Drinker of Words

By John Skow

POEMS AND PROBLEMS by Vladimir Nabokov. 218 pages. McGraw-Hill. $7.95.

The air is refreshing, humid and sweet, How good the caprifoli smells!

--Vladimir Nabokov

Caprifole is a lovely word. If anything it is a shade too lovely, something to be tasted, rolled over the tongue, chewed lightly, savored and then, perhaps, not swallowed but spit discreetly into a tub of clean shavings. But what does it mean? The first dictionary to come to hand, an old Webster's, does not list caprifole at all. The unabridged Random House mentions only "caprifoliaceous: belonging to the Caprifoliaceae, a family of plants including the honeysuckle, elder, viburnum, snowberry, etc."

Well, no great mystery; the caprifole stanza continues botanically: "Downward a leaf inclines its tip/ and drops from its tip a pearl." It is clear that Nabokov is describing a rain-wet shrub, but has his own good reasons for leaving indefinite precisely which shrub. It is as if he had written of a cavalryman saddling his ungulate (horse? cow? moose?) and riding away.

What is curious, though, is that this bit of verse is a translation from the Russian, and the Russian poet--Nabokov himself--did not use an obscure Russian equivalent of caprifole. He used a perfectly ordinary word, zheemolost, which means honeysuckle.

Elaborate Paperchase. The deeps of poetry must be respected, but as Nabokov sternly pointed out in the preface to his Englishing of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, the shallows of translation must be examined with skepticism. This book amply justifies such skepticism. It consists of 39 of Nabokov's Russian poems with his own English translations, 14 poems written in English, and a sly and self-parodying inclusion--18 chess problems.

Characteristically, the new volume is an elaborate paperchase. Within it, the actual chess puzzles, witty and elegant, throw an intentionally false scent. Nabokov nudges the reader shamelessly with a list of virtues that characterize chess problems "and all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity." Clearly the reader is supposed to pursue these clues and come to the conclusion that Nabokov approaches art as a sterile, chesslike intricacy. It is, however, a good general rule (discernible in the only good novel ever written about chess, Nabokov's The Defense), that chess has no relation to anything else. That is its charm.

Mars Bars. The caprifoliaceous translations are better clues to Nabokov's whereabouts. As a poet he is a master, divisively, sometimes awkwardly stretched between two landmass languages. There are times when he appears as a provincial linguistic pedant. At other times he is an overrefined rhymester who thinks it snazzy to pretend that "pre-au-roral" is the best English version of a straightforward Russian word meaning "daybreak." Nabokov seems to know and obstinately use all the English words that ever existed, but does he really not see that "stirless" (as in "Stirless, I stand there at the window") is an unsuccessful coinage, or that "mellow moon" sounds like an ad for Mars Bars?

One result is that for those few who can read them, the original poems in Russian are generally good, sometimes remarkable, while the translations are generally flawed. An exception is La Bonne Lorraine, whose language (expressing a surprising passion for Joan of Arc) is powerful and clear:

The English burned her, burned my

girl,

burned her in Rouen's market square.

The deathsman sold me a black coat

of mail, a beaked helmet and a dead

spear . , .

A few of the English poems are splendid, of the high quality of the long poem in Pale Fire. An Evening of Russian Poetry begins with Hght brilliance as the poet lectures:

The subject chosen for tonight's

discussion is everywhere, though often

incomplete: when their basaltic banks become too

steep, most rivers use a kind of

rapid Russian, and so do children talking in

their sleep,

At the evening's end the exiled lecturer, having wittily betrayed his native tongue to amuse a women's club, remembers his loneliness and stumbles into desolation

Nabokov is an expert poet (although he is capable of rhyming "alliterations" with "patience"), a fertile chessmaster and a pleasing and self-pleased illusionist. But primarily he is a prodigious drinker of language who does not always hold his words well. Of his abilities as a translator, he is his own judge:

What is translation? On a platter A poet's pale and glaring head, A parrot's screech, a monkey's

chatter, A nd profanation of the dead.

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