Subject
Notes, besides a reference to holograph and apograph [cf.20]
From
Date
Body
When there shall be nothing to research
But the notes of annoted notes,
....And only the devil shall look.
(Ezra Pound: The Logical Conclusion)
JM's OWN NOTES:
When Nabokov wrote his novels, even with his Verne-inventor's flair for futuresque gadgets briefly outlined in KQK, he didn't foresee digital copies with a search-button footman with quotes, notes and a dry martini in his round tray. A computer's mathematical template leads us to several short-cuts that reveal independent sub-plots in almost all VN's novels.
In Ada, the Ardis buttlers propagate from Bouteillan to Bout and, while we conjecture if we should pronounce the latter like a French "bouteille" or an English "bottle", we are taken on a trip with Mlle Ida and ashen Blanche to Eric's Floramores, before we reach an Olympic cup-bearer metamorphosed into a star.
In Pale Fire "notes" are connected to "notebook" and "annotations", also to "Foreword" [cf. 5]," Index", "commentator" [cf.6].
They also point to "underline", "write-down", "take heed", "reference", "remark", "keep record" ( [cf.21,cf.22], "written style" [cf.13,cf.18], musical notes [ cf.16,1 cf.17] and bank or promissory-notes [ Cf.33 ].
There are foot-notes and notes in CK's agenda ( annotated quotations by Dr.Johnson's Boswell [cf. 19], Judge Goldsworth [cf.12], André Gide [ cf.28] and even by Hazel [cf.21]...).
There are notes written in the margins [cf.32. Marginal notes got a special technical designation,but I forgot which].
Are there suicide-notes or ex-machina authorial notes? [cf.15, cf.36]
............................................................................................................................................................................................
1.The manuscript, mostly a Fair Copy, from which the present text has been faithfully printed [heark]...Canto Four was begun on July 19, and as already noted, the last third of its text (lines 949-999) is supplied by a Corrected Draft
2. my poor friend's own voice proclaim on the evening of July 21 the end, or almost the end, of his labors. (See my note to line 991.)
3. Never shall I forget how elated I was upon learning, as mentioned in a note my reader shall find [& the reader must find it alone and suspect that...see line quoted under 29], that the suburban house...
4. "At last presented credentials," as noted, a little ironically, in my agenda [ here Kinbote, true to "Bot", behaves like an ambassador]
5. My Foreword has been, I trust, not too skimpy. Other notes, arranged in a running commentary, will certainly satisfy the most voracious reader. Although those notes, in conformity with custom, come after the poem, the reader is advised to consult them first and then study the poem with their help...
6. Let me state that without my notes Shade's text simply has no human reality at all since the human reality of such a poem as his ...has to depend entirely on the reality of its author ...a reality that only my notes can provide. To this statement my dear poet would probably not have subscribed, but, for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.
7.How ludicrous these efforts to translate/ Into one's private tongue a public fate!/ Instead of poetry divinely terse,/ Disjointed notes, Insomnia's mean verse!/ Life is a message scribbled in the dark./ Anonymous.../
8. He was afraid he had mislaid her notes.
9. Man's life as commentary to abstruse/ 940 Unfinished poem. Note for further use./
10. Incidentally, it is curious to note that a crested bird called in Zemblan sampel ("silktail"), closely resembling a waxwing in shape and shade...
11. In the lovely line heading this comment the reader should note the last word....We should also note the cloak-and-dagger hint-glint ...in the rhyme.
12. perhaps the funniest note concerned the manipulations of the window curtains which had to be drawn in different ways at different hours to prevent the sun...
13. Wordsmith University to which I shall devote here only a few words partly because.., but mainly because I wish to convey, in making this reference to Wordsmith briefer than the notes on the Goldsworth and Shade houses, the fact that the college was considerably farther from them than they were from one another. It is probably the first time that the dull pain of distance is rendered through an effect of style and that a topographical idea finds its verbal expression in a series of foreshortened sentences
14. found in my coat pocket a brutal anonymous note saying: "You have hal.....s real bad, chum," meaning evidently "hallucinations"
15. there is only one allusion to my friend's masterpiece ...: "Just before our poet's untimely death he seems to have been working on an autobiographical poem." The circumstances of this death are completely distorted by the professor...culprit...without awaiting his trial - which unfortunately was not to take place in this world (see eventually my ultimate note)...the most striking characteristic of the little obituary is that it contains not one reference to the glorious friendship...
16. The King sat down at the Bechstein and...explained briefly the situation while taking tinkling notes with one hand: "Never heard of any passage,"...
17. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain by feigned remoteness in the windowpane...The exquisite melody of ...The repetition of that long-drawn note is saved from monotony by the subtle variation in line 132 where the assonance between its second word and the rhyme gives the ear a kind of languorous pleasure as would the echo of some half-remembered sorrowful song whose strain is more meaningful than its words [ far-far away Zembla, of course, for such feigned remoteness, cf. further number 31 and 32]
18. I have staggered the notes referring to him in such a fashion that the first (see note to line 17 where some of his other activities are adumbrated) is the vaguest while those that follow become gradually clearer as gradual Gradus approaches in space and time.
19. Line 172: In a black pocketbook that I fortunately have with me I find, jotted down, here and there, among various extracts that had happened to please me (a footnote from Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson, the inscriptions on the trees in Wordsmith's famous avenue, a quotation from St. Augustine, and so on), a few samples of John Shade's conversation which I had collected
20. Moreover, this is not a holograph but an apograph, made by a scribe for the printers - you will note that both mayors write the same hand."/ "How interesting," said Gradus noting it.
21. Jane allowed me to copy out some of Hazel's notes from a typescript based on jottings made on the spot...The notes continue for several pages but for obvious reasons I must renounce to give them verbatim in this commentary...words and meaningless syllables which she managed at last to collect came out in her dutiful notes as a short line of simple letter-groups. I transcribe: pada ata lane pad not ogo old wart alan ther tale feur far rant lant tal told ...
22. In her Remarks, the recorder states she had to recite the alphabet, or at least begin to recite it ...
23. Note how delicately at this point the television theme happens to merge with the girl's theme ...
24. ... it was idealized and stylized only in regard to the older woman; in regard to Queen Disa, as she was that afternoon on that blue terrace...a plain unretouched likeness. I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to poems, or anything at all.
25. Everything had changed, everybody was happy...and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available...;that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead...
26. debris: I wish to say something about an earlier note (to line 12). Conscience and scholarship have debated the question, and I now think that the two lines given in that note are distorted and tainted by wistful thinking. It is the only time in the course of the writing of these difficult comments, that I have tarried, in my distress and disappointment, on the brink of falsification. I must ask the reader to ignore those two lines (which, I am afraid, do not even scan properly). I could strike them out before publication but that would mean reworking the entire note, or at least a considerable part of it, and I have no time for such stupidities.
27. This describes rather well the "chance inn,"...where I am trying to coordinate these notes...
28. ...recalling another author, Gide the Lucid, who praises in his African notes so warmly the satiny skin of black imps.
29. I spent a couple of pleasant months visiting the libraries of New York and Washington, flew to Florida for Christmas, and when ready to start for my new Arcady deemed it nice and dutiful to send the poet a polite note congratulating him on his restored health and jokingly "warning" him that beginning with February he would have a very ardent admirer of his for neighbor. I never received any answer..
30. so the translator will have to put it into one of those footnotes that are the rogue's galleries of words.
31. "Strange, strange," said the German visitor, who by some quirk of alderwood ancestry had been alone to catch the eerie note that had throbbed by and was gone. Shade [smiling and massaging my knee]: "Kings do not die - they only disappear, eh, Charles?" [ cp. number 17]
32. Line 937: Old Zembla ...I am a weary and sad commentator today. Parallel to the left-hand side of this card (his seventy-sixth) the poet has written, on the eve of his death, a line (from Pope's Second Epistle of the Essay on Man) that he may have intended to cite in a footnote: At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where./ So this is all treacherous old Shade could say about Zembla - my Zembla? While shaving his stubble off? Strange, strange... [cp. 17]
33.The Helman brothers said they had assisted in the negotiations for the placement of a sizable note: $11,000,000, Decker Glass Manufacturing Company, Inc., note due July 1, 1979,"
34. the tantalizing tingles and jingles contributed a pleasant melancholy note to the rest of Dulwich Hill's evening sonorities [ here a reference to distant choir of children in Lolita?]
35. That moment of grateful grief you soon forgot, dear girl. But I assure you that I do not mean any harm, and that John Shade, perhaps, will not be too much annoyed by my notes, despite the intrigues and the dirt...
36. Yes, better stop. My notes and self are petering out. ...God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of two other characters in this work. I shall continue to exist...in the clash between the two figments...
37. Kinbote, Charles, Dr., an intimate friend of S, his literary adviser, editor and commentator; ... his trusting the reader enjoyed the note, 149 [ note 149, indeed!]
