The Strange Case of the Nabokovs’ Enchanter

This essay is about authorship and translation by means of a genetic approach to a peculiar case study: Dmitri Nabokov’s double translation (from Russian into English and then into Italian) of Vladimir Nabokov’s Volshebnik (1939; The Enchanter, 1986; L’incantatore, 1986, 2011). Thanks to the material in the archives of the Berg Collection (NYPL), I could follow the history of the posthumous publication of this novella in English and Italian. But something was missing: there were no traces of the first drafts of the translations.In the second part of this article I question precisely what is missing, focusing on the genesis of L’incantatore, Dmitri Nabokov’s Italian translation of The Enchanter. Here, as with his English translations done in collaboration with his father, under his father’s “responsibility”, Dmitri Nabokov’s own authority and authorship are at stake. The son of the great writer, who did not master Italian as well as he mastered English, went on translating in collaboration with other, trustworthy translators. This practice, although rather common, raises an ethical question: what does a signature in a translation mean? And what does it mean when the (last) name happens to be the same as the author’s?