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."