9. Man’s life as commentary to abstruse/ 940 Unfinished poem. Note for further use./
10. Incidentally, it is curious to note that a crested bird called in Zemblan sampel ("silktail"), closely resembling a waxwing in shape and shade...
11. In the lovely line heading this comment the reader should
note the last word....We should also note the
cloak-and-dagger hint-glint ...in the rhyme.
12. perhaps the funniest note concerned the
manipulations of the window curtains which had to be drawn in different ways at
different hours to prevent the sun...
13. Wordsmith University to which I shall devote here only a few words
partly because.., but mainly because I wish to convey, in making this
reference to Wordsmith briefer than the notes
on the Goldsworth and Shade houses, the fact that the college was considerably
farther from them than they were from one another. It is probably the first time
that the dull pain of distance is rendered through an effect of style and that a
topographical idea finds its verbal expression in a series of foreshortened
sentences
14. found in my coat pocket a brutal anonymous note
saying: "You have hal.....s real bad, chum," meaning evidently "hallucinations"
15. there is only one
allusion to my friend’s masterpiece ...: "Just before our poet’s untimely death
he seems to have been working on an autobiographical poem." The circumstances of
this death are completely distorted by the professor...culprit...without
awaiting his trial — which unfortunately was not to take place in this world
(see eventually my ultimate note)...the most striking
characteristic of the little obituary is that it contains not one reference to
the glorious friendship...
16. The
King sat down at the Bechstein and...explained briefly the situation while
taking tinkling notes with one hand: "Never heard of any
passage,"...
17. I was the
shadow of the waxwing slain by feigned remoteness in the
windowpane...The exquisite melody of ...The repetition of that long-drawn
note is saved from monotony by the subtle variation in line 132
where the assonance between its second word and the rhyme gives the ear a kind
of languorous pleasure as would the echo of some half-remembered sorrowful song
whose strain is more meaningful than its words [ far-far
away Zembla, of course, for such feigned remoteness, cf. further number 31
and 32]
18. I have
staggered the notes referring to him in such a fashion that the
first (see note to line 17 where some of his other activities are adumbrated) is
the vaguest while those that follow become gradually clearer as gradual Gradus
approaches in space and time.
19. Line 172: In a black pocketbook that I fortunately have
with me I find, jotted down, here and there, among various
extracts that had happened to please me (a
footnote from Boswell’s Life of Dr. Johnson, the
inscriptions on the trees in Wordsmith’s famous avenue, a
quotation from St. Augustine, and so on), a few samples of John
Shade’s conversation which I had collected
20. Moreover, this
is not a holograph but an apograph, made by a scribe for the printers —
you will note that both mayors write the same hand."/ "How
interesting," said Gradus noting it.
21. Jane allowed me to copy out some of
Hazel’s notes from a typescript based on jottings made on the
spot...The
notes continue for several pages but for obvious reasons I must renounce to give
them verbatim in this commentary...words and
meaningless syllables which she managed at last to collect came out in her
dutiful notes as a short line of simple letter-groups. I
transcribe: pada
ata lane pad not ogo old wart alan ther tale feur far rant lant tal
told ...
22.
23. Note how delicately at this
point the television theme happens to merge with the girl’s theme
...
24. ... it was idealized and stylized only in regard
to the older woman; in regard to Queen Disa, as she was that afternoon on that
blue terrace...a plain unretouched likeness. I trust the reader appreciates the
strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems,
or notes to poems, or anything at
all.
26. debris: I wish to say something about an earlier note (to line
12). Conscience and scholarship have debated the question, and I now
think that the two lines given in that note are distorted and tainted by wistful
thinking. It is the only time in the
course of the writing of these difficult comments, that I have
tarried, in my distress and disappointment, on the brink of falsification. I
must ask the reader to ignore those two lines (which, I am afraid, do not even
scan properly). I could strike them out before publication but that would mean
reworking the entire note, or at least a considerable
part of it, and I have no time for such stupidities.
27.
This
describes rather well the "chance inn,"...where I am trying to coordinate these
notes...
28. ...recalling
another author, Gide the Lucid, who praises in his African
notes so warmly the satiny skin of black imps.
29.
I spent a couple of pleasant months visiting the libraries of New
York and Washington, flew to Florida for Christmas, and when ready to start for
my new Arcady deemed it nice and dutiful to send the poet a polite
note congratulating him on his restored health and jokingly "warning"
him that beginning with February he would have a very ardent admirer of his for
neighbor. I never received any answer..
30. so the translator will have to put it into one of those
footnotes that are the rogue’s galleries of words.
31.
"Strange, strange," said the German visitor, who by some
quirk of alderwood ancestry had been alone to catch the eerie note that had
throbbed by and was gone. Shade [smiling and massaging my knee]: "Kings
do not die — they only disappear, eh, Charles?" [ cp.
number 17]
32. Line 937: Old Zembla ...I am a weary and sad commentator today.
Parallel to the
left-hand side of this card (his seventy-sixth) the poet has written, on the eve
of his death, a line (from Pope’s Second Epistle of the Essay on Man) that he may have intended
to cite in a footnote: At
Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where./ So this is all
treacherous old Shade could say about Zembla — my Zembla?
While shaving his stubble off? Strange,
strange... [cp.
17]
33.The
Helman brothers said they had assisted in the negotiations for the placement of
a sizable note: $11,000,000, Decker Glass Manufacturing
Company, Inc., note due July 1, 1979,"
34.
the
tantalizing tingles and jingles contributed a pleasant melancholy
note to the rest of Dulwich Hill’s evening sonorities [ here a reference to distant choir of children in
Lolita?]
35. That moment of
grateful grief you soon forgot, dear girl. But I assure you that I do not mean
any harm, and that John Shade, perhaps, will not be too much annoyed by
my notes, despite the intrigues and the dirt...
36.
Yes, better stop.
My notes and self are petering out. ...God
will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of two
other characters in this work. I shall continue to exist...in the clash between
the two figments...
37. Kinbote,
Charles, Dr., an intimate friend of S, his literary adviser, editor and
commentator; ... his trusting the reader enjoyed the note, 149
[ note 149,
indeed!]