Access digital  text of VN's "Art of Translation” [August 4, 1941: archives from New Republic http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113310/vladimir-nabokov-art-translation  ] and its introduction:

"Without Edmund Wilson, America might never have gotten to know Vladimir Nabokov. It was The New Republic’s literary critic who welcomed the Russian writer in October of 1940, mere months after he had escaped Europe and arrived in New York. (Nabokov’s cousin was responsible for the introduction; Nabokov lost Wilson’s phone number, but the men still managed to set up a meeting.) Wilson remained Nabokov’s champion and friend for many years. When Nabokov complained that The New Yorker’s Katharine White was fiddling with his prose, Wilson dashed off a note accusing her of “a truly alarming condition of editor’s daze.” Nabokov wrote several pieces for The New Republic, including this early contribution, “The Art of Translation”—a litany of the irreverent or lazy translator’s sins and a meditation on his own struggles. But it was translation that ultimately undid the fraternity between Wilson and Nabokov. “Mr. Nabokov is in the habit of introducing any job of this kind which he undertakes by an announcement that he is unique and incomparable,” Wilson wrote in a 1965 review of Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin, “and that everybody else who has attempted it is an oaf and an ignoramus.” The relationship never recovered".