SOURCE: “The French Connection: Nabokov and Alfred de Musset, Ideas and Practices of Translation,” in The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 73, No. 4, October, 1995, pp. 613-47.

In the following essay, Grayson discusses the importance of Nabokov's work as a translator to the development of his work as a novelist.

Où tu vas, j'y serai toujours, Jusques au dernier de tes jours, Où j'irai m'asseoir sur ta pierre.(1) 

The focus of attention here is Nabokov's translation of Alfred de Musset's dramatic lyric, La Nuit de décembre. The specific instance of an early poetic translation is taken as a starting point for an account of Nabokov's relationship to this French Romantic poet, and beyond that for an examination of the larger context of the relationship that Nabokov's translations have to the main body of his work, and the bearing this relationship has on the vexed question of the primacy...