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Fw: [NABOKOV-L] "Singing gives birth to light": FINAL
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Dear List,
I retrieved old messages from the November N-Archives to find the original thread for our on-going discussion. Here are some of the excerpts:
A. Sklyarenko To Borges [...] words were the light. From Ursus' Spanish verses sung by blind Dea ("The Man Who Laughs," Part Two, Book Three, IX ) De palabra/ Nace razón/De luz el son - The word gives birth to reason, the singing gives birth to light ...
G.Shimanovich: Now substituting singing for a gift and taking it to a different poem [...] with "small grammar slip" for which Michail Yurevich Lermontov did not find replacement [...] I like in this substitution is consistency with my reading of "The Gift" (and "Pale Fire") where, I think, light is used as elaborate metaphor for gift, and vice versa.-
V.Fet: Lermontov could not find right grammar for "fire" to fit it in Russian line with "light", but he fit it anyway bending grammar [...]it is probably important that VN's novel is NOT called "Pale Light"...
G.Shimanovich: True, but to be precise I replaced 'light' (????) not 'fire' with 'gift' (???)So we too should not confuse fire/gift with light ...
Stan K-B: PALE FIRE, indeed! What we have is HEAT as a form of energy, visible only in a very narrow frequency range.
Jerry Friedman: Since no one who actually speaks Spanish has translated the little poem Alexey quoted, I'll give it a shot, and continue on momentum to Jansy's quotation from a review of VNAY. Alexey wrote: De palabra/ Nace razón/ De luz el son. Looks to me more like, "From word, reason is born. From light, sound.
..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
On the item "song", "sound" (el son) and light, I add a loose strand, to quote VN:
"I cannot understand why Mr. Wilson is puzzled by "dit" (Five: VIII: 13) which I chose instead of "ditty" to parallel "kit" instead of "kitty" in the next line, and which will now, I hope, enter or re-enter the language. Possibly, the masculine rhyme I needed here may have led me a little astray from the servile path of literalism (Pushkin has simply pesnya--"song"). But it is not incomprehensible; after all, anybody who knows what, say, "titty" means ("in nail-making the part that ejects the half-finished nail") can readily understand what "tit" means ('the part that ejects the finished nail')."
Cf.September 26, 2007: Odds and ends by James Marcus at: housemirth.blogspot.com/2007/09/odds-and-ends-nabokov-victorias-secret.html - 24k )
............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Now the intended posting:
SES: I have always believed that many of the parallel themes and motifs in Borges's and Nabokov's work reflect the fact that both grew up in Anglophile families, reading the same tales of doubles and detectives by writers in English[...]
JM: VN once said that he "didn't think in words but in images.", a philosophical positioning abandoned by post-modern theorists, but possibly shared by the two anglophile visionaries. The Dutch-engraver Escher once stated something similar - and mathematicians have been confirming his non-verbal pictorial insights*.
Jerry Friedman: From JM's quotation: [...]Nabokov warns the friend that he is perfectly useless in regard to managing individual (?) heating systems [...] The reader should notice the three lines (authorship, heating, circle of familiar gratitude) that flow together and fertilize each other in the image, as well as the way that Boyd uses the text [...]
JM: I don't have to follow VN's strictures on translation ( almost like Schopenhauer's ... at times), so I particularly enjoyed the poetry of Alexey's rendering where "sound" became "song" ( but not a "dit"!) for Ursus and Osberg. JF's more faithful rendering ( "from light, sound is born") exposes the poet's splitting of a single phenomenon into two (like what we experience as "lightning and thunder.", or in HH's description of Lolita's "light & fire"...) JF's translation of the Spanish seems to be faithful enough: good for you Jerry!.
Stan K-B observed off-L [ in relation to "what does "mollittude" mean in VN 's sentence "the luxury and mollitude of my first Villa Venus"] -"We can never answer for sure the general question "What does this word mean?" We can list possible meanings [...] there are contextual clues. It's a "quality" or "essence" or "state"[...]based on the rich root "moll-" (found in most Indo-European languages via the Proto-IE mil/mel/mol [to grind, whence milling flour etc]. So it's the state or quality associated with or encouraging being soft/gentle/complying/coaxing ..." SK-B also disagrees from my undisciplined interpretation of VN's "luxury", as being related to one of the seven deadly sins:"luxuria" [ it "has long lost its original Latin cognates. Had VN intended the Roman lascivious/sybaritic, he had many ways of saying so."]
JM: Every reader has the choice of "possible meanings" but, sensitivity to the song/light words, plus the context of a sentence, may add to our enjoyment. For me, mollittude is a spiky word... whereas mollittiousness is round and, perhaps, its "m" color is similar to the one VN's alphabet.
