What is translation? The pale, flaming head of a poet on a platter? The screech of a parrot? Polyglot author and translator, Vladimir Nabokov was convinced that Lolita and his Eugene Onegin would guarantee him a place in Parnassus. Pushkin's masterpiece in English, with its four volumes of notes, aroused bitter controversy, divided the intellectuals of the time and cost Nabokov the loss of his great friend Edmund Wilson. Gathered for the first time in one volume, these writings on translating offer the extreme, uncompromising and iconoclastic vision of one of the greatest and most controversial authors of the twentieth century.