Here are translations of Russian A-items into English by translators other than Nabokov. If, however, Nabokov supervised, oversaw, corrected, or collaborated on the translation, editions of such works can be found in the appropriate A-item slots. Included are two of Nabokov’s books in eight editions.
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Tags: English, translations
John Long, an imprint of the British publisher Hutchinson, issued the first translation of Nabokov’s 1933 Russian novel, Камера обскура, into English as Camera Obscura in January 1936 in black cloth-covered boards with gilt stamping and with a dust jacket illustration, by an artist named Abbey, of a man in a three-piece pinstripe suit glaring intensely at an awkwardly seated woman. The translation was credited to a Winifred Roy.
John Long royalty statements (in the Nabokov holdings of the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection) show that 567 sets of sheets of Camera Obscura were printed. The sheets were warehoused and then bound and shipped according to John Long’s marketing needs.
First released were full price copies into the domestic market at 7/6 (i.e., seven shillings and six pence) on 2-Jan-1936. Only 99 copies were sold. At about the same time, John Long, following standard British publishing practice of the time, shipped copies overseas to countries and colonies of the British Empire for sale at less than the full price edition, probably six shillings. These were bound with a preliminary sheet pointing out that the copy was for sale only in a restricted area of the British empire. (See http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-GriBook-_div3-N11A1D.html) John Long records that only 10 such copies were sold.
Eventually, John Long, following its standard practice of re-releasing at a lower price point 7/6-priced books that didn’t sell out, issued Camera Obscura in its “cheap” line at 3/6. One-hundred fifty-seven cheap copies were sold. Last of all were 277 copies sold at an unknown, remaindered price. A dozen copies were recorded as “free”, probably for the author, reviewers, promotions, etc. That left 12 sets of sheets unaccounted for.
Of the 567 possible bound copies of Camera Obscura, only a stackful survive. Those still in their dust jackets are even rarer. I’ve been able to track three such copies: one at the Berg Collection and which had previously been Nabokov’s own copy; a depository copy at the Cambridge University Library; and, one unsuccessfully offered three times (2002, 2005, 2008) by Sotheby’s in London, for which I have little information. Ten other institutional copies, almost certainly without dust jacket, are listed on WorldCat and multiple others are in private hands or dealers’ catalogs. The surviving population, with and without dust jacket, therefore is minimally a couple dozen.
The copies I’ve examined and the citations I’ve found reveal several points regarding bindings, dust jacket spines, and advertisements. For each point, the findings are listed in their probable order of issue. First are the bindings:
- Binding a – Black cloth-covered boards with gilt stamping;
- Binding b – Red cloth-covered boards with black stamping;
- Binding c – Wrappers (cited but unobserved).
Then are the dust jacket spines:
- Dust jacket spine a – Black and red lettering on a white ground (reading from the top down: title, blurb, author’s name, price at 7/6, and publisher’s name);
- Dust jacket spine b – A strip, overlaying the original spine, with black and red lettering on a yellow ground (reading from the top down: probably (because of incomplete information on a poorly preserved spine) the author’s name, title, two lines mentioning Despair, price at 3/6, and probably the publisher’s name).
In addition, bound into each copy is a concluding separately paginated signature of advertisements for John Long books. Those signatures are listed here in their probable chronological order. (Be aware of John Carter’s admonition in ABC for Book Collectors that when using bound-in advertisements to assess priority of issue, one must use the evidence with great caution.):
- Advertisement set a – Sixteen pages headed “JOHN LONG | Books | SUMMER LIST, 1935”. There are 11 pages for summer 1935 books, three pages for spring 1935 books, one for cheap editions, and one for a writing competition “…for a mystery or detective novel to be submitted…not later than 1st July, 1935…”. There is no mention of Camera Obscura or the 1937 John Long Despair anywhere in the ads;
- Advertisement set b – Sixteen pages headed “JOHN LONG’S NEW BOOKS”. Page one has the further heading “GENERAL”, encompassing eight pages of listings and page nine is headed “NOVELS” and encompasses eight pages. Camera Obscura is advertised on p. 10. There is no mention of Despair;
- Advertisement set c – Sixteen pages headed “JOHN \beginning of publisher’s rectangular device\ LONG’S | NEW \continuation of publisher’s rectangular device\ BOOKS”. There are 15 pages, plus one page for “RECENT NOVELS”. Camera Obscura is advertised on p. 9 and subheaded “Author of ‘Despair’”. But there is no separate listing for Despair;
- Advertisement set d – Four pages headed “JOHN LONG’S 3/6 LIBRARY | LOVE, LIFE & ROMANCE”. There is no mention of Nabokov or either of his two John Long titles. The fact that all of the books listed here are part of the “3/6 Library” implies that these advertisements were intended to be bound in with a John Long book selling at 3/6.
We come now to the actual copies examined:
- Binding a, dj spine a, advertisement set a;
- Binding a, dj spine a, advertisement set b;
- Binding a, unknown dj, advertisement set c;
- Binding b, unknown dj, advertisement set d;
And the copies, unexamined, with incomplete citations:
- Binding b, unknown dj, four pages of ads that are possibly advertisement set d;
- Binding c, unknown dj (if any), unknown ads, released in 1938.
