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[NABOKOV-L] Another "aunt" and La Belle Dame Sans Merci
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While perusing Pale Fire I noticed Kinbote's mention to a "romaunt". Checking on the internet I found out that, among others, there was a reference to Chaucer's translation of "The Romaunt of the Rose" containing lines on courtly love, codes for access to a lady and chivalry feats, among the works by Boethius* and the Gesta Romanorum.
Pale Fire, CK note to line 1000: "We know how firmly, how stupidly I believed that Shade was composing a poem, a kind of romaunt, about the King of Zembla. We have been prepared for the horrible disappointment in store for me. Oh, I did not expect him to devote himself completely to that theme! It might have been blended of course with some of his own life stuff and sundry Americana..."
I cannot access now Priscilla Meyer's work on Pale Fire, but she certainly mentions this "romaunt" in her thorough examination of ancient literature in connection to VN's "Pale Fire", but I could get another important text by Meyer, available through Cycnus.
My chief intention had been to make a playful reference to our theme related to "aunts". It would help me to introduce a "side-find", in connection to TRLSK , its knights and Malory's "Le Morte D'Arthur". Namely the lines on "La Belle Dame sans Merci" which, until now, I'd obviously only related to John Keats.
Being unfamiliar with an English Lit.curriculum... here I stop and summon help to complete or to dispute these accidental links.
TRLSK: "he did his best to shock people with his monstrous mass of otiose words [...] his main output seems now so nugatory, so false, so old-fashioned (super-modern things have a queer knack of dating much faster than others) that his true value is only remembered by a few scholars who admire the magnificent translations of English poems made by him at the very outset of his literary career - one of these at least being a very miracle of verbal transfusion: his Russian rendering of Keats's 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'.**
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* ...The allegorising turn is no less an instance of their affectation on writing on this subject in which the poet, under the agency of allegorical personages, displays the gradual approaches and impediments to fruition, and introduces a regular disputation conducted with much formality between Reason
and a lover. [The later prose work called the "Testament of Love" (which has been miftakenly attributed to Chaucer), is also formed on this philosophy of gallantry. It is a lover's parody of the work of Boethius De Consolatione... [The] poem called La Belle Dame sans Mercy - and [the] Assembly of Ladies... are from the same school( History of English Poetry from the Twelfth to the Close of the Sixteenth Century, by THOMAS WARTON, B.D.,1871, available on-line).
**- Priscilla Meyer mentions the poem (cf.2006, Cycnus) and John Keats's authorship through the "otiose, old-fashioned Alexis Pan", in TRLSK .
Quoting her: "That Sebastian will be the victim of such an enchanter is foretold[...] by his sudden (temporary) disappearance Eastward with Alexis Pan at age seventeen[...] Alexis Pan's best work is a translation into Russian of Keats' "La belle dame sans merci"[...], in which a faery Lady of the Meads seduces a knight [...] Sebastian becomes "[a] thin mournful and silent figure" (181); in Keats' words, a "knight. alone and palely loitering," "so haggard and so woe begone," forever "in thrall" to her enchantment. Like Keats' poem, Sebastian himself has been translated from his English world into his Russian one by the Russian siren, the "Rechnoy woman,"[...]Volume 24 n°1 :Vladimir Nabokov, Annotating vs Interpreting Nabokov| Actes du colloque , Nice 21-22-23 juin 2006. Priscilla Meyer.
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Pale Fire, CK note to line 1000: "We know how firmly, how stupidly I believed that Shade was composing a poem, a kind of romaunt, about the King of Zembla. We have been prepared for the horrible disappointment in store for me. Oh, I did not expect him to devote himself completely to that theme! It might have been blended of course with some of his own life stuff and sundry Americana..."
I cannot access now Priscilla Meyer's work on Pale Fire, but she certainly mentions this "romaunt" in her thorough examination of ancient literature in connection to VN's "Pale Fire", but I could get another important text by Meyer, available through Cycnus.
My chief intention had been to make a playful reference to our theme related to "aunts". It would help me to introduce a "side-find", in connection to TRLSK , its knights and Malory's "Le Morte D'Arthur". Namely the lines on "La Belle Dame sans Merci" which, until now, I'd obviously only related to John Keats.
Being unfamiliar with an English Lit.curriculum... here I stop and summon help to complete or to dispute these accidental links.
TRLSK: "he did his best to shock people with his monstrous mass of otiose words [...] his main output seems now so nugatory, so false, so old-fashioned (super-modern things have a queer knack of dating much faster than others) that his true value is only remembered by a few scholars who admire the magnificent translations of English poems made by him at the very outset of his literary career - one of these at least being a very miracle of verbal transfusion: his Russian rendering of Keats's 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'.**
................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
* ...The allegorising turn is no less an instance of their affectation on writing on this subject in which the poet, under the agency of allegorical personages, displays the gradual approaches and impediments to fruition, and introduces a regular disputation conducted with much formality between Reason
and a lover. [The later prose work called the "Testament of Love" (which has been miftakenly attributed to Chaucer), is also formed on this philosophy of gallantry. It is a lover's parody of the work of Boethius De Consolatione... [The] poem called La Belle Dame sans Mercy - and [the] Assembly of Ladies... are from the same school( History of English Poetry from the Twelfth to the Close of the Sixteenth Century, by THOMAS WARTON, B.D.,1871, available on-line).
**- Priscilla Meyer mentions the poem (cf.2006, Cycnus) and John Keats's authorship through the "otiose, old-fashioned Alexis Pan", in TRLSK .
Quoting her: "That Sebastian will be the victim of such an enchanter is foretold[...] by his sudden (temporary) disappearance Eastward with Alexis Pan at age seventeen[...] Alexis Pan's best work is a translation into Russian of Keats' "La belle dame sans merci"[...], in which a faery Lady of the Meads seduces a knight [...] Sebastian becomes "[a] thin mournful and silent figure" (181); in Keats' words, a "knight. alone and palely loitering," "so haggard and so woe begone," forever "in thrall" to her enchantment. Like Keats' poem, Sebastian himself has been translated from his English world into his Russian one by the Russian siren, the "Rechnoy woman,"[...]Volume 24 n°1 :Vladimir Nabokov, Annotating vs Interpreting Nabokov| Actes du colloque , Nice 21-22-23 juin 2006. Priscilla Meyer.
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/