The trials of translation …

… Document: Nabokov’s Notes. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

You’d think that after planning and working on the project on and off for more than twenty years, Nabokov would have been pleased with the result. Why, then, did he overwrite so much of the text in this copy, further revising his translation? Why are there annotations here stretching into the early 1970s? His new alterations were in response to Wilson’s damning review in The New York Review of Books—and they were designed to play up the aspects of the translation Wilson hated most.