Stan Kelly-Bootle: My own
idle browsing for ‘orbicle of jasp’ (which always struck me as VN portraying
Shade as the most jarring un-poet!) found Vladimir Mylnikov’s essay A and
Z of Zembla, at http://pmeyer.web.wesleyan.edu/nabokov/alphabet.html JM:Another available response to "orbicle of jasp," by Molly Lehman, is
less critical of John Shade's poetic talents than SKB's, rather it dwells
on Kinbote's own commentary before we discover ourselves in the midst of
Lehman's commentaries about the role of the literary annotator, and her
initially daring (?) comparison between Kinbote/Pale Fire and
Nabokov/Eugene Onegin. Cf. Vladimir Nabokov'sPale Fireand the Role of the
Literary...-mollylehman.wordpress.com/.../vladimir-nabokovs-pale-fir...*
I'm all ears to follow the
experts...
........................................................................................................................................................................ * "...Kinbote
seems to be out of touch with his audience; he has a poor sense of what we would
and would not know, and frequently, he misses the point altogether...Some
departures seem much like those in Eugene Onegin. Like Nabokov, Kinbote makes
use of his position as commentator to praise both the text and the poet. Shade’s
lines “How to locate in blackness, with a gasp / Terra the
Fair, an orbicle of jasp” (PF, 45) are, Kinbote tells us in the only
annotation he devotes to them, “The loveliest couplet in
this canto” (PF, 181). But according to what standards is this the
“loveliest”? Like Nabokov, Kinbote’s own personal preferences are being invoked;
here, it is his idea of loveliness that is being used as a gauge. This
evaluation, however, comes in a form (the annotation) that attempts to assign
this preference the authority of scholarship...As with Eugene Onegin...we are
seeing ...Kinbote’s attempt to control our responses to Shade’s poem. Kinbote
wants us to read the poem as he reads it ...The difference, however, between
Nabokov’s liberties as commentator and Kinbote’s emerges when we realize that
Kinbote’s dictation of our responses, commanding of our attentions and informing
us of certain meanings, beyond being merely infused with personality, has a
certain agenda behind it..."