Post-Scriptum to: "I got the impression that in his
essay on translating EO, Nabokov states that poems can only
remain alive in their original language ... In that sense would
translations only become the projected shadows of a "real thing" in
Nabokov's eyes?"
The archetypal quality of a poem's original may have been
voiced in "Pale Fire," by Prof. Hurley - of all people
- in reference to a "structural matter", as we find it
in Kinbote's foreword:
"I quote [Prof. Hurley]: 'None can say how long John Shade planned
his poem to be, but it is not improbable that what he left represents only a
small fraction of the composition he saw in a glass, darkly.' Nonsense
again!...I shall even assert (as our shadows still walk without us) that there
remained to be written only one line
of the poem (namely verse 1000) which would have been identical to line 1 and
would have completed the symmetry of the structure, with its two identical
central parts, solid and ample, forming together with the shorter flanks twin
wings of five hundred verses each, and damn that music. Knowing Shade’s
combinational turn of mind and subtle sense of harmonic balance, I cannot
imagine that he intended to deform the faces of his crystal by meddling with its
predictable growth."
The same creative process found
in Prof.Hurley's alusion to seeing "God face to face," has been
described by Nabokov in relation to the composition of his novelsm,as
he often states in "Strong Opinions" and, more recently, quoted in
connection to TOoL. Quite recently, in relation to B.Boyd's
investigation of 'organs and organitrons,' the issue of symmetry, automatism
and creative freedom, as expressed by CK, was also
broached.