry and sublime of objective reality? I think Carl Sagan would agree, and any person with an operating heart has to admit that even a cursory browse of NASA's picture of the day gallery yields some truly breath-taking images.



But where does that leave art, where does that leave us? Is our role as critical and aesthetic and feeling audience important in some way, as Kant might say after I don't know, I guess like 6,000 pages? And if that's the case, doesn't that make truth subordinate to beauty instead of the other way around?

These are the kinds of questions that tend to bring any kind of engaging conversation to a halt because let's be real, they rarely ever lead anywhere. People get irritated, or more likely, they get bored, and the subject gets dropped. Discussed in a vacuum, things get boring or pedantic fast. However, when a writer or thinker of any kind sits down and starts to approach either of those two poles, it seems to me that some kind of commitment has to be made. In other words, whether that definition is articulated consciously or not, some meaning of "value" is hazarded. Beneath the surface of all art of pursuit of truth, the dialogue is going on.



What interests me, in particular, is the danger of dogmatism that accompanies the writer who is unwilling to work within a tentative and sinuous framework of truth and beauty. Translation, something I've mentioned a couple of times on this blog before, is a good testing ground for sussing out an author's stance, and lately I've been kind of hung up on the unique risks in translating "Eugene Onegin." Onegin, as a verse novel, and a formal verse novel at that, has a weightier commitment to sense and style then somebody like, I don't know, Basho, who has seen fit to be squashed and stretched and wrestled into procrustean syllable arrangements ever since sickly white people started noticing Japan, which in my amateur estimation was roughly around the time Pokemon came out (1863? 1864?).

Anyway, if you don't know, "Eugene Onegin" is two things. One, its an incredibly tightly plotted and cleverly meta-narrative story about intrigue and duels and being a poseur and/or a poet, complete with dream sequences and Laurence Sterne-esque tricks. Two, its a series of hundreds of exquisitely crafted sonnets following, with a few exceptions, the fascinating AbAbCCddEffEgg (the capital letters being masculine rhymes, the lower cases feminine). To the immense credit of the handful of guys who've tried their hands at the piece, including Charles Johnston, James Falen, Stanley Mitchell (my favorite) and the tireless Douglas Hoftstadter, most translations manage to stick fairly faithfully to the stanza-by-stanza road-map of content and plot, while preserving Pushkin's meter and rhyme.

Personally, I think that's impressive, and I think it can be pretty fun to admire the verbal acrobatics required at various points to get our stodgy language to where it needs to go, as well as to scoff at some of the lamer reaches (in Mitchell, for example, "It's only by the by I'm saying/ That once a slander gets expressed/ By some foul liar in a garret/ To whom the monde awards a carrot," and "Tatiana" ends up rhyming with "manner" way too many times, and...). I guess in that respect I think preserving the beauty of the language at the expense of the literal truth of what Pushkin's words signified is ok.

Nabokov disagreed.



Now I don't know if you've ever gone on YouTube or whatever and looked up some of his old TV interviews, or read the essay collection "Strong Opinions," but it seems like the dude more or less made a second career out of having, well, strong opinions, but his argument against these creative translations of Onegin was on a totally different level. Fed up with the existing Arndt translation, he took it upon himself to produce a new version, as literal as possible. If the rhyme and strict meter wound up as stylistic casualties, that was fine by him; the substance would remain, in blank verse as opposed to the classic Pushkin sonnet, as it turned out.

From here, opinions differ: some people will tell you that his translation, including in its four volumes a facsimile of the first Russian edition and a huge fuckton of notes, is the crowning achievement of his scholarly career. Others will tell you that it was a huge waste of his talents, and beyond that, a pretty wretched translation. Not even a particularly accurate one, as accused in Edmund Wilson's legendary take down of the project in the pages of the NYRB.

Setting aside whether a really REALLY strict translation of anything is even possible, from both a practical perspective and an, I don't know, Wittgeinsteinny linguistic/logical perspective, my own primary impression of the project is the scale of it, and the tragicomic grandeur of its failure. Nabokov took a verse novel weighing in at less than 200 pages and somehow extracted, at my estimate, around 1,600 pages. The language, faithful or not, lacks the lightness, the quickness, the at least spiritual exactitude of even the most loose translations. Despite the universally lauded quality and depth of his footnotes and the increasing popularity of blank and free verse in American poetry, is it mere coincidence that you can just roll into a bookstore and leave with one of several strictly rhymed and metrical Onegins while Nabokov's rough beast has been out of print for fuck, who knows, decades?

Could it be that in taking a stand for "truth" over "beauty," Nabokov missed that maybe Keats was right, jesus christ, maybe the two are indissoluble, that the capital T Truth, the "value" in Pushkin's masterpiece lays less in whether you say a horse "sniffed" or "snorted" or "sensed at" the snow (depending, obv., on which Russian dictionary you're consulting) and more in the spirit of agility, irony and rapture captured in the book's intimidating network of rules and the deftness with which the translator moves among them? Could it be that all writers should just get Calvino's "Six Memos for the Next Millenium" just fucking welded to their chests at birth for constant reference?

I think Nabokov's admirable weakness in sticking to his epistemological guns is summed up in a story focusing on his more scientific side, that is his second life as a lepidopterist. He was a butterfly ace, as you probably know already, with a whole genus named after him. But just like in the literary world his reactionary tendencies were just as pronounced as his prodigious talents. Until the end of his life he was a hard-liner for the "good old ways" of lepidoptery. What this meant in practical terms was that in the face of mounting evidence he refused to concede the value of new ways of identifying different breeds, such as chromosome counting or genetic comparisons.

For Vlady, when he went to find out what kind of butterfly he was looking at exactly, he went for the classics-- severing the genitalia and examining them under a microscope. If you go to the Harvard Museum of Natural History's comparative zoology wing you can still see his "genitalia cabinet," stocked with a morbid selection of tiny blue butterfly sex organs.

I think that the implication here is heavy-handed enough without any kind of embellishment. Nabokov's aesthetic infatuation with butterflies and moths led to both beauty-- his gorgeous sketches and paintings of various specimens-- as well as truth, in the meticulous accuracy of those same portraits as well as the fidelity of his specimens themselves. However, like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, it seems like in this microcosm either truth must be sacrificed to beauty or vice versa. You can look at a butterfly, see the light play off its wings, watch it duck and weave over the flowers like a boxer, and never be sure of its genus or species. Or, you can catch it, jar it, pin those sapphire wings to cardboard and with steady hands clip the literal seat of its creative powers-- for beauty's sake, in other words, you are invited to destroy beauty. Observation collapses the wave. I don't know.

"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muss man schweigen."

Ok, or:

To express the truth in beauty, perhaps, you occasionally need to castrate what you can't express.