In his commentary and index to Shade’s poem Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions his uncle Conmal, the Zemblan translator of Shakespeare:
English was not taught in Zembla before Mr. Campbell's time. Conmal mastered it all by himself (mainly by learning a lexicon by heart) as a young man, around 1880, when not the verbal inferno but a quiet military career seemed to open before him, and his first work (the translation of Shakespeare's Sonnets) was the outcome of a bet with a fellow officer. He exchanged his frogged uniform for a scholar's dressing gown and tackled The Tempest. A slow worker, he needed half a century to translate the works of him whom he called "dze Bart," in their entirety. After this, in 1930, he went on to Milton and other poets, steadily drilling through the ages, and had just completed Kipling's "The Rhyme of the Three Sealers" ("Now this is the Law of the Muscovite that he proves with shot and steel") when he fell ill and soon expired under his splendid painted bed ceil with its reproductions of Altamira animals, his last words in his last delirium being "Comment dit-on 'mourir' en anglais?" - a beautiful and touching end.
It is easy to sneer at Conmal's faults. They are the naive failings of a great pioneer. He lived too much in his library, too little among boys and youths. Writers should see the world, pluck its figs and peaches, and not keep constantly meditating in a tower of yellow ivory - which was also John Shade's mistake, in a way.
We should not forget that when Conmal began his stupendous task no English author was available in Zemblan except Jane de Faun, a lady novelist in ten volumes whose works, strangely enough, are unknown in England, and some fragments of Byron translated from French versions.
A large, sluggish man with no passions save poetry, he seldom moved from his warm castle and its fifty thousand crested books, and had been known to spend two years in bed reading and writing after which, much refreshed, he went for the first and only time to London, but the weather was foggy, and he could not understand the language, and so went back to bed for another year.
English being Conmal's prerogative, his Shakspere remained invulnerable throughout the greater part of his long life. The venerable Duke was famed for the nobility of his work; few dared question its fidelity. Personally, I had never the heart to check it. 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! (note to Line 962)
Conmal, Duke of Aros, 1855-1955, K. 's uncle, the eldest half-brother of Queen Blenda (q. v.); noble paraphrast, 12; his version of Timon of Athens, 39, 130; his life and work, 962. (Index)
The name Conmal seems to hint at Que tu me connois mal, ô ma chere Ophélie! (Hamlet's words in Jean-François Ducis's French version, 1772, of Shakespeare's play). K Ofelii ("To Ophelia," 1842-47) is a cycle of nine poems by Afanasiy Fet (a Russian poet, translator and memoirist, 1820-1892). The most famous of them is Ofeliya gibla i pela ("Ophelis perished and sang," 1846):
Офелия гибла и пела,
И пела, сплетая венки;
С цветами, венками и песнью
На дно опустилась реки.
Ах, много по жизни мелькнуло
Дней светлых, безумной тоски,
И счастье давно потонуло,
Лишь песни плывут да венки.
И многое с песнями канет
Мне в душу на тёмное дно,
И много мне чувства, и песен,
И слёз, и мечтаний дано.
The poems of Fet's cycle include the following Sonnet (1842):
С тех пор, как бог в тебе осуществил
Передо мной создание поэта,
Не знаю сам, за что я полюбил
Игривое созвучие сонета.
Не знаю сам, зачем он сердцу мил:
Быть может, звук знакомого привета
Он тех же рифм чредой изобразил —
И ложною мечтой душа согрета.
А может быть, он схож с тобою в том,
Что изо всех стихов его стихом,
Как и тобой, владеть всего труднее,
Иль, наконец, причудливый, как ты,
Смиряясь, он для чувства красоты,
Чем затруднял, становится милее.
A fine town in East Zembla, Aros seems to hint at Aarhus (Aros is the original Viking-Age name for Aarhus, Denmark's second-largest city). On the other hand, Aros brings to mind the Pharos of Alexandria and Fet's famous palindrome A roza upala na lapu Azora (And the rose fell on the paw of Azor). On August 16, 1857, Afanasiy Fet (a son of Afanasiy Shenshin, a Russian landowner, and Charlotte Foeth, née Becker) married Maria Botkin (the younger sister of the writer and critic Vasiliy Botkin, 1812-1869). Vasiliy Botkin is the author of Mozart (1838), a biographical essay. At the end of Pushkin's little tragedy Mozart and Salieri (1830), Mozart uses the prase nikto b (none would), Botkin (Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus' "real" name) in reverse:
Когда бы все так чувствовали силу
Гармонии! Но нет: тогда б не мог
И мир существовать; никто б не стал
Заботиться о нуждах низкой жизни;
Все предались бы вольному искусству.
If all could feel like you the power
of harmony! But no: the world
could not go on then. None would
bother about the needs of lowly life;
All would surrender to free art. (Scene II)
The last day of Shade's life has passed in a sustained low hum of harmony:
Gently the day has passed in a sustained
Low hum of harmony. The brain is drained
And a brown ament, and the noun I meant
To use but did not, dry on the cement.
Maybe my sensual love for the consonne
D'appui, Echo's fey child, is based upon
A feeling of fantastically planned,
Richly rhymed life. I feel I understand
Existence, or at least a minute part
Of my existence, only through my art,
In terms of combinational delight;
And if my private universe scans right,
So does the verse of galaxies divine
Which I suspect is an iambic line. (ll. 963-976)
In Pushkin's little tragedy, Mozart and Salieri are two sons of harmony:
За твоё
Здоровье, друг, за искренний союз,
Связующий Моцарта и Сальери,
Двух сыновей гармонии.
(Пьёт.)
Mozart
Here is a health
To you, my friend, and to the candid union
That ties together Mozart and Salieri,
Two sons of harmony.
(Drinks.) (Scene II)