The Translator’s Doubts: Vladimir Nabokov and the Ambiguity of Translation

The Translator’s Doubts singles out translation as a way of talking about literary history and theory, philosophy, and interpretation, with the work of Vladimir Nabokov as its case study. It is hard to separate Nabokov from the act of translation, in all senses of the word-ranging from moving across geographical borders and cultural and linguistic boundaries to the transferring of the split between here and there and then and now. Investigating translation as a transformational rather than mimetic experience allows us to understand the strikingly original end-result: in what emerges, both the target language and the native language undergo something new that dispenses with the quest for and the anxiety of influences. In this sense Nabokov constitutes a perfect object for comparativist study since his oeuvre offers us the unique opportunity to look at his major texts twice: as originals and as translations.