A propos des fontaines. Here is Fyodor
Tyutchev's famous poem "The Fountain" (1836) in F. Jude's
translation:
Look, a living cloud,
the radiant fountain throws
its flaming
spray, scattering
moist mist towards the sun,
tossing rays up to the
sky,
touching forbidden heights
and once again, a fire-coloured
dust,
is sentenced to fall back to earth.
..........
Water-course of
human thought,
inexhaustible water-course!
What incomprehensible
law
tosses and urges you up there?
How greedily you reach out to the
sky!
But an invisible, fateful hand
diffracts and pulls your stubborn
stream
in showers of spray back down to the land!
The beginning of the second stanza is rendered not
quite accurately. In Russian, it goes:
O smertnoi mysli vodomiot,
O vodomiot neistoshchimyi!
(Oh, the fountain of the mortal human
thought,
Oh, the
inexhaustible fountain!)
which emphasises the human thought's
mortality. Doesn't it suggest that Shade (or his mind) is killed, but
his thought nevertheless continues to spout after his (or his mind's)
death?
By the way, another important source of Pale Fire,
which everybody seems to have overlooked, is Fyodor Sologub's (another Fyodor!)
novel Tvorimaya Legenda ("The Legend Being Created") written in the late 1900s.
It is set in a Russian provincial town (invented by the author) and the "United
Islands" ruled by the Queen Ortruda. Like PF, Sologub's novel (initially
entitled Nav'i chary, "The sorcery of ghosts") contains otherworldly
motifs.
Alexey
Sklyarenko