Translations of Hamlet

Ember, Translator of Hamlet
by Christine Raguet-Bouvart

Pity the elderly gray translator
Who lends to beauty his hollow voice
And-choosing sometimes a second rater-
Mimes the song-fellow of his choice.

"Rimes, " Vladimir Nabokov

In an essay published on 4 August 1941 in The New Republic, The Art of Translation, Vladimir Nabokov characterizes translation as the queer world of transmigration. Having arrived in the United States a year earlier, he had himself effected a transmigration from one continent to another, fleeing Hitlers troops to protect his family and to preserve his use of language. But for the shift to be complete, the Russian author would have to give way to the American author. The move had been initiated in France a few years earlier with the rewriting of Laughter in the Dark, then with the writing of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and was followed, in America, by work on translations of Russian poetry into English. In 1942, he begins composition of Bend Sinister, a novel whose plot does indeed take a sinister turn, but whose working title was first The Person from Porlock. This allusion to the interruption of a poets inspiration cannot but evoke the authors situation and the echoes of it he gives in his novel by means of two distinct characters: the philosopher Krug, and Ember, an obscure scholar, a translator of Shakespeare in whose green, damp country he had spent his studious youth [BS, 29]. Published in 1947, Bend Sinister is set in an imaginary state and relates the story of the last seven months of the life of Adam Krug, a brilliant philosopher with a striking force of character. The action opens just after the death of Olga, his wife, and shortly after the seizing of power by a tyrant, Paduk, nicknamed The Toad, who happens to be a former classmate and scapegoat of Krugs. The party of The Average Man, which heads the state and whose philosophy is based on a theory of egalitarianism, Ekwilism, developed by a certain Skotoma, has as its object the glorification of the commonplace and the ordinary. Nonetheless, Paduk seeks to obtain the official support of Krug, the only thinker in the state whose renown is international. To provoke his submission, Paduk causes to disappear, one after the other, all his friends and colleagues, but Krug attaches no importance whatsoever to these threats until the day his son is abducted, then tortured to death in an absurd and brutal manner. Thereafter, the sole means of pressuring him having disappeared, Krug no longer has any reason to yield to...