Nabokov’s virtuosity in juggling with the English language, the prettiness and wit of his verbal inventions. It has produced a bald and awkward language which has nothing in common with Pushkin or with the usual writing of Nabokov.

The results of this have been more disastrous than those of Arndt’s heroic effort. Nabokov decided that this could not be done with any real fidelity to the meaning and undertook to make a “literal” translation which maintains an iambic base but quite often simply jolts into prose. Professor Arndt had attempted the tour de force of translating the whole of Onegin into the original iambic tetrameter and rather intricate stanza form. * This article-which sounded like nothing so much as one of Marx’s niggling and nagging attacks on someone who had had the temerity to write about economics and to hold different views from Marx’s-dwelt especially on what he regarded as Professor Arndt’s Germanisms and other infelicities of phrasing, without, apparently, being aware of how vulnerable he himself was. Nabokov, before the publication of his own translation of Evgeni Onegin, took up a good deal of space in these pages to denounce a previous translation by Professor Walter Arndt.

Nabokov is in the habit of introducing any job of this kind which he undertakes by an announcement that he is unique and incomparable and that everybody else who has attempted it is an oaf and an ignoramus, incompetent as a linguist and scholar, usually with the implication that he is also a low-class person and a ridiculous personality, Nabokov ought not to complain if the reviewer, though trying not to imitate his bad literary manners, does not hesitate to underline his weaknesses. Nabokov-for whom he feels a warm affection sometimes chilled by exasperation-and an admirer of much of his work, does not propose to mask his disappointment.

This production, though in certain ways valuable, is something of a disappointment and the reviewer, though a personal friend of Mr.

Onegin novel