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Fountains in Pale Fire and Tyutchev
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A propos des fontaines. Here is Fyodor Tyutchev's famous poem "The Fountain" (1836) in F. Jude's translation:
Look, a living cloud,
the radiant fountain throws
its flaming spray, scattering
moist mist towards the sun,
tossing rays up to the sky,
touching forbidden heights
and once again, a fire-coloured dust,
is sentenced to fall back to earth.
..........
Water-course of human thought,
inexhaustible water-course!
What incomprehensible law
tosses and urges you up there?
How greedily you reach out to the sky!
But an invisible, fateful hand
diffracts and pulls your stubborn stream
in showers of spray back down to the land!
The beginning of the second stanza is rendered not quite accurately. In Russian, it goes:
O smertnoi mysli vodomiot,
O vodomiot neistoshchimyi!
(Oh, the fountain of the mortal human thought,
Oh, the inexhaustible fountain!)
which emphasises the human thought's mortality. Doesn't it suggest that Shade (or his mind) is killed, but his thought nevertheless continues to spout after his (or his mind's) death?
By the way, another important source of Pale Fire, which everybody seems to have overlooked, is Fyodor Sologub's (another Fyodor!) novel Tvorimaya Legenda ("The Legend Being Created") written in the late 1900s. It is set in a Russian provincial town (invented by the author) and the "United Islands" ruled by the Queen Ortruda. Like PF, Sologub's novel (initially entitled Nav'i chary, "The sorcery of ghosts") contains otherworldly motifs.
Alexey Sklyarenko
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
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Look, a living cloud,
the radiant fountain throws
its flaming spray, scattering
moist mist towards the sun,
tossing rays up to the sky,
touching forbidden heights
and once again, a fire-coloured dust,
is sentenced to fall back to earth.
..........
Water-course of human thought,
inexhaustible water-course!
What incomprehensible law
tosses and urges you up there?
How greedily you reach out to the sky!
But an invisible, fateful hand
diffracts and pulls your stubborn stream
in showers of spray back down to the land!
The beginning of the second stanza is rendered not quite accurately. In Russian, it goes:
O smertnoi mysli vodomiot,
O vodomiot neistoshchimyi!
(Oh, the fountain of the mortal human thought,
Oh, the inexhaustible fountain!)
which emphasises the human thought's mortality. Doesn't it suggest that Shade (or his mind) is killed, but his thought nevertheless continues to spout after his (or his mind's) death?
By the way, another important source of Pale Fire, which everybody seems to have overlooked, is Fyodor Sologub's (another Fyodor!) novel Tvorimaya Legenda ("The Legend Being Created") written in the late 1900s. It is set in a Russian provincial town (invented by the author) and the "United Islands" ruled by the Queen Ortruda. Like PF, Sologub's novel (initially entitled Nav'i chary, "The sorcery of ghosts") contains otherworldly motifs.
Alexey Sklyarenko
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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