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'.**
................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
* ...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.