JM: Interesting coincidence. the bookish bag by
Olympia Le-Tan reproduces the Olympia Press 'Lolita' cover...
Sandy P. Klein: Butterflies Made a Darwin Doubter of
Vladimir Nabokov - December 5, 2010 by Monika
Maeckle
http://texasbutterflyranch.wordpress.com/2010/12/05/butterflies-made-a-darwin-doubter-of-vladimir-nabokov/ "
The
celebrated Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov embodies the best of right
and left brain thinking. Known for his great novels (Lolita, Pale Fire, Pnin),
he was also a passionate student of butterflies...That a great mind like
Nabokov’s doubted Darwin and challenged evolution makes us take
pause. Surely it’s a testament to the infinite intrigue of
butterflies."
JM: I wish our Nab-list experts (biologists, engineers,
savants) would deign to opine on this "darwinian" issue, as it has
reached us poor lay-people, because new questions are always possible,
independently of their source. There must be more to Darwin than the
theory about the "survival of the fittest" and some other,
equally important, tenets of his evolutionary theory. Sweeping
statements, as those about "a great mind...makes us pause, etc etc," are
only journalistic stuff but...OK, let's pause. Did Nabokov in fact
"challenge evolution" (whatever M.Maeckle means by that)?
Take the new form of life that's just been announced, ie, bacteria
thriving on arsenium and not constituted by phosphorus. Doesn't
this illustrate how transient all classificatory systems must be, for we
need to keep on adapting and altering the "limits" we've set to
nature, and to our conscious minds?
Would Nabokov's intuitions about a "divine design" accept that
identifiable patterns evolve, together with our ability to detect
them, not only in our apprehension of the natural world but, also, in
relation to Art (ie, his finished novels will continue to develop,
thanks to their readers)?
G.S. Lipon: I assume that VN(Shade) has inverted the
sense of the original when he writes: Lafontaine
was wrong:/ Dead is the mandible, alive the song. - but I've
never been able to track down the original. Does anybody know anything about
this?
JM: This item has often been discussed in the Nab-List
(the ravenous ant and its mandibular claws. The ever-living song of the cicada,
like the waxwing's flying and dancing reflection on a window
pane...) Lafontaine ( La Fontaine, the fountain, written both ways by
Shade/Kinbote) inspired his verses in one of Aesop's fables.
In Shade's poem (lines 238/240) the couple finds "An empty emerald
case, squat and frog-eyed,/Hugging the trunk; and its companion piece,/ A gum-logged ant."
indicating that a living cicada is out of its case, but that the ant (its
companion piece, somehow) has perished... Here is what I found in the
internet: at www.bewilderingstories.com/issue209/cigale.html -
La Cigale et la fourmi
by Jean de La Fontaine
La cigale ayant chanté
Tout l'été,
Se trouva fort
dépourvue
Quand la bise fut venue :
Pas un seul petit morceau
De
mouche ou de vermisseau.
Elle alla crier famine
Chez la fourmi sa
voisine,
La priant de lui prêter
Quelque grain pour
subsister
Jusqu’à la saison nouvelle.
« Je vous paierai, lui
dit-elle,
Avant l’août, foi d’animal,
Intérêt et principal. »
La
fourmi n’est pas prêteuse :
C’est là son moindre défaut.
« Que
faisiez-vous au temps chaud ?
Dit-elle à cette emprunteuse.
— Nuit
et jour à tout venant
Je chantais, ne vous déplaise.
— Vous chantiez
? J’en suis fort aise :
Eh bien ! Dansez maintenant. » |
The Cricket and the Ant
translation by Don Webb
The cricket had sung her song
all summer long
but found her
victuals too few
when the north wind blew.
Nowhere could she
espy
a single morsel of worm or fly.
Her neighbor, the ant, might,
she thought, help her in her
plight,
and she begged her for a little grain
till summer would come
back again.
“By next August I’ll repay both
Interest and principal; animal’s
oath.”
Now, the ant may have a fault or two
But lending is not something
she will do.
She asked what the cricket did in summer.
“By night and day, to any comer
I sang whenever I had the
chance.”
“You sang, did you? That’s nice. Now
dance.” |
La Fontaine (1621-1695) put La Cigale et la fourmi first in the first
book of his Fables precisely because it was his personal favorite.
It and others in his twelve books of fables are a cultural treasure and have
been memorized by generations upon generations of school children. And well they
ought to be: two hundred years would pass till lyric poetry met the standard he
set.
The cigale is, strictly speaking, a cicada. I use “cricket” by poetic
license because the figure is more familiar to English-speaking readers.
La Fontaine’s fable is unique in that it does not end with the traditional
moral, which would sum up the meaning of the poem lest an inattentive listener
miss it. Rather, La Fontaine forces the readers to choose their own
interpretation: is the cricket an artist or a profligate wastrel? Is the ant
economical and prudent or a bourgeois philistine?
Walt Disney took his film sketch from Æsop’s dreary Fables,
where the self-styled thrifty and provident have no shred of mercy for their
neighbor, the singer. La Fontaine’s untraditional silence at the end of the poem
speaks volumes: things are not always as simple as we’re told or as we might
like to think.
La Cigale et la fourmi sets the style and tone for the rest of La
Fontaine’s fables. Sweet little poems about animals? No, they are tales of
terror about people living in the ancien régime — and today.
Copyright © 2006 by Don
Webb