Subject
[NABOKOV-L] Errata & Query
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Date
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Queries:
(a) How important were ("poor") Baudelaire's poetry and essays to French-speaking Nabokov?
(b) Does "Pale Fire" express a particular view about rhyme and reason, beauty, infinity without resorting to "split personality" but holding Shade, or Kinbote to serve as "masks"?
Quickly assembled items obtained from W.Fowlie's introduction in "Flowers of Evil and Other Works - Charles Baudelaire" ( Edited and Translated by Wallace Fowlie.Dover publications, Inc. 1992.) and from T.S.Eliot's short essay (1930) in "T.S.Eliot, Selected Essays" (faber&faber 1999). VII- Baudelaire ( p.419) * :
In his Introduction Fowlie refers to a dialogue between Housman and Gide (1917), related to French and English poetry. To Housman's question "After all, what is poetry?", Gide cited Baudelaire: "Rythm and rhyme... answer man's immortal need for monotony and symmetry, as opposed to the vanity and danger of inspiration." How unlike Shade's vague "two methods of composition."**
A lot of what Nabokov has affirmed about his own intimations and conclusions concerning "reality" and "consciousness," during the interviews presented in "Strong Opinions," is not made manifest in "Pale Fire," although it is taken up with particular emphasis in "Ada." Shade is clearly not intended as the sort of poet who seriously strives to "reach the essence of poetry...to enter into communication with supreme Reality...who engages all his being in what may be called the adventure of poetry...an "aspiration toward the infinite." (Fowlie's words related to Baudelaire). Fowlie establishes a link between Baudelaire and the philosophy of Bergson, before he concludes that, for them, "the poet should place himself in the very center of what is real and merge his consciousness and his sensibility with the universe." If Baudelaire had the misfortune to be presented to the English readers by Swinburne ( words by T.S.Eliot in his essay on Baudelaire) Fowline mentions that it was Eliot who championed Baudelaire in America. Concerning the translation of "semblable", Fowlie favors "twin": "You know him, reader, this delicate mnster,/ -Hypocrite reader - my twin - my brother!". He notes that Baudelaire's "art is a communication between himself and his reader. In it he identifies his reader with himself... it is a line which Eliot takes over whole into The Waste Land." Nevertheless, Eliot believed that "Baudelaire's notion of beatitude certainly tended to the wishy-washy: and even in one of the most beautiful of his poems, L' invitation au voyage, he hardly exceeds the poésie des départs..." a restriction that results from " a gap between human love and divine love. His human love is derfinite and positive, his divine love vague and uncertain: hence his insistence upon the evil of love, hence his constant vituperations of the female..." (p.429)
Baudelaire's definition of beauty reminded me (only in part) of Nabokov's exclamation [ "I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence."] For Baudelaire, "Beauty is the infinite in the finite." ("C'est l'infini dans le fini"). It seems to me that he expresses the hope that art, with discipline, will enable him to attain and keep beauty and the infinite. Nabokov's lament, perhaps, led him to search for it in the "hereafter."
....................................................................
* - btw: the lively exchange about CB and Eliot bt. E.Wilson and Nabokov needs to be read again in this context...
** - While Shade is writing these lines, and systematically describing his shaving procedure, is he following method A? Why does he choose to endure such agony - if not because this is when the Muse comes to him? (the vain pain of inspiration, versus a steady work with rhyme and symmetry? What else is there?) "Two methods of composing: A, the kind/ Which goes on solely in the poet's mind,/ A testing of performing words,.../ and B,../ The other kind, much more decorous, when/ He's in his study writing with a pen. // In method B the hand supports the thought,/ The abstract battle is concretely fought...// But method A is agony! The brain/ Is soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain./ A muse in overalls directs the drill/ Which grinds and which no effort of the will/ Can interrupt, while the automaton...// Why is it so? Is it, perhaps, because/ In penless work there is no pen-poised pause/.../ Having to choose the necessary rhyme,/ And keep in mind all the preceding tries?/ Or is the process deeper with no desk/ To prop the false and hoist the poetesque?/"
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(a) How important were ("poor") Baudelaire's poetry and essays to French-speaking Nabokov?
