Man From the USSR & Other Plays Read Online Free PDF Page A

reality is opinion on public matters, can one justly accuse Nabokov of lacking a social consciousness?
    Nabokov identified beauty with pity, with the poetry and patterns of life itself. He detested brutality and injustice, whether toward a group or an individual. He had the same compassion for the victim of a crime as for someone unjustly punished for that crime. The outrage of a didactic tract, whether or not it purports to be literature and whatever its viewpoint, is hollow. The compassion of the true artist is sometimes poignant to the point of discomfort, which may be what bothers certain critics.
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    In translating the verse plays, I have deliberately tried for an accurate reproduction of the pentameter and the iambic foot wherever it was possible to reconcile them with reasonably natural speech patterns. It is true that Father’s approach to the translation of poetry, as exemplified in his version of
Eugene Onegin
and other late translations of his own and others’ verse, attained a literal purity wherein meter and (if present) rhyme were abandoned in the search for absolute accuracy of sense, nuance, and connotation. Where possible, however, he did strive for rhythm and alliteration. While Nabokov’s more complex verse, with some of which I am grappling now, does dictate greater sacrifices to literality, I believe that, in the case of these wonderful, youthful verse compositions, the relative straightforwardness of language would have led Nabokov to decide that there was no need, as a rule, to scrap the basic structure. Hence, while precision, of course, received absolute priority, I found it possible to preserve the overall metric scheme and the individual stresses with considerable accuracy (if one accepts, as in the Russian, the
ad libitum
use of an unaccented final syllable with the resultant feminine ending).
    In the two prose plays there are certain deliberate departures from the original texts: in the case of wordplays, references, or special expressions that were untranslatable literally, or that, had they been translated, would have proved meaningless to the English-speaking reader or theatregoer.
    In both the prose and the verse plays the possibility of performance has been kept in mind. I have tried to keep transliteration as straightforward as possible. “A” is of course sounded as in “ma,” “e” as in “hey,” “i” as “ee,” “o” as something between “oh” and “aw” when stressed and as “uh” when not, “u” as in “put” with a bit of “boot,” and “y” (except when used alone) is a purely auxiliary symbol denoting a diphthong sound, and is to be passed over as rapidly as possible. The soft-signed letters “1’ ” and “n’,” in Russian, sound like the French “1” and “n” when the latter are followed by the vowel “i.” The soft-signed final “v’ ” of “Lyubov’ ” is almost a French “f ” when the latter is followed by “i.” In addition to a one-time indication of stresses for Russian characters listed in the casts, stresses of diminutives as well as names and patronymics of persons mentioned in the text but not listed in Cast of Characters are indicated (in cases where there might be a doubt) at their first occurrence. The stress and transliteration business is purely utilitarian here, and has therefore been deliberately simplified.
    It seems appropriate, in view of the variations that abound, to add that the author’s name is stressed Vladimir Nabokov.
    The four plays I have translated for this volume will soon be published by Ardis as part of a collection of Father’s dramatic works in the original Russian.

Chronology
A BRIEF CHECKLIST OF DRAMATIC WORKS BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV
    (For more details regarding the history of the four plays included in this volume, see