Pninian English

 

Pninian English

 A recent archive issue of The New Yorker (September 6, 2021) featured the story by Vladimir Nabokov, “Pnin Gives a Party,” published originally in the magazine on November 12, 1955. Later, considerably reworked, with a good many additional passages, this story made up Chapter Six in the novel Pnin, published by Doubleday in 1957.

Toward the end of his soirée, Pnin takes two of the guests, Joan Clements and Margaret Thayer, a university librarian, upstairs to show off his digs. There they come upon bookshelves “loaded with three hundred [and] sixty-five items from the Waindell College Library.” Here’s the rest of the passage, as it reads in the New Yorker:

“‘And to think I have stamped all these,’ sighed Mrs. Thayer, rolling [up] her eyes in mock dismay.

“‘Some stamped [by] Mrs. Miller,’ said Pnin, a stickler for historical truth.”

 The words I have placed in brackets above do not appear in the book. In the first two instances this makes little difference, but that word “by” in the last instance distorts a wonderful sentence in Pninian English, where “Some stamped Mrs. Miller” is perfectly logical.

The Russian syntax in Pnin’s mind allows for the direct object to come at the beginning and the subject at the end; the use of case endings in Russian nouns makes for a flexibility in word order that is impossible in English. As near as I can figure the Russian sentence would read, “Некоторые [штампы] [по]ставила госпожа Миллер.”

“Some stamped Mrs. Miller” is a nice joke, ruined by a “by.” I’m not sure whether Nabokov originally had that word in his sentence, or (more likely) proofreaders at the New Yorker, unconversant in Pninian English, felt the need to insert the “by.”