Panel: Processes of Self-Translation and Multiple Texts
Copanelists: Lee Elaine Skallerup Bessette and Kaitlin Briggs
Vladimir Nabokov referred to the culmination of his thirty-year-long autobiographical project as “This re-Englishing of a Russian reversion of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place” (Speak, Memory 12). The English text of the volume known as Speak, Memory originated as fifteen separate essays written in English that were published variously in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and the Partisan Review between 1946 and 1950. Subsequently, Nabokov arranged these into fifteen chronologically arranged chapters entitled Conclusive Evidence (1956). His autobiographical effort hardly proved conclusive at this point, since he translated it into Russian in a version that both added and omitted elements of the English volume; this work was published in 1954 with a title quite different in its implications: Drugie Berega [Other Shores]. Finally, Nabokov combined translated elements of the Russian volume with further additions to Conclusive Evidence to produce Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1956).
Some of the differences between Speak, Memory and its immediate predecessor Drugie Berega seem to be simple corrections of factual inaccuracies. Others seem to result because the process of translating his own excellent, idiosyncratic English into elegant Russian stimulated additional memories to include in the memoir. Some of the alterations he made as he returned the work to English seem motivated by a desire to preserve a stylistic felicity discovered while writing in Russian. The most important, however, directly address the relationship of language and self-identity. Like the double encountered by the protagonist of Nabokov’s novel Despair, the subject voice in Speak, Memory differs subtly from its Russian original; it is a reflection (in both senses of that word), rather than a reproduction.
Joanne Karpinski is Associate Professor of English at Regis University. She teaches cultural history, humanities, research techniques, comparative literature, and literary theory. She has published essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman and is the editor of Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1992). Her article on life writing and artifacts is in the Encyclopedia of Life Writing.