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madness and avian theme in Pale Fire
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Dear Carolyn and all,
you may find this interesting:
In the last, fifth, stanza of The Lord Forbid my Going Mad (1833), the poem I cited in my previous posting,* Pushkin mentions a nightingale:
And I shall hear at night neither the brilliant
voice of the nightingale,
nor the dense forest's murmur,
but my companions' cries,
the oaths of the night wardens,
shrill sounds, the clink of chains.
In the Commentary to his Translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (note to Seven:VI:5-6; vol. 3, p. 74 of the Princeton/Bollingen edition), Nabokov (the above translation from Pushkin is his) says that the epithet "brilliant" (yarkiy) is Pushkin's special code in which he signals his awareness of Batyushkov's madness. The same epithet, unusual in the Russian poetry for the nightingale, was used by Batyushkov in his elegy The Last Spring (1815): "The brilliant voice of Philomela / has charmed the gloomy pinewood".
Let's now switch from Pushkin to Tyutchev, author of the short poem Bezumie ("Madness", 1830). In his eight-line poem Vecher mglistyi i nenastnyi ("A misty, foul-weathered evening", written in the 1830s) Tyutchev speaks of the shock he expierenced when hearing the skylark, a bird that sings (unlike most other birds, while soaring above the ground) before noon, at an unusually late hour. The bird's voice stunned the poet's soul like a horrible laughter of madness: Kak bezum'ya smekh uzhasnyi / On vsyu dushu mne potryas.
Let's now switch from Russia to England ("where poets flew the highest", according to Shade; see Kinbote's note to l. 922). To a Skylark ("Hail to thee, blithe Spirit, / Bird thou never wert...") is the famous poem (1820) by P. B. Shelley. Its last stanza reads:
Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then - as I am listening now.
"Shelley's incandescent soul" is mentioned in Shade's poem The Nature of Electricity (see Kinbote's note to l. 347). On the other hand, the title of one of Shades' books of poetry, Hebe's Cup, seems to refer to the last stanza of Tyutchev's poem Vesennyaya groza ("The Spring Thunderstorm", 1828) that mentions yet a third bird, the eagle:
You'd say: the frivolous Hebe,
feeding Zeus' eagle,
has spilled on Earth, laughing,
the thunder-boiling cup.
Add to this that Shade's parents were ornithologists, that his wife's maiden name is Irondell (which comes, according to Kinbote, from hirondelle, French for "swallow") and that his last unfinished long poem begins with an avian image ("I was the shadow of the waxwing").
I could say more, but the above would suffice for now .
*the poem's second line, "Net, legche posokh i suma", can be paraphrased, to rhyme with the first, as "a beggar's lot is not as bad" (suma, bag, being a traditional attribute of a [Russian] beggar; khodit' s sumoy means "to beg, go a-begging"). As a next step, one is tempted to substitute "exile" for "beggar". Then we'll have: "The Lord, forbid my going mad / an exile's lot is not as bad".
Alexey Sklyarenko
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you may find this interesting:
In the last, fifth, stanza of The Lord Forbid my Going Mad (1833), the poem I cited in my previous posting,* Pushkin mentions a nightingale:
And I shall hear at night neither the brilliant
voice of the nightingale,
nor the dense forest's murmur,
but my companions' cries,
the oaths of the night wardens,
shrill sounds, the clink of chains.
In the Commentary to his Translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (note to Seven:VI:5-6; vol. 3, p. 74 of the Princeton/Bollingen edition), Nabokov (the above translation from Pushkin is his) says that the epithet "brilliant" (yarkiy) is Pushkin's special code in which he signals his awareness of Batyushkov's madness. The same epithet, unusual in the Russian poetry for the nightingale, was used by Batyushkov in his elegy The Last Spring (1815): "The brilliant voice of Philomela / has charmed the gloomy pinewood".
Let's now switch from Pushkin to Tyutchev, author of the short poem Bezumie ("Madness", 1830). In his eight-line poem Vecher mglistyi i nenastnyi ("A misty, foul-weathered evening", written in the 1830s) Tyutchev speaks of the shock he expierenced when hearing the skylark, a bird that sings (unlike most other birds, while soaring above the ground) before noon, at an unusually late hour. The bird's voice stunned the poet's soul like a horrible laughter of madness: Kak bezum'ya smekh uzhasnyi / On vsyu dushu mne potryas.
Let's now switch from Russia to England ("where poets flew the highest", according to Shade; see Kinbote's note to l. 922). To a Skylark ("Hail to thee, blithe Spirit, / Bird thou never wert...") is the famous poem (1820) by P. B. Shelley. Its last stanza reads:
Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then - as I am listening now.
"Shelley's incandescent soul" is mentioned in Shade's poem The Nature of Electricity (see Kinbote's note to l. 347). On the other hand, the title of one of Shades' books of poetry, Hebe's Cup, seems to refer to the last stanza of Tyutchev's poem Vesennyaya groza ("The Spring Thunderstorm", 1828) that mentions yet a third bird, the eagle:
You'd say: the frivolous Hebe,
feeding Zeus' eagle,
has spilled on Earth, laughing,
the thunder-boiling cup.
Add to this that Shade's parents were ornithologists, that his wife's maiden name is Irondell (which comes, according to Kinbote, from hirondelle, French for "swallow") and that his last unfinished long poem begins with an avian image ("I was the shadow of the waxwing").
I could say more, but the above would suffice for now .
*the poem's second line, "Net, legche posokh i suma", can be paraphrased, to rhyme with the first, as "a beggar's lot is not as bad" (suma, bag, being a traditional attribute of a [Russian] beggar; khodit' s sumoy means "to beg, go a-begging"). As a next step, one is tempted to substitute "exile" for "beggar". Then we'll have: "The Lord, forbid my going mad / an exile's lot is not as bad".
Alexey Sklyarenko
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/