Camera Obscura and Laughter in the Dark,
or, The Confusion of Texts
by Christine Raguet-Bouvart
translated from the French by Jeff Edmunds
page three of three

In reformulating the translation of Kamera obskura, Nabokov sought to free the text from the double grip of the Russian author and the English translator, who were unable, it seems, to effect a satisfactory exchange between producer and reader. In effect, the reader presents two faces: one turned toward the past upon which the text is based--here, the Berlin of the Russian emigration, which is much more present and striking in Camera Obscura and thus awakens nostalgia for a lost world whose disappearance would indeed be most keenly felt in the loss of its language--and a second turned toward the future, a future not to be found in the Berlin past, unless this past were to take the form of a grotesque fictional farce and assume, in another language, a new function, to be assigned by the reader. In this way, Nabokov leads us into one of his favorite games, the game of the double and the self, for, as might have been expected, Winifred Roy, in transposing into English this Russian novel that developed in Tolstoy's shadow, distorted it: her attempt to give it another life by duplicating it failed.

The text's development is extremely complex, for the first version, signed "Vladimir Sirin," strikes most readers as very rooted in the Russian world of the Berlin of the 1920s. At that time, Nabokov was writing under a pseudonym so as not to be confused with his father, also V. Nabokov. (In 1922 his father had been assassinated, and Nabokov began his career as a writer, in Russian circles, under the name "V. Sirin" so as to be distinguishable from the deceased.) The first English version, Camera Obscura, is signed "Vladimir Nabokoff-Sirin," indicating, in addition to the loss of the mother tongue, the beginning of a readoption of identity.

But it is only with the American version, after having rewritten the text in English, after having internationalized it, that he becomes Vladimir Nabokov, that the veritable Russian identity of its author is accepted as authoritative. When he translated Otchaianie (Despair) into English in 1936, he was still signing himself Nabokoff-Sirin. What is most curious is that this second version of Kamera obskura, which all the critics who have compared the two texts agree in finding more international than the first, is much more deeply rooted in the world of Russian literature, above all of Tolstoy. Anna Karenina and "The Devil" are the two clearest points of reference, but for what reason were they chosen?22

One might respond to this question: for readerly reasons. In Laughter in the Dark, Nabokov introduces Tolstoy on the first page by evoking his funeral: "(1910, a brisk, jerky funeral procession with legs moving too fast),"23 thereby placing his novel under the sign of death, and notably of the death of the Russian past such as he wishes it not be read, because for Nabokov, a distinguished entomologist, the larva dies only to give rise to the chrysalis, and the chrysalis to engender the butterfly. In other words, he denies retrograde reading, which, seeking explanations by returning to the past, reads everything backwards. Conversely, the ideal Nabokovian reader is the creative reader who comprehends the text's mutations. Anna Karenina thus accompanies us in a very subtle and ironic manner throughout the novel because it belongs to universal literature, because it transcends time, nationality, and language, and this is precisely what Nabokov aspires to. Moreover, in aligning himself with the methods of a short story like "The Devil," which offers us two possible endings and invites the reader to participate in the realization of the text, Nabokov makes explicit his authorial intentions as to the way in which his texts should be read. And he does all this by means of, and within, a translation, the medium of the mother tongue having become insufficient. To become Vladimir Nabokov, he must change tongues.

What outcomes might we expect from such a procedure? Outcomes almost certain to be disappointing to an author so anxious to have well-informed and competent readers, for the majority of them make no distinction between the Russian and American texts, despite the fact that the paratext of the latter points out that two different states of the novel exist: "A different version of this novel has been published in England under the title Camera Obscura." Some criticism of the era seems to have ignored this: "Laughter in the Dark has already enjoyed some acclaim in Europe under the title of Camera Obscura," reads a headline in the Herald Tribune of May 15, 1938. The same confusion is found in many press blurbs, but also in academic articles, where at times the first text seems never to have existed and at others the second is described as the translation into English made by Nabokov from the Russian. Why so much misunderstanding, which reappears under the pens of later, sometimes eminent commentators, among them Alfred Appel, Jr., the author of the very staid Annotated Lolita, who, repeating the error of Andrew Field, that much less felicitous biographer of Nabokov, conflates Bruno Kretschmar and Albert Albinus to create "Albinus Kretschmar"? In French, the errors are of another order, and, of course, involve elements of both the French translation and the American version. In Chambre obscure, for example, the characters' names are not those of Camera Obscura, but of Laughter in the Dark. Briefly put, most readers have come to know a single text, upon which they confer the characteristics of the other, whose shadow continues to hover.

Such readers are not fulfilling their roles as discriminators; their reception of the work addressed to them fails because they remain passive instead of nourishing their own creative energies with the text, a text whose intent is to compel them to reflect, reread, and then engage in autonomous aesthetic activity. Rather curiously, the fact that in later interviews Nabokov expressed fear of not being understood by his reader seems to confirm that his expectations were never fully satisfied. If the good reader is a rereader, the ideal reader can be none other than the author himself. But here too the contradiction is great. What status should the text be accorded under these conditions? Did Nabokov the English writer read the English text of Camera Obscura as a bad translation from the Russian or as a failed production of the original author? Why, after having declared that his Russian novels belonged to Russia's literary heritage, did he rewrite a Russian novel in English in a more 'universal' mode? No doubt because in being his own rereader, he was certain of being a good reader and thus of assuring the survival of his work. Despite Nabokov's statements, we know that there can exist no ideal reading and that a translator imposes a reading upon the text. But this interpretation, which as we have already seen completes the work, in turn permits other interpretations to future readers. It comes to enlarge or reduce the field of potential meanings according to choices it reflects, and in addition it modifies the melody line, the music of the language itself. Thus, an author as attentive as Nabokov could not leave his text unverified at the risk of hearing, especially in a language familiar to him such as English--which he could read before Russian--a music that would have been foreign to him. It must be possible for the reader of the translated text to discover in it the totality of the author's talent, or, failing this, the translator must be blessed with as much talent as the author so as to be able to create a text of equivalent quality in translation. The translator must also have a perfect familiarity with the two nations and two cultures so that no detail will escape his understanding, so that he will be able to render every detail, thereby ensuring that the reader will find everything that exists in the original. Finally, the 'music' of the translated text must match the music of the original, thanks to the mimetic gift of a translator aware of every nuance and subtlety of the author's language.

At this point, we might ask, which translated text should be read if not the one translated by the author himself? For no translator would dare, at the risk of being overwhelmed by the power of the words, hazarding a task as venturesome as retranslating a work already translated by the original author. There is an uncrossable frontier between author and translator, since the status of author is refused the latter and since a reader always reads the work of an author. Nabokov was well aware of this when he declared:

When I translate myself, I permit myself many more liberties that when it is someone else. I can permit myself this freedom because after all I am not only the translator but the author of the book.24

22. See the chapter "Who Killed Lev Tolstoļ," devoted by G. M. Hyde to Laughter in the Dark, in his Vladimir Nabokov: America's Russian Novelist, London: Marion Boyars, 1977, pp. 57-75. [See also Thomas Seifrid's "Nabokov's Poetics of Vision, or, What Anna Karenina is Doing in Kamera obskura," which first appeared in Nabokov Studies #3 (1996)--Translator's note.]

23. Laughter in the Dark, p. 12.

24. P. Dommergues, "Entretien avec Vladimir Nabokov," loc. cit., p. 101.

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