Nabokov’s Nostalgia

Poem translated: “An Execution” by Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov is primarily known as a brilliant writer of fiction, but he also wrote some damn fine poems. In fact, someone (I can’t remember who — Joseph Brodsky?) said that Nabokov was a poet manqué who, failing to make his mark as an author of verse, used prose as a medium for his poetry — a poet in prose, if you will. Maybe. I’d say that anyone who composed “An Execution” is anything but a poet manqué. The reader need only read the first two lines of the opening stanza to know he’s dealing with a poem of the first caliber:

Бывают ночи: только лягу,
в Россию поплывет кровать;

The staccato pace of these lines (the first line especially) is hard to render into the English language. A literal translation would go something like this: “On some nights, no sooner have I lain down / than off to Russia sails away my bed.” Russian is flexible enough to permit Nabokov to use only eight words where English needs, if my rendition is chosen, at least seventeen (it is the same with the title of the poem — the original Russian name, “Rasstrel,” actually means “execution by firing squad,” but imagine using that as the title). Eight words are enough to convey the scope of the author’s tragic destiny: the loss of, and nostalgia for, a homeland that no longer exists, and may have never existed beyond the imagination of the man who feels nostalgic; an émigré’s nervous hypothalamus; the oneiric restoration of one’s patrie perdue. Alas, it was not to be. Nabokov would never set foot in his native land, and any other country, however welcoming, could only be an ersatz. I am convinced the last sixteen years of his life that Nabokov spent at a smart hotel in Montreux were no personal eccentricity but a metaphor: a man who had been deprived of his home could not put down roots anywhere else. Unlike a house, a hotel offered the kind of impermanence Nabokov must have needed, and it helped that the hotel was in Switzerland, that perfect place for well-heeled vagabonds.

At the time the poem in question was written (1927), Nabokov had no illusions about what awaited him back home in the event he was foolish enough to return. While Stalin was in power, homesick émigrés flocking back to the motherland were often arrested and done away with (this was the fate of the man of letters Prince Dimitry Svyatopolk-Mirsky). Sometimes they did away with themselves (the case of the great poetess Marina Tsvetaeva, who hanged herself some two years after her return from France). Nabokov was so keenly aware of the dangers of repatriation he made it a central theme of one of his novels, Glory. Martin Edelweiss, the novel’s protagonist, decides to return to Bolshevik Russia and disappears without a trace as soon as he ventures across the Soviet border. Unlike his foolhardy literary creation, Nabokov knew better and stayed put in his exile in the West. But, as “An Execution” suggests, the temptation to return — along with the awareness of the risk that such a return implied — remained, at least for the first ten years or so of his life away from the idyll Nabokov had lost and would never regain.

Some might say it is impudent of me to have translated a poem that had already been translated by the perfectly bilingual Nabokov. I make no claims to have improved on the author’s own translation but, reading Nabokov’s version, one may say there is such a thing as being too literal. So, for what it’s worth, here is my attempt. In translating the poem, I have done the utmost to preserve its meaning as well as its rhythm.

On certain nights when down I lie,
To Russia sails away my bed,
To Russia where I’m led to die,
To the gully to be shot I’m led.

I come to in my darkened lair
To see a watch and matches in a pile,
And, trained on me from that same chair,
The garish, gloomy digits of a dial.

In vain I struggle to avert my gaze
And shield my chest and head;
I can’t escape the dull, matte blaze
About to strike me dead.

The steady ticking of the clock
Becalms my fuddled mind;
My palmy exile, solid as a rock,
Obscures the doom I left behind.

But how to quench my heart’s desire
To be in Russia, to be free
To see the stars when they shout, “Fire!”
In the gully with a Mayday tree.