With this information in hand, I have parsed this edition into three issues:
- Issue a – Binding a (black) and dust jacket spine a at 7/6: certainly the full price issue;
- Issue b – Binding a (black) and dust jacket spine b at 3/6: probably the cheap issue;
- Issue c – Binding b (red) and unknown dust jacket at unknown price: probably the remaindered issue.
Since I have not examined or found solid citations for colonial or wrappers releases, I have not given them the status of separate issues.
I have ignored the advertising sets here. Though they can with confidence be chronologically organized, the binder could have grabbed whatever current or old ones he had at hand when binding them into any of the issues: Witness ad set a with its references to spring and summer 1935 bound into a book released in January 1936.
D. Barton Johnson speculates that the credited translator, Winifred Roy, is in fact, Winifred Ray. Johnson researches come up with no mention of Roy. but that “…Winifred Ray was active as a translator from German and French in the 1930s. At least one of her translations was published by John Long, making it not unlikely that Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark was also Ray’s work. There is no evidence that Ray knew Russian, so if she was the translator, she must have worked from Doussia Ergaz’s French version (V. Nabokov-Sirine, Chambre obscure [Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1934]).” (See D. Barton Johnson’s “Sources of Nabokov’s Despair”, p. 15n, in Nabokov at Cornell, Gavriel Shapiro, ed., Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2003.)
I would appreciate hearing from anyone with further information about the 1936 John Long Camera Obscura.
Tags: English, novel, translations
This is the final installment of the final A-item of the drafts of the revised and updated bibliography. The “Complete” in the heading is obviously tentative. Lolitas in their original English and Russian versions gush from the presses of publishers in the English- and Russian-speaking worlds (and in the non-English speaking world as texts for the study of American literature).
The full Lolita / Лолита draft encompasses 83 editions in English and Russian. The most recent installment adds A28.74, a Russian edition from Azbuka that was the first to reinstate a paragraph missing from all previous Russian editions. On that note, I’ve also included some information about the errors and corrections in various English language editions.
Next, D-items — translations by others than Nabokov.
I’ve posted the sixth version of the update to the draft pages of Lolita / Лолита. There are 72 English and Russian editions in this update, published from 1955 through 2006. Of interest are four editions published in Russia, two in English (A28.66 and A28.69), a quasi-finely-bound edition in Russian (A28.67), and a very expensive, finely-bound, limited edition in Russian (A28.72).
I’ve posted the fifth version of the update to the draft pages of Lolita / Лолита. There are 59 English and Russian editions in this version (eventually there will be more than 80), published from 1955 through 2000. Of interest are English language editions published in China (A28.44 and A28.58) and Korea (A28.48), a large print edition (A28.47), and two editions of The Annotated Lolita with corrections (A28.40 and A28.43).
Here’s a new update to the draft pages of Lolita / Лолита. So far there are 37 editions in English and Nabokov’s Russian translation, published from 1955 through 1991. Included this time are the first 15 editions of Nabokov’s Russian translation which were published in Russia (the first one by Izvestia, 1989) and two editions with corrections (Vintage, 1989, and The Annotated Lolita, Vintage, 1991).
I’ve added a new update to the draft pages of Lolita / Лолита. Included are the first nineteen editions in English and Nabokov’s Russian translation, from 1955 through 1987. I’ve added the U.S. and British The Annotated Lolita (with Alfred Appel, Jr.’s supplementary material, corrections, and quotations from Nabokov), two Ardis Russian editions (reproduced from the 1967 Phaedra edition with its errors), and five book club editions.
I’ve updated the new draft pages of Lolita / Лолита to include the first eight editions, from 1955 through 1969. I’ve added the first wrappers editions from Fawcett (US, 1959) and Corgi (Britain, 1961), the long run of paperback printings from Putnam’s/Berkley (US, 1966–1987 and possibly later), and the first edition of Nabokov’s Russian translation, from Phaedra (US, 1967).
And so we reach the end of the A-items, for now, with Lolita / Лолита. There are dozens of editions and hundreds of printings in English and Nabokov’s own translation into Russian. Here I start out with only the first three editions, or A-items: The Paris Olympia Press edition of 1955, the American Putnam edition of 1958, and the British Weidenfeld & Nicolson edition of 1959. I will add more editions next week. Lolita is A28 in the 1986 bibliography.
The pdf of the draft pages is not acting sanely in Firefox and I am working on the problem. It is displaying properly in Safari and Chrome. I don’t know if it behaves in Internet Explorer and other browsers.
I am vacationing on Mt. Desert Island for the next two weeks and won’t be able to post the next draft pages until I return. That next set will be very complex (dozens of editions), very long (hundreds of printings), and very rich (from many countries in the two languages Nabokov wrote and translated it in). For these reasons, I will post A28 Lolita (for it is her of course) in installments over several weeks when I return.
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