Citation:
Abstract:
Vladimir Nabokov's pre-war Russian language short stories were translated into English, whether by his son Dmitri or by others, but, in the novelist's lifetime, always "in collaboration with the author." The extent of this collaboration sometimes amounts to self-translation, that is, not to improving the text but to changing its details, the way a translator has no right to do while the author is entitled to revisions. Most often such changes were made in the awareness of the horizons of the new audience; but they also reflect modified attitudes to the material and suggest which meanings it was important for Nabokov to emphasize and which it was important for him to preclude. We discuss such traces of self-translation in three of Nabokov's short stories, "Torpid Smoke," "Details of a Sunset," and "Spring in Fialta."