Subject
T.S.Eliot's _The Waste Land_ notes & the PLAE FIRE notes?(fwd)
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From: Wayne Daniels <wdaniels@gwmail.mtrl.toronto.on.ca>
Louis Menand, in his review of _The Waste Land, the 75th anniversary
edition_ (_NYR_, May 15), writing about the fussy, but probably
unserious notes Eliot added to the poem, remarks,
They don't elucidate the poem; they complicate it, by adding onto the
poetic text a Kinbote-ish "interpretation." And they raise again the
question of whose voice we are hearing when we read a poem. Who is
this pompous person who condescendingly informs us that a translation
of _Brihadaranyaka_ can be found in Deussen's _Sechzig Upanishads des
Veda_, p. 489, and that the hermit-thrush referred to in Oart V is
_Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, whose "'water-dripping song' is justly
celebrated"? This is not the same person who wrote
On Margate sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
Except, of course, it is.
End quote. This set me to wondering whether anyone has ever suggested
that Nabokov had _The Wasteland_ in mind when he wrote _Pale Fire_,
or at any rate its frame-breaking notes, which are and are not part
of the work.
Wayne Daniels
Metro Toronto Reference Library
wdaniels@gwmail.mtrl.toronto.on.ca
Louis Menand, in his review of _The Waste Land, the 75th anniversary
edition_ (_NYR_, May 15), writing about the fussy, but probably
unserious notes Eliot added to the poem, remarks,
They don't elucidate the poem; they complicate it, by adding onto the
poetic text a Kinbote-ish "interpretation." And they raise again the
question of whose voice we are hearing when we read a poem. Who is
this pompous person who condescendingly informs us that a translation
of _Brihadaranyaka_ can be found in Deussen's _Sechzig Upanishads des
Veda_, p. 489, and that the hermit-thrush referred to in Oart V is
_Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, whose "'water-dripping song' is justly
celebrated"? This is not the same person who wrote
On Margate sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
Except, of course, it is.
End quote. This set me to wondering whether anyone has ever suggested
that Nabokov had _The Wasteland_ in mind when he wrote _Pale Fire_,
or at any rate its frame-breaking notes, which are and are not part
of the work.
Wayne Daniels
Metro Toronto Reference Library
wdaniels@gwmail.mtrl.toronto.on.ca