Subject
Les Fenetres, self-pity and High Ideals
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Dear List,
Enchanting fluency and rich cadence in R.S.Gwynn translation of Mallarmé's "Les Fenetres." - marvellous!
( I'm glad I'm not an expert critic so I feel free to lavish praises with the utmost sincerity) .
Reaching Mallarmé's last lines: And the rank vomit of stupidity/ Stops up my nose before the azure sky./ Is there a way for Me, who know such sorrow, / To break this glass soiled by humanity,/To fly on featherless wings into tomorrow--/ Risking the plunge into Eternity? ...
I cannot find the least similarity, in spirit, between this poem and Shade's narcisism and self-pity.
VN's poem seems to me, more and more, as a cruel satire.
If the waxwing-poet smashed against a "High Azure", it was because he followed "false ideals".
Did he achieve a spiritual transformation to finally risk a plunge into Eternity, with his dead face turned towards the azure, or was it - again - a trick played on us by Kinbote?
Twisting the subject a little, and following certain developments in LATH after special avowals which might be fitting to bring up now:
"Throughout adolescence I read, in pairs, and both with the same rich thrill, Othello and Onegin, Tyutchev and Tennyson, Browning and Blok...my domestic tongue remained English, while the body of my own Russian works started to grow and was soon to disorb my household gods... the question confronting me in Paris...could I fight off the formula and rip up the ready-made, and switch from my glorious self-developed Russian, not to the dead leaden English of the high seas with dummies in sailor suits, but an English I alone would be responsible for, in all its new ripples and changing light?
... Russian and English had existed for years in my mind as two worlds detached from one another...I was acutely aware of the syntactic gulf separating their sentence structures. I feared (unreasonably, as was to transpire eventually) that my allegiance to Russian grammar might interfere with an apostatical courtship. Take tenses: how different their elaborate and strict minuet in English from the free and fluid interplay between the present and the past in their Russian counterpart ...The fantastic number of natural-looking nouns that the British and the Americans apply in lovely technical senses to very specific objects also distressed me...
The traversal of my particular bridge ended, weeks after landing... The neuralgia in my right forearm was a gray adumbration compared to the solid black headache that no pill could pierce."
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Enchanting fluency and rich cadence in R.S.Gwynn translation of Mallarmé's "Les Fenetres." - marvellous!
( I'm glad I'm not an expert critic so I feel free to lavish praises with the utmost sincerity) .
Reaching Mallarmé's last lines: And the rank vomit of stupidity/ Stops up my nose before the azure sky./ Is there a way for Me, who know such sorrow, / To break this glass soiled by humanity,/To fly on featherless wings into tomorrow--/ Risking the plunge into Eternity? ...
I cannot find the least similarity, in spirit, between this poem and Shade's narcisism and self-pity.
VN's poem seems to me, more and more, as a cruel satire.
If the waxwing-poet smashed against a "High Azure", it was because he followed "false ideals".
Did he achieve a spiritual transformation to finally risk a plunge into Eternity, with his dead face turned towards the azure, or was it - again - a trick played on us by Kinbote?
Twisting the subject a little, and following certain developments in LATH after special avowals which might be fitting to bring up now:
"Throughout adolescence I read, in pairs, and both with the same rich thrill, Othello and Onegin, Tyutchev and Tennyson, Browning and Blok...my domestic tongue remained English, while the body of my own Russian works started to grow and was soon to disorb my household gods... the question confronting me in Paris...could I fight off the formula and rip up the ready-made, and switch from my glorious self-developed Russian, not to the dead leaden English of the high seas with dummies in sailor suits, but an English I alone would be responsible for, in all its new ripples and changing light?
... Russian and English had existed for years in my mind as two worlds detached from one another...I was acutely aware of the syntactic gulf separating their sentence structures. I feared (unreasonably, as was to transpire eventually) that my allegiance to Russian grammar might interfere with an apostatical courtship. Take tenses: how different their elaborate and strict minuet in English from the free and fluid interplay between the present and the past in their Russian counterpart ...The fantastic number of natural-looking nouns that the British and the Americans apply in lovely technical senses to very specific objects also distressed me...
The traversal of my particular bridge ended, weeks after landing... The neuralgia in my right forearm was a gray adumbration compared to the solid black headache that no pill could pierce."
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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