Selected translations and unfinished or lost works

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1913 Four poems from "El Romancero" (The Tempers, pp. 24-29)

1916 “Spanish-American Number” [poetry] various authors (Others) 

1918 “The Man Who Resembled a Horse” [fiction] Rafael Arévalo Martínez (The Little 

Review). [with his father, William George Williams] 

1929 Last Nights of Paris [fiction] Philippe Soupault  

1933 “Cage” [fiction] from the French of E. C. Fabre (Blast)  

1937 ... and Spain Sings: Fifty Loyalist Ballads Adapted by American Poets. Benardete, M. J. 

and Rolfe Humphries, eds. [trans. by Williams and others]

1941 Wrested from Mirrors: Poem, Nicolas Calas[1] 

1942 "Prelude in Boricua", Luis Palés Matos, in American Prefaces.

1954/ The Dog and the Fever [fiction], Pedro Espinosa, [retranslation, orig. Stevens 1707] [with 2018 his mother, Raquel Héléna Rose Hoheb], 1954 [long attributed to Francisco de 

Quevedo; a new edition by Jonathan Cohen, 2018]

1956 Hypnos Waking: Poetry and Prose by Rene Char, selected and translated by Jackson  Mathews, with the collaboration of William Carlos Williams, et al. 

1957 "Translation from Sappho." Spectrum 1 (Fall 1957): 46. [Entitled 'Peer of the gods," also  published in Evergreen Review, fall 1957, and as a broadside as "Sappho: A Translation  by William Carlos Williams in the Poems in Folio series in San Francisco, 1957.]

1958 poems by Pablo Neruda, Nicanor Parra, Silvina Ocampo, Ernesto Mejía Sánchez, and 

Jorge Carrera Andrade, Issue 14 (Dec.) of New World Writing

1941 Jean Sans Terre, by Yvan Goll, [1941, subsequently 1944, complete English translation, 

with many translators including W.H. Auden, Kenneth Rexroth, Louise Bogan, and 

illustrated by Marc Chagall and Salvador Dalí, 1958]

1966 “The Cassia Tree” [poetry] various authors (New Directions 19, 1966) [Many of the late-

career  Chinese translations with David Raphael Wang, who called them 're-creations in 

the American idiom']

2001 Collected Poems 1939-1962, v. II, [translations of Luis Palés Matos, Octavio Paz, Ali  Chumacero, Alvaro Figueredo, Nicanor Parra, Pablo Neruda, Silvina Ocampo, Miguel  Hernández, Rafael Beltrán Logroño, Mariano del Alcázar, Paul Eluard, Yvan Goll,  Nicolas Calas]

2003 The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. Eliot Weinberger (Editor)  [Williams' contributions include works by Ho-Chih-Chang, Meng Hao-Jan, Wang Wei,  Li Po (Li Bai), Wang Ch'ang-Ling, Tu Fu, Li Yü, and an essay, "On Rexroth's One  Hundred Poems from the Chinese"]

2011 By Word of Mouth [poetry] (2011). Includes first publication of Williams' "Ode to My 

Socks" (Neruda); translations of Rafael Arévalo Martínez, José Santos Chocano, Alfonso 

Guillén Zelaya, Luis Carlos López, José Asunción Silva, Lupercio de Argensola, 

Anonymous, Francisco de Quevedo, Miguel Hernández, Rafael Beltrán Logroño, 

Mariano del Alcázar,  Luis Palés Matos, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Alí Chumacero, 

Nicanor Parra, Alvaro Figueredo, Silvina Ocampo, Ernesto Mejía Sánchez, Jorge Carrera 

Andrade, Eugenio Florit, Raquel Hélène Rose Hoheb Williams, and Eunice Odio.

[1] "Wrested from Mirrors", "Nothing Off The Line" ("The Storm at Dawn") can be found in the Williams-Calas correspondence at the Lilly Library, Indiana. Tashjian documents these and the first publication of others: "Williams also translated "The Agony Among the Crowd" and "Narcissus in the Desert," (1978, p. 6n6).

1925 "The Discovery of the Indies" (in In the American Grain, based on Columbus, 

Christopher. Journal of the First Voyage. Trans. Sir Clements R. Markham. In 89–258: 

Olson, Julius E., and Edward Gaylord Boume, eds. The Northmen, Columbus, and Cabot, 

985–1503. Vol. I of Original Narratives of Early American History. Ed. J. Franklin 

Jameson. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906, 89-258) [revised essay from 

Williams' 1923 serial version][2]

[2] Williams' relationship with the Columbian texts are complicated:

