I patted my friend on the head and bowed slightly to Eberthella H. The poet looked at me with glazed eyes. She said: «You must help us, Mr. Kinbote: I maintain that what’s his name, old — the old man, you know, at the Exton railway station, who thought he was God and began redirecting the trains, was technically a loony, but John calls him a fellow poet.»
«We all are, in a sense, poets, Madam,» I replied, and offered a lighted match to my friend who had his pipe in his teeth 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 (line 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: 662 Who rídes so láte in the níght and the wínd 664 …. Ít is the fáther with his chíld 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: Ret wóren ok spoz on nátt ut vétt?
Éto est vótchez ut míd ik détt.
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 called 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 prosodic 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 is not as pure idiomatically as might seem at first glance. And finally, the lovely closule: Had it lived long it would have been Lilies without, roses within contains in our lady’s French not only a solecism but also that kind of illegal run-on which a translator is guilty of, when passing a stop sign: Il aurait été, s’il eut longtemps Vécu, lys dehors, roses dedans.
How magnificently those two lines can be mimed and rhymed in our magic Zemblan («the tongue of the mirror,» as the great Conmal has termed it)!
Id wodo bin, war id lev lan, Indran iz lil ut roz nitran.
Line 680: Lolita
Major hurricanes are given feminine names in America. The feminine gender is suggested not so much by the sex of furies and harridans as by a general professional application. Thus any machine is a she to its fond user, and any fire (even a «pale» one!) is she to the fireman, as water is she to the passionate plumber. Why our poet chose to give his 1958 hurricane a little-used Spanish name (sometimes given to parrots) instead of Linda or Lois, is not clear.
Line 681: gloomy Russians spied
There is really nothing metaphysical, or racial, about this gloom. It is merely the outward sign of congested nationalism and a provincial’s sense of inferiority — that dreadful blend so typical of Zemblans under the Extremist rule and of Russians under the Soviet regime. Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors; the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.
However, not all Russians are gloomy, and the two young experts from Moscow whom our new government engaged to locate the Zemblan crown jewels turned out to be positively rollicking. The Extremists were right in believing that Baron Bland, the Keeper of the Treasure, had succeeded in hiding those jewels before he jumped or fell from the North Tower; but they did not know he had had a helper and were wrong in thinking the jewels must be looked for in the palace which the gentle white-haired Bland had never left except to die. I may add, with pardonable satisfaction, that they were, and still are, cached in a totally different — and quite unexpected — corner of Zembla.
In an earlier note (to line 130) the reader has already glimpsed those two treasure hunters at work. After the King’s escape and the belated discovery of the secret passage, they continued their elaborate excavations until the palace was all honeycombed and partly demolished, an entire wall of one room collapsing one night, to yield, in
