Dear List,

 

Here are a few extracts from Simon Karlinski’s introduction to VN/EW  and from VN’s comments to Wilson about amphibracs (this only started to make sense to me following the examples by Stan,Gary and Steve in relation to anapests).

 

 

On page 24: “When he warned Nabokov…to avoid playing with words and making puns, something for which he took Nabokov to task also in his responses to the two of his books he most admired…Wilson could not have been aware that this was less a personal idiosyncrasy of Nabokov’s than an aspect of a widespread trend in the literature of Russian modernism. Interest in paronomasia, in discovering the hitherto unperceived relationships between the semantic and phonetic aspects of speech, pursued not for the purpose of playing with words but for discovering and revealing new meanings, was bacsic to the prose of Remisov, Bely and other Russian symbolists…”

 

On page 18: Despite their disagreement on Lenin and on Russian iambics, the letters for the early 1940s document the ever growing closeness..

 

page 19: “Because Nabokov felt more at home in the Russian literary tradition than in any other, he was apt to transpose the Western writers Wilson held up for his admiration into their Russian equivalents…”

 

page 21: There can hardly be a better illustration of the chronological disjunction between Russian and Western intellectual trends than this assumption of Wilson’s ( related to what he saw as ars gratia artis in VN)  

 

From letter 45 on we can follow bt the two friends an interesting (live, real) debate about Russian prosody.

 

Wilson wrote (letter 49) Our five English feet are these: trochee, iambus, anapest, dactyl, spondee.  We do not need any more.

 

Letter 50, VN writes: It took me ten minutes to compose the following little masterpiece consisting exclusively of 4^th paeons, a sequence that is seldom found even in Russian prosody:

The complicated variation

Of Lepidoptera affords

A fascinating occupation

For proletarians and lords.

 

He adds (but I’m unable to copy) “here is the same thing in Russian”…”The composing of the amphibraic poem proved more difficult” I HAD TO STRUGGLE AGAINST SLIPPING INTO ANAPEST JUST AS THERE ARE HORSES THAT SBIVAIUTSIA S RYSSI NA GALOP. ( SK:”break from a trot into a gallop”)*.

 

I hope to have encouraged List-members who haven’t yet read EW/VN letters annotated by Karlinsky to go check for themselves…  In a way it is “Nabokov in the making” (not really, but in part - and this is what Karlinsky teaches us to set into perspective)  

 

*- (“Amphibracs”, renamed “Exile” and published in The New Yorker, Oct.24, 1942. Adds Karlinsky in his note: Russian amphibrachs are a three syllable metrical unit in which the second syllable is stressed and the first and thir are not. This meter is similar to that of Anglo-/American limericks: The was a youg man from Nantucket… )

Transcription of “Exile”:                    

 

                   EXILE

 

He happens to be a French poet, that thin

book-carrying man with a bristly gray chin;

you meet him whenever you go

across the bright campus, past ivy-clad walls.

The wind, which is driving him mad (this recalls

a rather good line in Hugo,)

keeps making blue holes in the waterproof gloss

of college-bred poplars that rustle and toss

their slippery shadows at pied

young beauties, all legs, as they bicycle through

his shoulder, his armpit, his heart and the two

big books that are hurting his side.

 

Verlaine had been also a teacher somewhere

in England. And what about great Baudelaire,

alone in his Belgian hell?

This ivy resembles the eyes of the deaf.

Come, leaf, name a country beginning with “f,”

for instance, “forget” or “farewell.”

Thus dimly he muses and dreamily heeds

His eaves-dropping self as his body recedes,

Dissolving in sun-shattered shade.

L’envoi: Those poor chairs in the Bois, one of which,

Legs up, stuck half-drowned in the slime of a ditch

while others were grouped in a glade.

 

The New Yorker link: Click here: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1942/10/24/1942_10_24_026_TNY_CARDS_000190946