(b) Does "Pale Fire" express a particular view about rhyme and reason, beauty, infinity without resorting to "split personality" but holding Shade, or Kinbote to serve as "masks"?
Quickly assembled items obtained from W.Fowlie's introduction in "Flowers of Evil and Other Works - Charles Baudelaire" ( Edited and Translated by Wallace Fowlie.Dover publications, Inc. 1992.) and from T.S.Eliot's short essay (1930) in "T.S.Eliot, Selected Essays" (faber&faber 1999). VII- Baudelaire ( p.419) * :
In his Introduction Fowlie refers to a dialogue between Housman and Gide (1917), related to French and English poetry. To Housman's question "After all, what is poetry?", Gide cited Baudelaire: "Rythm and rhyme... answer man's immortal need for monotony and symmetry, as opposed to the vanity and danger of inspiration." How unlike Shade's vague "two methods of composition."**
A lot of what Nabokov has affirmed about his own intimations and conclusions concerning "reality" and "consciousness," during the interviews presented in "Strong Opinions," is not made manifest in "Pale Fire," although it is taken up with particular emphasis in "Ada." Shade is clearly not intended as the sort of poet who seriously strives to "reach the essence of poetry...to enter into communication with supreme Reality...who engages all his being in what may be called the adventure of poetry...an "aspiration toward the infinite." (Fowlie's words related to Baudelaire). Fowlie establishes a link between Baudelaire and the philosophy of Bergson, before he concludes that, for them, "the poet should place himself in the very center of what is real and merge his consciousness and his sensibility with the universe." If Baudelaire had the misfortune to be presented to the English readers by Swinburne ( words by T.S.Eliot in his essay on Baudelaire) Fowline mentions that it was Eliot who championed Baudelaire in America. Concerning the translation of "semblable", Fowlie favors "twin": "You know him, reader, this delicate mnster,/ -Hypocrite reader - my twin - my brother!". He notes that Baudelaire's "art is a communication between himself and his reader. In it he identifies his reader with himself... it is a line which Eliot takes over whole into The Waste Land." Nevertheless, Eliot believed that "Baudelaire's notion of beatitude certainly tended to the wishy-washy: and even in one of the most beautiful of his poems, L' invitation au voyage, he hardly exceeds the poésie des départs..." a restriction that results from " a gap between human love and divine love. His human love is derfinite and positive, his divine love vague and uncertain: hence his insistence upon the evil of love, hence his constant vituperations of the female..." (p.429)
Baudelaire's definition of beauty reminded me (only in part) of Nabokov's exclamation [ "I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence."] For Baudelaire, "Beauty is the infinite in the finite." ("C'est l'infini dans le fini"). It seems to me that he expresses the hope that art, with discipline, will enable him to attain and keep beauty and the infinite. Nabokov's lament, perhaps, led him to search for it in the "hereafter."
....................................................................
* - btw: the lively exchange about CB and Eliot bt. E.Wilson and Nabokov needs to be read again in this context...
** - While Shade is writing these lines, and systematically describing his shaving procedure, is he following method A? Why does he choose to endure such agony - if not because this is when the Muse comes to him? (the vain pain of inspiration, versus a steady work with rhyme and symmetry? What else is there?) "Two methods of composing: A, the kind/ Which goes on solely in the poet's mind,/ A testing of performing words,.../ and B,../ The other kind, much more decorous, when/ He's in his study writing with a pen. // In method B the hand supports the thought,/ The abstract battle is concretely fought...// But method A is agony! The brain/ Is soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain./ A muse in overalls directs the drill/ Which grinds and which no effort of the will/ Can interrupt, while the automaton...// Why is it so? Is it, perhaps, because/ In penless work there is no pen-poised pause/.../ Having to choose the necessary rhyme,/ And keep in mind all the preceding tries?/ Or is the process deeper with no desk/ To prop the false and hoist the poetesque?/"
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/