Subject
Nabokoviana
Date
Body
EDITOR'S NOTE: Until Suellen Stringer-Hye is able to resume her monthly
VNCollations, NABOKV-L will be dependant upon its subscribers to submit
VN miscellany. I off er the following two items. DBJ
1) Reagan's biographer, Edmund Morris, offers a moving meditation on
character, handwriting, and history arising from the former President's
handwritten public letter about his Alzheimer's disease. Speaking of the
impact of handwritten vs. typed or electronic texts, he cites the Berg VN
materials as an example. Doubting that personal texts on floppy disks will
ever be prized as artifacts, he continues:
"Or, if they [are], I doubt that they will attract the sort of awe
accorded some manuscripts of Vladimir Nabokov, which the New York Public
Library's Berg Collection put on display last spring. At least two of
these, delineated in colored pencil, were more design than script. One was
a diagrammatic analysis of metrical variations in a poem by Vasily
Zhukovsky, structured rather like a stained-glass window. Units of
scansion were represented by variously colored lozenges, and ruled
ligatures ran with and contrary to the rhythms, in triangular and
rectangular patterns. Nearby lay Nabokov's study of some butterfly wing
configurations, just as careful, just as chromatic, generically different,
yet spiritually the same--products of a genius able to comprehend both
extremes of the Great Chain of Being, and to balance them on the point of
his pen. Edmund Morris, "This Living Hand," THE NEW YORKER, Jan. 16,
1995, pp.67-68.
2) The current issue of POETRY (Feb. 1995) has a poem by Jane Kenyon,
"Reading Aloud to My Father" (p. 287). The first stanza:
"I chose the book haphazard
from the shelf, but with Nabokov's first
sentence I knew it wasn't the thing
to read to a dying man:
'The cradle rocks above an abyss,' it began,...
Kenyon goes on to develop (and disagree) with Nabokov's lines in the
following stanzas.
Off hand, I can think of two other poems that derive from VN's SPEAK,
MEMORY. If you find examples of your own, please send them to NABOKV-L.
Don Johnson, Editor
VNCollations, NABOKV-L will be dependant upon its subscribers to submit
VN miscellany. I off er the following two items. DBJ
1) Reagan's biographer, Edmund Morris, offers a moving meditation on
character, handwriting, and history arising from the former President's
handwritten public letter about his Alzheimer's disease. Speaking of the
impact of handwritten vs. typed or electronic texts, he cites the Berg VN
materials as an example. Doubting that personal texts on floppy disks will
ever be prized as artifacts, he continues:
"Or, if they [are], I doubt that they will attract the sort of awe
accorded some manuscripts of Vladimir Nabokov, which the New York Public
Library's Berg Collection put on display last spring. At least two of
these, delineated in colored pencil, were more design than script. One was
a diagrammatic analysis of metrical variations in a poem by Vasily
Zhukovsky, structured rather like a stained-glass window. Units of
scansion were represented by variously colored lozenges, and ruled
ligatures ran with and contrary to the rhythms, in triangular and
rectangular patterns. Nearby lay Nabokov's study of some butterfly wing
configurations, just as careful, just as chromatic, generically different,
yet spiritually the same--products of a genius able to comprehend both
extremes of the Great Chain of Being, and to balance them on the point of
his pen. Edmund Morris, "This Living Hand," THE NEW YORKER, Jan. 16,
1995, pp.67-68.
2) The current issue of POETRY (Feb. 1995) has a poem by Jane Kenyon,
"Reading Aloud to My Father" (p. 287). The first stanza:
"I chose the book haphazard
from the shelf, but with Nabokov's first
sentence I knew it wasn't the thing
to read to a dying man:
'The cradle rocks above an abyss,' it began,...
Kenyon goes on to develop (and disagree) with Nabokov's lines in the
following stanzas.
Off hand, I can think of two other poems that derive from VN's SPEAK,
MEMORY. If you find examples of your own, please send them to NABOKV-L.
Don Johnson, Editor