Subject
[NABOKOV-L] Analogic Incrustations "yesteryear leaves" into "UBI
SUNT" motif in NABOKOV
SUNT" motif in NABOKOV
From
Date
Body
Writing about distress and distance, not as a poet but as a commentator Kinbote, in his note on lines 47-48, refers the reader to another note (to line 62).
"Solitude is the playfield of Satan. I cannot describe the depths of my loneliness and distress. There was naturally my famous neighbor just across he lane...The Goldsworth castle became particularly solitary after that turning point at dusk which resembles so much the nightfall of the mind. Stealthy rustles, the footsteps of yesteryear leaves, an idle breeze, a dog touring the garbage cans - everything sounded to me like a bloodthirsty prowler."
The season he mentions is not the autumn he spends in the Cedarn cave, but applied to when, in "those March nights their house was as black as a coffin". His comments create new furrows in time/space also because he is musing about "stealthy rustles, the footsteps of yesteryear leaves..." ( which may be conjured in the mind alone). Here Kinbote's uses a word that reminded me of one applied in translations of François Villon's "Ballade des dames du temps jadis", to the English, ie, to "d'antan/yesteryear."*
His mood led me to a sonnet related to this season: "To Autumn," by John Keats and, in fact, I found a similar lamentation in its third stanza:
"Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?" Perhaps it's too long a stretch into "analogic incrustations" ( from "yesteryear/d'antan" into "where are they?").
In the meantime I found myself humming a song by Stan Kelly-Bootle's friend, Pete Seeger, which I associate to my stay in the US: "Where have all the flowers gone?" and exploring Wiki.
Perhaps, in fact, it's almost a delirious notion to find, through Kinbote's choice of only one word, an entire theme which, so it seems to me, is characteristic not only of Nabokov's "Pale Fire," but of many other novels of his (I think Villon's "yesteryear snows" are directly mentioned in "Ada"?).
Namely "Ubi Sunt?" (where have all my childhood years gone...my Russia, my native tongue, my father, my first loves?)
Wiki: "Ubi sunt is a phrase that begins several Latin medieval poems and occurs, for example, in the second stanza of the song "De Brevitate Vitae" (also known as "Gaudeamus Igitur"). The theme was the common property of medieval Latin poets: Cicero may not have been available, but Boethius' line was known: Ubi nunc fidelis ossa Fabricii manent? ...Sometimes thought to indicate nostalgia, the "ubi sunt motif" is actually a meditation on mortality and life's transience. In medieval Persian poetry, Ubi sunt? is a pervasive theme in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:
Each Morn a thousand Roses brings, you say:
Yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday?**
And this first Summer month that brings the Rose
Shall take Jamshyd and Kaikobad away.
Prominent ubi sunt Anglo-Saxon poems are The Wanderer, Deor, The Ruin, and The Seafarer (all part of a collection known as the Exeter Book, the largest surviving collection of Old English literature). The Wanderer most exemplifies Ubi sunt poetry in its use of erotema (the rhetorical question):
Where is the horse gone?
Where the rider?
Where the giver of treasure?
Where are the seats at the feast?
Where are the revels in the hall?
Ubi sunt poetry also figures in some of Shakespeare's plays. When Hamlet finds skulls in the Graveyard (V. 1), these rhetorical questions appear:
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorr'd in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kiss'd I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment,that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning -- quite chap-fall'n. Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come; make her laugh at that.¨
More links to "Ubi Sunt?" are: Carpe diem; Timor mortis conturbat me; Memento mori ; Vanitas ( Nabokovian themes, all of them and "Vanitas" figures prominently in Pale Fire's references to "Arcady" and "chained Dementia"...)
..............................................................................................................
* Mais où sont les neiges d'antan! François Villon Ballade des dames du temps jadis
** Cp. to Nabokov's lines about the "Swift" (often quoted in the list).
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"Solitude is the playfield of Satan. I cannot describe the depths of my loneliness and distress. There was naturally my famous neighbor just across he lane...The Goldsworth castle became particularly solitary after that turning point at dusk which resembles so much the nightfall of the mind. Stealthy rustles, the footsteps of yesteryear leaves, an idle breeze, a dog touring the garbage cans - everything sounded to me like a bloodthirsty prowler."
The season he mentions is not the autumn he spends in the Cedarn cave, but applied to when, in "those March nights their house was as black as a coffin". His comments create new furrows in time/space also because he is musing about "stealthy rustles, the footsteps of yesteryear leaves..." ( which may be conjured in the mind alone). Here Kinbote's uses a word that reminded me of one applied in translations of François Villon's "Ballade des dames du temps jadis", to the English, ie, to "d'antan/yesteryear."*
His mood led me to a sonnet related to this season: "To Autumn," by John Keats and, in fact, I found a similar lamentation in its third stanza:
"Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?" Perhaps it's too long a stretch into "analogic incrustations" ( from "yesteryear/d'antan" into "where are they?").
In the meantime I found myself humming a song by Stan Kelly-Bootle's friend, Pete Seeger, which I associate to my stay in the US: "Where have all the flowers gone?" and exploring Wiki.
Perhaps, in fact, it's almost a delirious notion to find, through Kinbote's choice of only one word, an entire theme which, so it seems to me, is characteristic not only of Nabokov's "Pale Fire," but of many other novels of his (I think Villon's "yesteryear snows" are directly mentioned in "Ada"?).
Namely "Ubi Sunt?" (where have all my childhood years gone...my Russia, my native tongue, my father, my first loves?)
Wiki: "Ubi sunt is a phrase that begins several Latin medieval poems and occurs, for example, in the second stanza of the song "De Brevitate Vitae" (also known as "Gaudeamus Igitur"). The theme was the common property of medieval Latin poets: Cicero may not have been available, but Boethius' line was known: Ubi nunc fidelis ossa Fabricii manent? ...Sometimes thought to indicate nostalgia, the "ubi sunt motif" is actually a meditation on mortality and life's transience. In medieval Persian poetry, Ubi sunt? is a pervasive theme in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:
Each Morn a thousand Roses brings, you say:
Yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday?**
And this first Summer month that brings the Rose
Shall take Jamshyd and Kaikobad away.
Prominent ubi sunt Anglo-Saxon poems are The Wanderer, Deor, The Ruin, and The Seafarer (all part of a collection known as the Exeter Book, the largest surviving collection of Old English literature). The Wanderer most exemplifies Ubi sunt poetry in its use of erotema (the rhetorical question):
Where is the horse gone?
Where the rider?
Where the giver of treasure?
Where are the seats at the feast?
Where are the revels in the hall?
Ubi sunt poetry also figures in some of Shakespeare's plays. When Hamlet finds skulls in the Graveyard (V. 1), these rhetorical questions appear:
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorr'd in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kiss'd I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment,that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning -- quite chap-fall'n. Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come; make her laugh at that.¨
More links to "Ubi Sunt?" are: Carpe diem; Timor mortis conturbat me; Memento mori ; Vanitas ( Nabokovian themes, all of them and "Vanitas" figures prominently in Pale Fire's references to "Arcady" and "chained Dementia"...)
..............................................................................................................
* Mais où sont les neiges d'antan! François Villon Ballade des dames du temps jadis
** Cp. to Nabokov's lines about the "Swift" (often quoted in the list).
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/