Nabokov’s Surprising and Verbose Universe - Bend Sinister

The story of a translation

Bend Sinister

Vladimir Nabokov has always held one of the first places in a list of authors I am fascinated by. For a long time, I only read one or two of his books, but in time I appreciated the importance of his works and I added all of his books to my reading list.

Interestingly enough, my Nabokov reads started with one of his lesser-known works, Transparent Things, which is his penultimate book before he died in 1973. When I check my library, I see the Penguin edition that I bought on August 26, 1982. Among the things attracting me to this book were the long paragraphs that smash tens of words together, word plays and the discussion of abstract concepts, sometimes in the first person. Later on, I experienced the same phenomenon in each of his books.

Bend Sinister is the first book Nabokov wrote in the U.S. It was written just after the Second World War and as such has a main theme which is derived from his hate of the Nazis and - since he and his family had to leave Russia when he was very young - his equally strong or stronger hate of the Bolsheviks. The book delves into Nabokov’s perception that the common feature of both groups, authoritarianism, is both funny and horrible, and it has an abundance of word plays. Sometimes he does verbal acrobatics that do not necessarily make sense and sometimes the segments you read are narrated in the illogical atmosphere of a dream.

All the criticism I read about this novel mentioned that Nabokov exhibited his verbal skills almost as a circus show and interpreted Nabokov to be egocentric, claiming that he did not want to pick a side on any social topic. Nabokov himself clearly emphasized in his foreword to the book that he is not interested in criticising this or that social system or this or that government and claimed that his book is about the love between a father and his son. When we accepted this interpretation, some of the segments in the book did not make much sense and it was difficult to understand why these were included. I liked the book a lot, due to its mastery of language.

A few years ago I read Andrea Pitzer’s The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov. (See my post on this book here). This book changed my perception of Bend Sinister, as well as Nabokov’s whole life. According to this book, Nabokov hid his reaction to people’s pain in words and themes placed in his books. One of the most prominent pains was his brother Sergey’s death in a concentration camp for being a homosexual, around the same time Nabokov was emigrating to the U.S. to escape from the war. Anybody who finds Nabokov egocentric or uninterested in social realities should read the book.

I liked the book so much that I wrote a play based on the book in 2015. The play covers the main themes of the book, but I also used the claims in Pitzer’s book and some scholarly articles on the book. The play was not staged up to now, but since it reflects the visual treasures of the book using theatre techniques, I am hopeful that it will be staged at one point in time.

I took on translating the book to Turkish in June 2018 and the translation was published in early 2019.

Verbal Acrobatics

One of the important features of Nabokov’s work is that he uses lots of word plays, invented words, hidden references to other works and similar verbal easter eggs. Most of his readers may not notice all this but devout Nabokov readers or translators make it a challenge to discover these and this turns into a great adventure.

Bend Sinister is perhaps Nabokov’s most difficult novel to read, apart from his masterpiece Pale Fire. For a translator, it is a nightmare, like any of his books.

Nabokov uses a lot of idioms, similes, metaphors and any other literary mechanisms you can think of. He does not do this to show-off, this is part of his nature.

Translating idioms is a task that has a certain degree of difficulty, but translators are aware of the issues and can find solutions to this problem. But when Nabokov uses phrases like as the wan sun swooned, creating a harmony from words sounding Chinese, how can we translate it properly?

In some parts of the text, sentences that are almost a page long cause the translator to have a fit. Look at this segment:

“They separated and he caught a glimpse of her pale, dark-eyed, not very pretty face with its glistening lips as she slipped under his door-holding arm and after one backward glance from the first landing ran upstairs trailing her wrap with all its constellation - Cepheus and Cassiopeia in their eternal bliss, and the dazzling tear of Capella, and Polaris the snowflake on the grizzly fur of the Cub, and the swooning galaxies - those mirrors of infinite space qui m’effrayent, Blaise, as they did you, and where Olga is not, but where mythology stretches strong circus nets, lest thought, in its ill-fitting tights, should break its old neck instead of rebouncing with a hep and a hop - hopping down again into this urine-soaked dust to take that short run with the half pirouette in the middle and display the extreme simplicity of heaven in the acrobat’s amphiphorical gesture, the candidly open hands that start a brief shower of applause while he walks backwards and then, reverting to virile manners, catches the little blue handkerchief, which his muscular flying mate, after her own exertions, takes from her heaving hot bosom - heaving more than her smile suggests - and tosses to him, so that he may wipe the palms of his aching weakening hands."

The narration starts with the past tense at the beginning of the sentence, then as Krug describes what he sees in a stream-of-consciousness using other similes and adds not only what he sees, but the view with all its connotations, it switches to the present tense in the remainder of the sentence. The French reference in the sentence is also meaningful. “They make me afraid Blaise, just like they did to you.” Here Nabokov refers to the section in Pensées - Pascal’s unfinished compilation of texts on theology and philosophy put together posthumously - where Pascal mentions that the eternal silence of infinite space makes him afraid. (Here amphiphorical is not a real word but Nabokov uses it for texts with exaggerated and long metaphors. No need to mention it, but he does the same thing in this book. You can download an interesting article about this from here.

Bend Sinister is full of ‘Easter eggs’. In 1963, Nabokov wrote a foreword to this novel which he published in 1947 and explained some of the Easter eggs. I think this was not just for the sake of explaining them. It could be because a lot of critics saw the book as a complex work full of verbal acrobatics and belittled his contribution.

Frankly, it could have been impossible to detect these Easter eggs without the Foreword. For example, in Chapter 3 Krug’s friend Ember, while thinking about their first years together, remembers that he had translated one of Krug’s most important works to English, reaching bestseller status in the U.S., then provides a few names of books that were bestellers at that time. In the Foreword, Nabokov mentions that three of these books’ names were derived from warnings on train toilets about not flushing the toilets while going through cities and villages, the fourth implies the bestseller Bernadette’s Song (which is a cheap novel according to Nabokov). In a different section, he merges the names of All Quiet in the Western Front, the most important novel of Erich Maria Remarque and And Quiet Flows the Don, Sholohov’s famous novel, ending up in All Quiet on the Don (Nabokov sees both novels as cheap).

Another verbal acrobatics he explains in the Foreword really perplexed me. When Krug attends a university meeting rather half-heartedly, he is listening to the President. The President first uses the phrase “when an animal has lost his feet in the ageing ocean”, then a bit later “of the admiral whose fleet is lost in the raging waves”. Krug mishears the speech as referring to an animal and its feet, whereas the later segment corrects it. It would be difficult to detect this if Nabokov did not explain it.

I like difficult texts. Each translation is in effect a great puzzle or an intellectual game. As we are advised to play games and solve puzzles as we get older, I say yes, continue working your mind…