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Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov [83]

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and was beating himself with both hands on various parts of his torso.

I am not sure this trivial variant has been worth commenting; indeed, the whole passage about the activities of the IPH would be quite Hudibrastic had its pedestrian verse been one foot shorter.

Line 662: Who rides so late in the night and the wind

This line, and indeed the whole passage (lines 653-664), allude to the well-known poem by Goethe about the erlking, hoary enchanter of the elf-haunted alderwood, who falls in love with the delicate little boy of a belated traveler. One cannot sufficiently admire the ingenious way in which Shade manages to transfer something of the broken rhythm of the ballad (a trisyllabic meter at heart) into his iambic verse:

Goethe’s two lines opening the poem come out most exactly and beautifully, with the bonus of an unexpected rhyme (also in French: vent-enfant), in my own language:

Another fabulous ruler, the last king of Zembla, kept repeating these haunting lines to himself both in Zemblan and German, as a chance accompaniment of drumming fatigue and anxiety, while he climbed through the bracken belt of the dark mountains he had to traverse in his bid for freedom.

Lines 671-672: The Untamed Seahorse

See Browning’s My Last Duchess.

See it and condemn the fashionable device of entitling a collection of essays or a volume of poetry—or a long poem, alas—with a phrase lifted from a more or less celebrated poetical work of the past. Such titles possess a specious glamor acceptable maybe in the names of vintage wines and plump courtesans but only degrading in regard to the talent that substitutes the easy allusiveness of literacy for original fancy and shifts onto a bust’s shoulders the responsibility for ornateness since anybody can flip through a Midsummer-Night’s Dream or Romeo and Juliet, or, perhaps, the Sonnets and take his pick.

Line 678: into French

Two of these translations appeared in the August number of the Nouvelle Revue Canadienne which reached College Town bookshops in the last week of July, that is at a time of sadness and mental confusion when good taste forbade me to show Sybil Shade some of the critical notes I made in my pocket diary.

In her version of Donne’s famous Holy Sonnet X composed in his widowery:

Death be not proud, though some have calléd thee

Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so

one deplores the superfluous ejaculation in the second line introduced there only to coagulate the caesura:

Ne soit pas fière, Mort! Quoique certains te disent

Et puissante et terrible, ah, Mort, tu ne l’es pas

and while the enclosed rhyme “so-overthrow” (lines 2-3) is fortunate in finding an easy counterpart in pas-bas, one objects to the enclosing disent-prise rhymes (1-4) which in a French sonnet of circa 1617 would be an impossible infringement of the visual rule.

I have no space here to list a number of other blurrings and blunders in this Canadian version of the Dean of St. Paul’s denouncement of Death, that slave—not only to “fate” and “chance”—but also to us (“kings and desperate men”).

The other poem, Andrew Marvell’s “The Nymph on the Death of her Fawn,” seems to be, technically, even tougher to stuff into French verse. If in the Donne translation, Miss Irondell was perfectly justified in matching English pentameters with French Alexandrines, I doubt that here she should have preferred l’impair and accommodated with nine syllables what Marvell fits into eight. In the lines:

And, quite regardless of my smart,

Left me his fawn but took his heart

which come out as:

Et se moquant bien de ma douleur

Me laissa son faon, mais pris son coeur

one regrets that the translator, even with the help of an ampler prosodie womb, did not manage to fold in the long legs of her French fawn, and render “quite regardless of” by “sans le moindre égard pour” or something of the sort. Further on, the couplet

Thy love was far more better than

The love of false and cruel man

though translated literally:

Que ton amour était fort meilleur

Qu’amour d’homme cruel et trompeur

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