I just came across a quote from one of Pushkin's
letters, where he wrote: "mais le bonheur [...]
c´est um grand peut-être, comme le disait Rabelais du paradis ou de l'
éternité. Je suis l' Athée du bonheur." (Boldino, Fall,1830) and Sergei
Soloviev brought up Shade's lines on "L'if, lifeless tree! Your great Maybe,
Rabelais..."
In Pushkin's lines from
Mozart and Salieri, as A.Bouzza kindly allowed me to read in
VN's rendering, there is something like a "shade of the
word between": Even now/
I seem to see him
sitting here with us,making a third, but there
is no direct use of that preposition.
Now, in VN's translation of "Irregular Iambics", although this
time it is possible to discern méshdu
in "leaves that flow /Between
the fingers of the air", I
now missed a "scuddable" "If" (ésli)
-
unless it was likewise hidden, this time by
a "conditional shade": For the last
time... the poor olive ripples... had there not
been..
Questions:
Once the word "if" doesn't concretely appear in the poem,
why did VN note "there is no reason,however,why this other
light and fluid dissyllable should not be treated similarly, especially at the
begining of an iambic line" ?
The date at the end of the translation was 1953 (Ithaca),
but VN's introduction to the Poems was written in 1969 (
Montreux). When was the note added: 1953? 1969?