I:
...how did VN come to find stang...
Victor Fet: From his goalkeeping youth. So far
nobody noticed that there is a RUSSIAN "shtanga" (derived from 'der Stange'),
which, among a number of exotic terms (such as barbell) means a goalpost - or
any metal post (either vertical or horizontal).The term appears, for example, in
"Drugie berega" (12.3) in football context ("prislonivshis k levoi shtange
vorot"); the same in "Speak, memory" (13.4): ("leant my back against the left
goalpost").When the football hits it, the Russian soccer fans scream:
"SHTANGA!!"
JM:
Shtanga!!!! to Victor Fet (but, of course, it all depends from
whose side one is cheering? Soccer fans also yell "na trave" in a dejected
mood since the goalie hasn't made any outstanding catch, nor
did the attacking ball enter the goal.
This stangy word, in Russian, led me back
to Pale Fire, again indirectly, by its illustrious translator Conmal
and its original architectonic term in Greek*.
From note to line 962, by Kinbote: "One callous Academician
who did, lost his seat in result and was severely reprimanded by Conmal in an
extraordinary sonnet composed directly in colorful, if not quite correct,
English, beginning:
I am not slave! Let be my critic
slave.
I cannot be. And Shakespeare would not want
thus.
Let drawing students copy the
acanthus,
I work with Master on the
architrave!"
Gary Lipon: "I think this pretty much puts the issue to rest.Grateful, Hazel
let go of the stang."
II.
Gary Lipon:..."Pale Fire, the poem is an ironic piece, but
the feelings of pathos and tragedy bleed through the irony...To me this
remarkable feel for rhythm within the confines of the heroic couplet,
distinguishes Shade/Nabokov as great poet: a fine sense of rhythm that is used
to lead into, set up, and close, the short episodes... humor is reinforced by
the extra emphasis imparted by the spondaic rhythm of the last three words...But
the very act of writing a thousand line narrative poem in an age old form is
daring. Shade/VN risks a lot on that ground alone, and it's to be expected that
many modern readers should find PF, the poem, ineffectual by reason of antique
form alone,a quaint anachronism...there is a balancing going on through out all
of Pale Fire, the poem, between irony and parody on one side and pathos and
authentic emotion on the other...
John Morris: "Opinions
understandably differ about whether Shade is a lousy poet, but it seems clear to
me that VN did not present him as such...Furthermore, the fact that he offered
long excerpts from the poem at public readings, to which his audience responded
with evident and unironic enjoyment, also argues for VN's faith in the poem's
merits... See my article "Genius and Plausibility: Suspension of Disbelief in
Pale Fire" on the Zembla website."
A.Bouazza: I like to think that, as has been pointed out
before, the feel of steel the word evokes (cold and hard) may have been decisive
for VN; furthermore, on a cold night a stang will sting the hand more...PF
contains a striking amount of dialect words, chiefly Scottish ones. The line
preceding the one containing the word in quiestion has "Lochanhead", lochan is a
diminutive of the Scottish loch, and lochan means pond. There is a
defamiliarization at play here on a verbal level similar to the existential one
experienced by Hazel.
JM: Gary Lipon's description of John Shade's achievements
touched a chord in my heart for the first time. Until then I was mainly
annoyed at the self-centered, provincial poet, jumping straight from New
Wye onto the whirling stars, with no Haiti or Afghanistan lying in
between because I'd been considering Shade
following Kinbote's point of view, only - and he was such an
ambivalent, idealizingly unfair admirer...
I still don't consider Shade to be a great poet, not even in
fiction ("the greatest", according to VN), but the debate has lighted a fresh
path for me. A.Bouazza's comments on "stang" describing its effect
of "defamiliarization...on a verbal level similar to the existential one
experienced by Hazel,"expresses much about the novel as a whole, its shifting
perspectives and the habitual alternation btw parody and
pathos.
btw: A.Sklyarenko's "Beaver...Castor-Castro...tyrants", seen from
VN's angle is a plausible alusion but, as a political rendering of
King Charles, the Beloved, it may be a little incongruous.
*- The architrave (from Italian: architrave, also called an epistyle from
Greek epistylo or door frame) is a moulded or ornamental band framing
a rectangular opening. It is the lintel or beam that rests on the
capitals of the columns. As such, it is the lowest part of the entablature
consisting of architrave, frieze and cornice. The word is derived from the
Greek and Latin words arche and trabs combined together to mean "main
beam". They are mainly used in churches and cathedrals, and other religious
buildings. They can also be seen in modern houses.The architrave is
different in the different orders. In the Tuscan, it only consists of a
plain face, crowned with a fillet, and is half a module in height. In the
Doric and composite, it has two faces, or fasciae; and three in the Ionic
and Corinthian, in which it is 10/12 of a module high, though but half a
module in the rest. The word architrave is also used to refer more generally to
the mouldings (or other elements) framing a door, window or other
rectangular opening .