Word: nabokovs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Well, no great mystery; the caprifole stanza continues botanically: "Downward a leaf inclines its tip/ and drops from its tip a pearl." It is clear that Nabokov is describing a rain-wet shrub, but has his own good reasons for leaving indefinite precisely which shrub. It is as if he had written of a cavalryman saddling his ungulate (horse? cow? moose?) and riding away...
What is curious, though, is that this bit of verse is a translation from the Russian, and the Russian poet-Nabokov himself-did not use an obscure Russian equivalent of caprifole. He used a perfectly ordinary word, zheemolost, which means honeysuckle...
Elaborate Paperchase. The deeps of poetry must be respected, but as Nabokov sternly pointed out in the preface to his Englishing of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, the shallows of translation must be examined with skepticism. This book amply justifies such skepticism. It consists of 39 of Nabokov's Russian poems with his own English translations, 14 poems written in English, and a sly and self-parodying inclusion-18 chess problems...
Characteristically, the new volume is an elaborate paperchase. Within it, the actual chess puzzles, witty and elegant, throw an intentionally false scent. Nabokov nudges the reader shamelessly with a list of virtues that characterize chess problems "and all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity." Clearly the reader is supposed to pursue these clues and come to the conclusion that Nabokov approaches art as a sterile, chesslike intricacy. It is, however, a good general rule (discernible in the only good novel ever written about chess, Nabokov's The Defense), that chess has no relation to anything...
Mars Bars. The caprifoliaceous translations are better clues to Nabokov's whereabouts. As a poet he is a master, divisively, sometimes awkwardly stretched between two landmass languages. There are times when he appears as a provincial linguistic pedant. At other times he is an overrefined rhymester who thinks it snazzy to pretend that "pre-au-roral" is the best English version of a straightforward Russian word meaning "daybreak." Nabokov seems to know and obstinately use all the English words that ever existed, but does he really not see that "stirless" (as in "Stirless, I stand there at the window...