Hard not to admire how Edmund Wilson taught himself Russian in his 30s and acquired a decent reading knowledge but also hard not to be amazed that this gave him the confidence to challenge Nabokov's on points of Russian diction. The audacious temerity of the autodidact.
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I'm actually sympathetic to Wilson's case, because I don't think Nabokov actually intended to do a good translation of Onegin so much as he intended to demonstrate that Onegin is untranslatable and only fluent Russophones should be allowed to enjoy it.
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They were operating from very different theories of language & translation but, dudes being dudes, they turned it into a pissing match about the dictionary definition of words.
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