This listing is not complete...
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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
But the notes of annoted notes,
....And only the devil shall look.
(Ezra Pound: The Logical Conclusion)
JM's OWN NOTES:
When Nabokov wrote his novels, even with his Verne-inventor's flair for futuresque gadgets briefly outlined in KQK, he didn't foresee digital copies with a search-button footman with quotes, notes and a dry martini in his round tray. A computer's mathematical template leads us to several short-cuts that reveal independent sub-plots in almost all VN's novels.
In Ada, the Ardis buttlers propagate from Bouteillan to Bout and, while we conjecture if we should pronounce the latter like a French "bouteille" or an English "bottle", we are taken on a trip with Mlle Ida and ashen Blanche to Eric's Floramores, before we reach an Olympic cup-bearer metamorphosed into a star.
In Pale Fire "notes" are connected to "notebook" and "annotations", also to "Foreword" [cf. 5]," Index", "commentator" [cf.6].
They also point to "underline", "write-down", "take heed", "reference", "remark", "keep record" ( [cf.21,cf.22], "written style" [cf.13,cf.18], musical notes [ cf.16,1 cf.17] and bank or promissory-notes [ Cf.33 ].
There are foot-notes and notes in CK's agenda ( annotated quotations by Dr.Johnson's Boswell [cf. 19], Judge Goldsworth [cf.12], André Gide [ cf.28] and even by Hazel [cf.21]...).
There are notes written in the margins [cf.32. Marginal notes got a special technical designation,but I forgot which].
Are there suicide-notes or ex-machina authorial notes? [cf.15, cf.36]
............................................................................................................................................................................................
1.The manuscript, mostly a Fair Copy, from which the present text has been faithfully printed [heark]...Canto Four was begun on July 19, and as already noted, the last third of its text (lines 949-999) is supplied by a Corrected Draft
2. my poor friend's own voice proclaim on the evening of July 21 the end, or almost the end, of his labors. (See my note to line 991.)
3. Never shall I forget how elated I was upon learning, as mentioned in a note my reader shall find [& the reader must find it alone and suspect that...see line quoted under 29], that the suburban house...
4. "At last presented credentials," as noted, a little ironically, in my agenda [ here Kinbote, true to "Bot", behaves like an ambassador]
5. My Foreword has been, I trust, not too skimpy. Other notes, arranged in a running commentary, will certainly satisfy the most voracious reader. Although those notes, in conformity with custom, come after the poem, the reader is advised to consult them first and then study the poem with their help...
6. Let me state that without my notes Shade's text simply has no human reality at all since the human reality of such a poem as his ...has to depend entirely on the reality of its author ...a reality that only my notes can provide. To this statement my dear poet would probably not have subscribed, but, for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.
7.How ludicrous these efforts to translate/ Into one's private tongue a public fate!/ Instead of poetry divinely terse,/ Disjointed notes, Insomnia's mean verse!/ Life is a message scribbled in the dark./ Anonymous.../
8. He was afraid he had mislaid her notes.
9. Man's life as commentary to abstruse/ 940 Unfinished poem. Note for further use./
10. Incidentally, it is curious to note that a crested bird called in Zemblan sampel ("silktail"), closely resembling a waxwing in shape and shade...
11. In the lovely line heading this comment the reader should note the last word....We should also note the cloak-and-dagger hint-glint ...in the rhyme.
12. perhaps the funniest note concerned the manipulations of the window curtains which had to be drawn in different ways at different hours to prevent the sun...
13. Wordsmith University to which I shall devote here only a few words partly because.., but mainly because I wish to convey, in making this reference to Wordsmith briefer than the notes on the Goldsworth and Shade houses, the fact that the college was considerably farther from them than they were from one another. It is probably the first time that the dull pain of distance is rendered through an effect of style and that a topographical idea finds its verbal expression in a series of foreshortened sentences
14. found in my coat pocket a brutal anonymous note saying: "You have hal.....s real bad, chum," meaning evidently "hallucinations"
15. there is only one allusion to my friend's masterpiece ...: "Just before our poet's untimely death he seems to have been working on an autobiographical poem." The circumstances of this death are completely distorted by the professor...culprit...without awaiting his trial - which unfortunately was not to take place in this world (see eventually my ultimate note)...the most striking characteristic of the little obituary is that it contains not one reference to the glorious friendship...
16. The King sat down at the Bechstein and...explained briefly the situation while taking tinkling notes with one hand: "Never heard of any passage,"...
17. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain by feigned remoteness in the windowpane...The exquisite melody of ...The repetition of that long-drawn note is saved from monotony by the subtle variation in line 132 where the assonance between its second word and the rhyme gives the ear a kind of languorous pleasure as would the echo of some half-remembered sorrowful song whose strain is more meaningful than its words [ far-far away Zembla, of course, for such feigned remoteness, cf. further number 31 and 32]
18. I have staggered the notes referring to him in such a fashion that the first (see note to line 17 where some of his other activities are adumbrated) is the vaguest while those that follow become gradually clearer as gradual Gradus approaches in space and time.
19. Line 172: In a black pocketbook that I fortunately have with me I find, jotted down, here and there, among various extracts that had happened to please me (a footnote from Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson, the inscriptions on the trees in Wordsmith's famous avenue, a quotation from St. Augustine, and so on), a few samples of John Shade's conversation which I had collected
20. Moreover, this is not a holograph but an apograph, made by a scribe for the printers - you will note that both mayors write the same hand."/ "How interesting," said Gradus noting it.
21. Jane allowed me to copy out some of Hazel's notes from a typescript based on jottings made on the spot...The notes continue for several pages but for obvious reasons I must renounce to give them verbatim in this commentary...words and meaningless syllables which she managed at last to collect came out in her dutiful notes as a short line of simple letter-groups. I transcribe: pada ata lane pad not ogo old wart alan ther tale feur far rant lant tal told ...
22. In her Remarks, the recorder states she had to recite the alphabet, or at least begin to recite it ...
23. Note how delicately at this point the television theme happens to merge with the girl's theme ...
24. ... it was idealized and stylized only in regard to the older woman; in regard to Queen Disa, as she was that afternoon on that blue terrace...a plain unretouched likeness. I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to poems, or anything at all.
25. Everything had changed, everybody was happy...and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available...;that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead...
26. debris: I wish to say something about an earlier note (to line 12). Conscience and scholarship have debated the question, and I now think that the two lines given in that note are distorted and tainted by wistful thinking. It is the only time in the course of the writing of these difficult comments, that I have tarried, in my distress and disappointment, on the brink of falsification. I must ask the reader to ignore those two lines (which, I am afraid, do not even scan properly). I could strike them out before publication but that would mean reworking the entire note, or at least a considerable part of it, and I have no time for such stupidities.
27. This describes rather well the "chance inn,"...where I am trying to coordinate these notes...
28. ...recalling another author, Gide the Lucid, who praises in his African notes so warmly the satiny skin of black imps.
29. I spent a couple of pleasant months visiting the libraries of New York and Washington, flew to Florida for Christmas, and when ready to start for my new Arcady deemed it nice and dutiful to send the poet a polite note congratulating him on his restored health and jokingly "warning" him that beginning with February he would have a very ardent admirer of his for neighbor. I never received any answer..
30. so the translator will have to put it into one of those footnotes that are the rogue's galleries of words.
31. "Strange, strange," said the German visitor, who by some quirk of alderwood ancestry had been alone to catch the eerie note that had throbbed by and was gone. Shade [smiling and massaging my knee]: "Kings do not die - they only disappear, eh, Charles?" [ cp. number 17]
32. Line 937: Old Zembla ...I am a weary and sad commentator today. Parallel to the left-hand side of this card (his seventy-sixth) the poet has written, on the eve of his death, a line (from Pope's Second Epistle of the Essay on Man) that he may have intended to cite in a footnote: At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where./ So this is all treacherous old Shade could say about Zembla - my Zembla? While shaving his stubble off? Strange, strange... [cp. 17]
33.The Helman brothers said they had assisted in the negotiations for the placement of a sizable note: $11,000,000, Decker Glass Manufacturing Company, Inc., note due July 1, 1979,"
34. the tantalizing tingles and jingles contributed a pleasant melancholy note to the rest of Dulwich Hill's evening sonorities [ here a reference to distant choir of children in Lolita?]
35. That moment of grateful grief you soon forgot, dear girl. But I assure you that I do not mean any harm, and that John Shade, perhaps, will not be too much annoyed by my notes, despite the intrigues and the dirt...
36. Yes, better stop. My notes and self are petering out. ...God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of two other characters in this work. I shall continue to exist...in the clash between the two figments...
37. Kinbote, Charles, Dr., an intimate friend of S, his literary adviser, editor and commentator; ... his trusting the reader enjoyed the note, 149 [ note 149, indeed!]
This listing is not complete...
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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