Fran Assa: Sybil Shade could be Vladimir's
pseudonym. But consider the possibility of it being Vera's
translation. Are there any handwritten versions in existence? My
wild stab in the dark is due to having always pictured the Sybil of Pale Fire as
Vera, for some reason.
JM (after-thoughts): The collection of
poems, which VN(Vera?) translated refers to lines by
Virgil, later taken up by Dante - and by Thomas Hardy!!!
Perhaps Nabokov signed "Sybil Shade" to add an extra-novel cue, or plum.
In this case we would move from Henri Régnier's "Vestigia Flammae", that
indicate Dido's words: "adgnosco veteris vestigia flammae,"
towards Dante, who returns to them when his guide, Virgil,
passes him over to Beatrice: « conosco i segni de l'antica fiamma! »
(Purgatorio, XXX, 48).
Here we encounter a transition from the shades of the underworld
into purgatory ( that's where I suppose Kinbote found himself while writing
his notes).
As we all know, Hardy's lines concerning stillicide are found in "Friends
Beyond" ( and describe a fantasy about IPH's hereafter):
"They’ve a way of whispering to me — /fellow-wight who yet abide — /In the muted,
measured note/Of a ripple under archways,/ or one cave's
stillide."*
The "cave" theme is picked up later, in Hardy's lines on "De Profundis,
III" where he mentions a Psalm (119) and "cedar".
"Eheu mihi,
quia incolatus meus prolongatus est! Habitavi cum
habitantibus Cedar; multum
incola fuit aninia mea."--Ps. cxix.
A Bible translation
site offered the translation:
| 5 Heu mihi quia incolatus meus prolongatus est
habitavi cum habitationibus Cedar |
5 Woe is me, that my sojourning is prolonged! I
have dwelt with the inhabitants of cedar: |
| 6 Multum incola fuit anima mea |
6 My soul hath been long a
sojourner. |
I thought of connecting "Friends Beyond" and "De Profundis" to reach the
"Cedarn Cave" not only because of the theme about death and mourning, exile and
a hereafter, ever present in Kinbote's commentary, but mainly because two
successive, but different entries in Kinbote's notes, are applicable
to the same set of Shadian verses and are more connected than one may
initially surmise.
I mean, Lines 34-35: Stilettos of a frozen
stillicide ( where he mentions "a succession
of drops falling from the eaves, eavesdrop, cavesdrop." and his
recollection of encountering the word "for the first
time in a poem by Thomas Hardy. The bright frost has eternalized the bright
eavesdrop." -- and Lines 39-40: Was close my eyes, etc., when Kinbote presents a
"variant reading": "and
home would haste my
thieves,/ The sun with stolen ice, the moon with
leaves," which he connects to Timon of Athens (Act IV, Scene 3) and
adds: " Having no library in the desolate log cabin
where I live like Timon in his cave..." ( at that time he didn't
realize the reference in T of A for Shade's choice of Pale Fire's title...)
I
cannot shake off the feeling, now, that inspite of PF's tragicomic aspects, the
book hints at iniciatic rites of passage. In this case, VN's choice to
translate H.Régnier "Vestigia Flammae", right after finishing his novel
"Pale Fire," (1962) could indicate a serendipitous find, something
which might enrich the already established wide net of allusions in PF and
Shade's conjectures of eternal cypress
walks...
Nevertheless, Nabokov changed the title of Régnier's poem in his
translation. In the French we find the curious little "ode": an "Odelette". In
Nabokov's translation we get "Passing of Youth". His choice moves from Virgil's
"rekindled fires of love" to a lamentation on what has been lost through
the passage of time.
btw: It's unnecessary to remember fellow List-participants that, were
it not for those novel "search engines" ( would Nabokov have foreseen such
things, or did he trust some of his reader's extensive and true
scholarship?) I would never have connected Virgil, Dante, Hardy and recover
their lines.
........................................................................................................
* internet source: The wordis not one of that melancholy collection ending in
-cide that refers to an act of killing or something that kills
(suicide, pesticide), since it comes from a different Latin verb,
caedere, to fall. The first part is from Latin stilla, a drop; the
English word is a reformulation of Latin stillicidium, falling drops. The
Latin word could mean in particular the drip of rain from the eaves of a house,
which is exactly equivalent to an ancient meaning of our eavesdrop. This
meaning led to the main historical sense of the word, a legal term in Scots
law...It’s not a word much encountered these days. When it appears it has the
sense of falling water, not the legal one.