Subject
Re: [Fwd: A stand-alone edition of the poem "Pale Fire" may cause
controversy/p.s.]
controversy/p.s.]
From
Date
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Ron Rosenbaum: This fall will see a stand-alone edition of the poem "Pale Fire" (edited with an essay by Brian Boyd and blesssed apparently by Dmitri). It raises all kinds of interesting questions about the relationship between the novel and the poem which have been discussed before, but now the argument will have an objective correlative. R.S. Gwynn's essay is noteworthy for suggesting a model for Shade. I discuss some of the issues in this <Slate> essay:
http://www.slate.com/id/2261520/>
B. Boyd also sends "Ron Rosenbaum on the forthcoming edition of the poem "Pale Fire" on Shade's own index cards, with essays by Brian Boyd and R.S. Gwynn." link to "The Spectator" Freeing "Pale Fire" From Pale Fire The next big Nabokov controversy.
Posted Friday, July 23, 2010 (Editorial correction: "This article originally included a photograph of Nicolas Nabokov instead of Vladimir Nabokov.")
Excerpts from R.Ron's text :..."I'm talking about the world of Nabokov controversies...I had just emerged from several years of contention over the manuscript of Nabokov's last novel, The Original of Laura...In the course of writing about it, I had changed my position on whether Nabokov's burn order should be carried out at least twice...Though I must admit that when it finally came out last fall, I was at least ambivalently pleased at ending up in the Laura acknowledgments, despite ultimately opposing publication. I spent a lot of time trying to get Dmitri Nabokov to make up his mind. I deserved to be acknowledged. But things seemed to have settled down since the book came out. Then, like I said, I found myself dragged back again....* "...Mo Cohen, ...offered to show me a new Nabokovian objet d'art that is likely to touch off the next big Nabokov controversy... in that it once again tempts us into divining a dead author's intentions...I realized as he described this unique object, part book, part artwork, part literary manifesto, that he was talking about something more than some coffee-table-deluxe-edition-type thing. With the publication of "Pale Fire" as a stand-alone poem, Mo was throwing down the gauntlet, challenging the world's most avid Nabokov readers and critics, telling them that for 50 years, most of them had gotten a central aspect of, arguably, his greatest work flat wrong..."
"What gives the novel its postmodern, experimental look is that the bulk of it, some 230 pages that follow the 999-line poem, is made up of Kinbote's numbered and often long and meandering explicatory footnotes keyed to the poem's lines... (and) there has been one persistent unresolved schism...(centered) on the aesthetic status of the eponymous poem within the novel... Maybe the poem wasn't meant as a pastiche, a parody...Once it dawned on me that the poem might not be a carefully diminished version of Nabokov's talents, but Nabokov writing at the peak of his powers in a unique throwback form (the kind of heroic couplets Alexander Pope used in the 18th century), I began to write essays that advanced this revisionist view of the poem... it deserves to be stolen back from the thief Kinbote and looked at as a pseudonymous work of Nabokov's that he had hidden inside the Russian doll construction of the novel. That's the position taken by Mo Cohen in this new edition, designed by the artist and illustrator Jean Holabird. That the poem deserves to be read on its own terms, solus rex to use a Nabokovian phrase. Standing regally alone. Allowed to convey its own meanings once it's left the author's pen..."Pale Fire" freed! from the hackles of, or, if you prefer, the delicately woven web of Pale Fire. "Pale Fire" free at last to be a poem on its own...(and) the object has the blessing not only of Dmitri Nabokov, the godfather, but of Brian Boyd, his consigliere, the world's foremost Nabokov biographer. Boyd has contributed a long explicatory essay to the project (for which he's general editor), and by doing so will make headlines (or footnotes) among those who have been following Boyd's path in relation to "Pale Fire." ...10 or so years ago, Brian Boyd, in a complete switcheroo that had heads spinning ...wrote an entire book about who wrote the "Pale Fire" poem, claiming it wasn't John Shade but rather the ghost of his dead daughter Hazel...Now, in what appears to be another switch, Boyd seems-in the 30-page essay that accompanies Mo Cohen's edition-to completely abandon his Hazel Shade's shade theory of the poem's authorship**... Nabokov wrote the poem and it's time to claim it for him... I don't want to downplay the two essays in the booklet called "Pale Fire Reflections" that is included with the two texts of the poem. I just couldn't find it at first. I was particularly struck by the degree of erudition about contemporary American poetry that Gwynn brought to his case that Nabokov meant "Pale Fire" to be a reproof to over-casual, over-personal, over-trivial trends in American poetry. A reproof to the belief that formal poetics could not capture deep feeling in traditional verse forms. And that Nabokov had modeled John Shade on the well-known traditionalist American poet Yvor Winters, who was a partisan of formal poetics..."
...................................................................................................................................................................
* I suggest a return to Nab-L postings in September,2009 to get the feel of RR's being "at least ambivalently pleased..."
