Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0017399, Thu, 27 Nov 2008 22:27:34 -0200

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VN on allegory?
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VF: I wonder, are there cultures which do NOT distinguish OGON' or PLAMYA (fire) from SVET (light)?
JM:How about the English word "lighter" for the flame-producing instrument used to "light a cigarette"?

GS ( to V.Fet's ...VN's novel is NOT called "Pale Light"..): True, but to be precise I replaced 'light' (????) not 'fire' with 'gift' (???). In the sense that "Pale Fire" and "The Gift" are synonyms.
JM: I thought I had understood your original comparison ( light/gift), even though I speak no Russian. Now I'm confused because visually these words (ogon, plamya, svet, ceem, dar) look very different. The clue is in Lermontov?

R.S.Gwynn: VN is a late-born symboliste who dislikes "symbol" as a literary term, with many good reasons [...]The details in his own works gain that status (symbolic?) by the way that certain images are repeated and dwelt upon [...] Perhaps "metaphoric" is a term that is better than "allegoric" in dealing with how VN uses his life in his work. "Allegoric" is a prose term; "metaphoric" is a poetic one. We are, after all, dealing with a poet here.
JM: A sentence such as "Gone the panache of steam, gone the thunder and blaze, gone the romance of the railroad" (SO, Vintage,p.203) is, indeed a consumate poet's, the movement of the train, sound and visual images - mainly the the compression of past bravura and elegance, round gestures with a feathered hat - and the white plumes of steam in "panache": absolute novelty by one single word placed in the right place.
"Panache" is more than an analogy and more than a "symbol." It is actually a precise and objective description of a perceived scene but, at the same time, it is so much more than that! Would "metaphor" be also adequate?
On p.44, also in SO: "I have never been able to see any generic difference between poetry and artistic prose. As a matter of fact, I would be inclined to define a good poem of any length as a concentrate of good prose with or without the addition of recurrent rhythm and rhyme [...]in plain prose there are also certain rhythmic patterns, the music of precise phrasing, the beat of thought rendered by recurrent peculiarities of idim and intonation. As in today's scientific classifications, there is a lot of overlapping in our concept of poetry and prose today. The bamboo bridge between them is the metaphor ."

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