 "35. Christopher Columbus, Journal of the First Voyage, trans. Sir Clements R. Markham, in Julius E. Olson and Edward Gaylord Bourne, eds. The Northmen, Columbus, and Cabot, 985-1503 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1906), 238-239, 241-242. Williams does here what typifies his handling of the journal. He stitches together selected excerpts from several days of entries to form what seems to be a  single, extended entry by Columbus. In addition, he puts the text back into the first person. There are actually no extent copies the journal itself, and its contents have come to us only through the work of various epitomizers. Ferdinand Columbus used portions of the original text in writing his father's life, and Las Casas also had a copy of the text he used in writing his Historia de las Indias. Bourne, editor of the Columbus materials in Williams' source document, draws upon yet another epitome, first published in 1825 by the Spanish historian Navarrete from a manuscript in the archives of the Duke del Infantado. (It is not certain who prepared this manuscript, though Navarrete conjectures the handwriting to be Las Casas'.) This version is not only longer and more detailed than the other entries, but it gives an exact  transcription of Columbus' own words for the entries from October 12 to October 28, 1492. The rest of the entries, however, are written by the epitomizer himself, who paraphrases the words of "the Admiral," referring to Columbus throughout the text by his official title. Williams erases the presence of the  epitomizer from his selection of excerpts, creating the impression that Columbus' own manuscript has  survived to tell the story. Williams, furthermore, avails himself here, as he frequently does, of Bourne's scholarship by incorporating materials from the editor's notes into "The Discovery of the Indies". He takes Columbus' account of sealing a parchment in a barrel during the height of the storm from Bourne's lengthy  citation from Ferdinand Columbus, who provides that section of the journal in the exact words of his father.  And one last point regarding the peculiar permutations the already complicated matter of the journal undergoes in Williams' treatment--Columbus never used the phrase New World in relation to the lands he discovered, and indeed believed, after his fourth voyage, that he had reached the Orient. Williams, however, needed to have a Columbus who was conscious of having discovered a New 

World [...]."(Conrad, B. (1990), pp. 98-99n35)

Fernando de Herrera, lyric poetry[3]

[3] Williams 2009, p. 232. There does not seem to be evidence Williams worked on these translations, though he planned to.

Reid, Mayne. The Headless Horseman (into French alexandrines) [age 10-11]

1921 “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, Keats, John (into Russian)

1922 Colas Breugnon, Rolland, Romain (into Russian, Nikolka Persik)

1923 Alice in Wonderland, Carroll, Lewis (into Russian, Ania v strane chudes, under the 

pseudonym 'Sirin') 

1928 Nuit de decembre, Musset, Alfred de (into Russian, 'Dekabr'skaia noch'. Iz Miusse', Rul', 

7 October 1928, pp. 2-3)

1930  Prologue to Goethe's Faust (from German) 

1945 Three Russian Poets [Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tiuchev]

1958 A Hero of Our Time, Lermontov, Mikhail (with Dmitri Nabokov)

1960 The Song of Igor's Campaign (from Old East Slavic) [notable as a departure from 

literalism]

1964 Eugene Onegin (revised 1965), Pushkin, Alexander

2008 Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian Poetry (selected and translated, from  mostly Russian and some French), 2008 [first conceived as Anthology of Russian Verse 

in English in 1958 and expanded here]

Nabokov’s poetry and prose (self-translations or translations in collaboration), selected into English

1936/ Kamera Obskura (retranslation as Laughter in the Dark), 1936-38 [Nabokov’s  

1938 first literary work in English]

1937 Despair [Despair 2 in 1966]

1938 Laughter in the Dark

1959 Invitation to a Beheading (Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with Vladimir Nabokov)

1961 The Gift (revised Dimitri Nabokov and Michael Scammell's translation)

1963 Dar (trans. Dmitri Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov, and Michael Scammell)

1964 The Defense (Michael Scammell  with Vladimir Nabokov)

1965 The Eye (Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with Vladimir Nabokov)

1966 Speak, Memory [memoir]

1967 Lolita

1968 King, Queen, Knave (trans. Dmitri Nabokov and Vladimir Nabokov)

1970 Poems and Problems

1970 Mary

1973 “Ultima Thule,” (Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with Vladimir Nabokov)

1976 “The Return of Chorb,” in Details of a Sunset and Other Stories (self-translated 

with Dmitri, retranslation of Gleb Struve’s version)

Grayson lists 21 novels 1971-1975, 8 or more collections of short stories, 1 play, The Waltz Invention, 1966.[4] 

[4] Grayson, Appendix A, pp.220-221.

Anna Karenina (into English)

Ulysses (into Russian)

A Russian version of Hamlet [5]

Trzeciak (2005, p. 31n68) writes:

"Nabokov devoted considerable effort to translating the work of others. His 

translations into Russian include poems by Supervielle, Yeats and Verlaine 

(presumed lost), selected poems by Rupert Brooke, Ronsard, S.O'Sullivan, Byron

and Keats (published 1922-23), Tennyson's "In Memoriam" (published in Zveno

in 1926), selections of French Symbolists Baudelaire and Rimbaud "P'ianyi 

korabi'" ["Drunken Ship"] (published in Rul' in 1928), two poems by Musset

"Maiskaya noch'" ["May Night"] (published in Rul' in 1927) and "Dekabrskaya 

noch" ["December Night"] (which he translated twice, first in 1916 for Iunnaia 

Mysl', a journal of Tennishev High School and in 1928 for Rul'), two Shakespeare

sonnets (XVII, XXVII) in Rul' 1927, a scene from Hamlet and Goethe's prologue 

to Faust. He also translated several Pushkin poems into French. Besides Eugene 

Onegin, his major translation projects include Ania v strane chudes (Berlin, 

1923); The Song of Igor's Campaign (1960), and a co-translation of Lermontov's 

Hero of Our Time (1958). A year after his Three Russian Poets appeared, 

Nabokov published rhymed translations of three stanzas from Pushkin's Onegin in 

the Russian Review (1945)."

[1] Shvabrin 2019, p. 168.