** - Brian Boyd's next L-posting reads: :"... I just sent out the Slate essay by Ron Rosenbaum with an attached message limited to 150 characters. If I'd had more space I would have attached this: "Ron Rosenbaum on the forthcoming Ginkgo Pressedition of the poem "Pale Fire" on Shade's own index cards, with essays by Consigliere Brian Boyd and R.S. Gwynn and concept and illustrations by Jean Holabird." Rosenbaum is wrong to imagine my essay repudiates my Pale Fire book. It just looks at a different flank of the elephant, a different point of the starfish."
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http://www.slate.com/id/2261520/>
B. Boyd also sends "Ron Rosenbaum on the forthcoming edition of the poem "Pale Fire" on Shade's own index cards, with essays by Brian Boyd and R.S. Gwynn." link to "The Spectator" Freeing "Pale Fire" From Pale Fire The next big Nabokov controversy.
Posted Friday, July 23, 2010 (Editorial correction: "This article originally included a photograph of Nicolas Nabokov instead of Vladimir Nabokov.")
Excerpts from R.Ron's text :..."I'm talking about the world of Nabokov controversies...I had just emerged from several years of contention over the manuscript of Nabokov's last novel, The Original of Laura...In the course of writing about it, I had changed my position on whether Nabokov's burn order should be carried out at least twice...Though I must admit that when it finally came out last fall, I was at least ambivalently pleased at ending up in the Laura acknowledgments, despite ultimately opposing publication. I spent a lot of time trying to get Dmitri Nabokov to make up his mind. I deserved to be acknowledged. But things seemed to have settled down since the book came out. Then, like I said, I found myself dragged back again....* "...Mo Cohen, ...offered to show me a new Nabokovian objet d'art that is likely to touch off the next big Nabokov controversy... in that it once again tempts us into divining a dead author's intentions...I realized as he described this unique object, part book, part artwork, part literary manifesto, that he was talking about something more than some coffee-table-deluxe-edition-type thing. With the publication of "Pale Fire" as a stand-alone poem, Mo was throwing down the gauntlet, challenging the world's most avid Nabokov readers and critics, telling them that for 50 years, most of them had gotten a central aspect of, arguably, his greatest work flat wrong..."
"What gives the novel its postmodern, experimental look is that the bulk of it, some 230 pages that follow the 999-line poem, is made up of Kinbote's numbered and often long and meandering explicatory footnotes keyed to the poem's lines... (and) there has been one persistent unresolved schism...(centered) on the aesthetic status of the eponymous poem within the novel... Maybe the poem wasn't meant as a pastiche, a parody...Once it dawned on me that the poem might not be a carefully diminished version of Nabokov's talents, but Nabokov writing at the peak of his powers in a unique throwback form (the kind of heroic couplets Alexander Pope used in the 18th century), I began to write essays that advanced this revisionist view of the poem... it deserves to be stolen back from the thief Kinbote and looked at as a pseudonymous work of Nabokov's that he had hidden inside the Russian doll construction of the novel. That's the position taken by Mo Cohen in this new edition, designed by the artist and illustrator Jean Holabird. That the poem deserves to be read on its own terms, solus rex to use a Nabokovian phrase. Standing regally alone. Allowed to convey its own meanings once it's left the author's pen..."Pale Fire" freed! from the hackles of, or, if you prefer, the delicately woven web of Pale Fire. "Pale Fire" free at last to be a poem on its own...(and) the object has the blessing not only of Dmitri Nabokov, the godfather, but of Brian Boyd, his consigliere, the world's foremost Nabokov biographer. Boyd has contributed a long explicatory essay to the project (for which he's general editor), and by doing so will make headlines (or footnotes) among those who have been following Boyd's path in relation to "Pale Fire." ...10 or so years ago, Brian Boyd, in a complete switcheroo that had heads spinning ...wrote an entire book about who wrote the "Pale Fire" poem, claiming it wasn't John Shade but rather the ghost of his dead daughter Hazel...Now, in what appears to be another switch, Boyd seems-in the 30-page essay that accompanies Mo Cohen's edition-to completely abandon his Hazel Shade's shade theory of the poem's authorship**... Nabokov wrote the poem and it's time to claim it for him... I don't want to downplay the two essays in the booklet called "Pale Fire Reflections" that is included with the two texts of the poem. I just couldn't find it at first. I was particularly struck by the degree of erudition about contemporary American poetry that Gwynn brought to his case that Nabokov meant "Pale Fire" to be a reproof to over-casual, over-personal, over-trivial trends in American poetry. A reproof to the belief that formal poetics could not capture deep feeling in traditional verse forms. And that Nabokov had modeled John Shade on the well-known traditionalist American poet Yvor Winters, who was a partisan of formal poetics..."
...................................................................................................................................................................
* I suggest a return to Nab-L postings in September,2009 to get the feel of RR's being "at least ambivalently pleased..."
** - Brian Boyd's next L-posting reads: :"... I just sent out the Slate essay by Ron Rosenbaum with an attached message limited to 150 characters. If I'd had more space I would have attached this: "Ron Rosenbaum on the forthcoming Ginkgo Pressedition of the poem "Pale Fire" on Shade's own index cards, with essays by Consigliere Brian Boyd and R.S. Gwynn and concept and illustrations by Jean Holabird." Rosenbaum is wrong to imagine my essay repudiates my Pale Fire book. It just looks at a different flank of the elephant, a different point of the starfish."
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/