Dear Suellen, Matt, Fran, List...
In BS, as Matt quoted, there are lines extracted
from Melville's Moby Dick. Its preceding lines
are:
"He looked up various odds and ends [...] for an
essay which he [...] would never write because by now he had forgotten its
leading idea, its secret combination [...] A newspaper clipping mentioned that
the State Entomologist had retired to become
Adviser on Shade Trees" ( Nabokov, while writing BS, was working at the
Harvard " laboratorial paradise")..."[...] and one
wondered whether this was not some dainty oriental euphemism for death. On the
next slip of paper he had transcribed passages from a famous American poem (...)
After that we read ...."the delicious death of an Ohio honey hunter (for my humour's sake I
shall preserve the style in which I once narrated it at Thula to a lounging
circle of my Russian friends)."
Bend Sinister's "famous American
poem" mentions "The ship casts off her
cables"... "these bashful bears/ These timid warrior
whalemen...", extracted from Melville's book by means of
a curious selection of items.
Borges, in
his Lectures on English Literature, focuses on the kenningar
to study metaphors and alliteration used as substitutes for rhyme and
scansion. Many words in them derived from variations on "whaling"
to constitute fixed
metaphors.
The sea
was described, and then regularly named, "the way of the
whale".
Borges (as my only source on these matters) explains the name
of sea-borne "Beowulf"as having originated from
another metaphor: a "bee-wolf", ie,a
bear.
The epic, itself, mingles verses from more ancient
Virgil (The Eneid) thereby associating old Germanic
wyrd legends to Latin syntaxic norms.*
Do you think VN might have added, to the Melville items in
BS, allusions to ancient works (not a papyrus and
not oriental at all as he indicates), also to ancient metaphoric and
rythmic procedures - like those that were described later in P.F -
namely, the Edda, Beowolf, Bede's
manuscripts?
Or would the Ohio "honey hunter" refer only "honey" to
"mel" in "Mel-ville"?
btw:Matt, did you ever consider, in Pale Fire, VN's references to
"Monday" or "Sunday" ( Wednesday comes from Woden, or Odin), as some sort of
indication of Kinbote or Shade (following your idea about
a lunatic CK and sunny JS)?
JM
* Perhaps you will be interested in an Oratorio,
written in the early sixties, titled "Jonah". It was composed by Richard
Dirksen ( Washington,DC).
Its libretto mingles lines
from Melville and the Bible (the book of Jonah) and it offers a
musical closure to one that has been left in suspension by VN: "the ship
casts off her cables.../ all careening/ all careening glides to
the sea". There
are other rythmic features from Melville highlighted by Dirksen, such
as "I saw the opening maws of hell" (which I somehow linked to Pale
Fire's reference to "live is the song", from La
Fontaine's "cigales/seagulls"...)
Concerning what one "sees" or
"hears", in modern or ancient poetry, there was something else that
occurred to me. Recently I saw the picture of a Damselfly and the
photographer had captured the blurring effect of its white-spotted beating
wings. These then formed a very clear and elegant white arc
encircling them and belonging to their gestalt. I wondered if insects saw images like we do, when we visually
"stop" them, or if they saw them closer to that which this "slow"
camera showed, if they would react only to the actual spots on a
wing, or also to their residues when captured in motion while
performing, up-to-now unseen,
designs.
.......................................................................................................................
Date:
Tue, 16 Dec 2008 09:55:06
-0600
From: "Stringer-Hye,
Suellen"
Subject: Re: QUERY: Bend Sinister
poem?
If anyone really cares, I actually tracked the lines down to
their
sources in MD at one time for an article I was writing about
Melville
and VN...
---Suellen
Matthew Roth
Tuesday,
December 16, 2008 9:34 AM
[NABOKV-L] QUERY: Bend Sinister poem?
Tim,
Perhaps you are thinking of the Zemblan translation of T of A? That's
in
Kinbote's note to line 39. If it's really BS you mean, are you
thinking
of the poem in chapter 12, which VN made by combining lines from
Moby
Dick?
A curious sight--these bashful bears
These timid warrior
whalemen
And now the time of the tide has come;
The ship casts off her
cables
It is not shown on any map;
True places never are
This lovely
light, it lights not me;
All loveliness is
anguish--
MR
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