Honestly, it's truly amazing that Wilson, for all his accomplishments, thought he could challenge Nabokov on diction in both English and Russian. I mean talk about playing outside your league.
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Maybe it was just a trigger for the falling out?
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In retrospect, it's kind of amazing that two men who always had to be the smartest guy in the room were friends for so long. Their falling out was pre-ordained.
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With the crucial difference that Flaubert was long dead by this point, James Joyce used to insist that Flaubert used French imperfectly.
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Speaking of Flaubert, he gave an early demonstration of how untranslatable Pushkin seems to be. After reading a French translation, he told Turgenev, "Il est plat, votre poete. ("Your poet is flat.")
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Wasn't his critique of Nabokov's Onegin that it was thuddingly literal and didn't capture the poetry of the original?
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He also thought that Nabokov didn't understand Pushkin's words.
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Nabokov also knew French very well and made fun of Auden for the line "Le monde est ronde."https://books.google.com/books?id=oSFuBi9u69MC&pg=PT245 …
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I think English was his third language, after French?
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Trolling avant la lettre
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