Let's take the antithetical "mol" (milling together a hardcore agent with its consequent softness) in VN's LATH. There we meet a dentist and his "name was Molnar with that n like a grain in a cavity; I used him some forty years later in A Kingdom by the Sea". Grain and spikes may turn into grating cosmicomic jokes**, but the sensations lying behind them are totally subjective. So often, when one interprets something one is merely appropriating it for oneself (it usually remains as a culturally-enforced or accidental secret).
..................................................
* - Cf. SO pages 7 and 14.
Also on p.45: "I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more".
There are R's words in Transparent Things: "... that book will not be written - not merely because a dying man cannot write books but because that particular one would never express in one flash what can only be understood immediately."
Concerning visions, there is a very early poem written by VN in 1921 ( I have it only in Spanish): :"solo una palabra bastaría,/ para explicar todo el universo." ( "one single word would suffice to explain the entire universe"), or in his short-story (1923) "the Word": ..." the angel fixed his oblong diamond eyes on me - and I sensed that he had understood everything[...] Tell me what will save my country."[...]And fleetingly embracing my shoulders with his wings, the angel uttered a single word [...] I cried out the word, taking delight in each syllable[...] I do not remember what it is I cried out.
**- I keep forgetting to mention Italo Calvino's collection of fabulous stories published in 1965, the "Cosmicomics".
.....................................................................
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I retrieved old messages from the November N-Archives to find the original thread for our on-going discussion. Here are some of the excerpts:
A. Sklyarenko To Borges [...] words were the light. From Ursus' Spanish verses sung by blind Dea ("The Man Who Laughs," Part Two, Book Three, IX ) De palabra/ Nace razón/De luz el son - The word gives birth to reason, the singing gives birth to light ...
G.Shimanovich: Now substituting singing for a gift and taking it to a different poem [...] with "small grammar slip" for which Michail Yurevich Lermontov did not find replacement [...] I like in this substitution is consistency with my reading of "The Gift" (and "Pale Fire") where, I think, light is used as elaborate metaphor for gift, and vice versa.-
V.Fet: Lermontov could not find right grammar for "fire" to fit it in Russian line with "light", but he fit it anyway bending grammar [...]it is probably important that VN's novel is NOT called "Pale Light"...
G.Shimanovich: True, but to be precise I replaced 'light' (????) not 'fire' with 'gift' (???)So we too should not confuse fire/gift with light ...
Stan K-B: PALE FIRE, indeed! What we have is HEAT as a form of energy, visible only in a very narrow frequency range.
Jerry Friedman: Since no one who actually speaks Spanish has translated the little poem Alexey quoted, I'll give it a shot, and continue on momentum to Jansy's quotation from a review of VNAY. Alexey wrote: De palabra/ Nace razón/ De luz el son. Looks to me more like, "From word, reason is born. From light, sound.
..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
On the item "song", "sound" (el son) and light, I add a loose strand, to quote VN:
"I cannot understand why Mr. Wilson is puzzled by "dit" (Five: VIII: 13) which I chose instead of "ditty" to parallel "kit" instead of "kitty" in the next line, and which will now, I hope, enter or re-enter the language. Possibly, the masculine rhyme I needed here may have led me a little astray from the servile path of literalism (Pushkin has simply pesnya--"song"). But it is not incomprehensible; after all, anybody who knows what, say, "titty" means ("in nail-making the part that ejects the half-finished nail") can readily understand what "tit" means ('the part that ejects the finished nail')."
Cf.September 26, 2007: Odds and ends by James Marcus at: housemirth.blogspot.com/2007/09/odds-and-ends-nabokov-victorias-secret.html - 24k )
............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Now the intended posting:
SES: I have always believed that many of the parallel themes and motifs in Borges's and Nabokov's work reflect the fact that both grew up in Anglophile families, reading the same tales of doubles and detectives by writers in English[...]
JM: VN once said that he "didn't think in words but in images.", a philosophical positioning abandoned by post-modern theorists, but possibly shared by the two anglophile visionaries. The Dutch-engraver Escher once stated something similar - and mathematicians have been confirming his non-verbal pictorial insights*.
Jerry Friedman: From JM's quotation: [...]Nabokov warns the friend that he is perfectly useless in regard to managing individual (?) heating systems [...] The reader should notice the three lines (authorship, heating, circle of familiar gratitude) that flow together and fertilize each other in the image, as well as the way that Boyd uses the text [...]
JM: I don't have to follow VN's strictures on translation ( almost like Schopenhauer's ... at times), so I particularly enjoyed the poetry of Alexey's rendering where "sound" became "song" ( but not a "dit"!) for Ursus and Osberg. JF's more faithful rendering ( "from light, sound is born") exposes the poet's splitting of a single phenomenon into two (like what we experience as "lightning and thunder.", or in HH's description of Lolita's "light & fire"...) JF's translation of the Spanish seems to be faithful enough: good for you Jerry!.
Stan K-B observed off-L [ in relation to "what does "mollittude" mean in VN 's sentence "the luxury and mollitude of my first Villa Venus"] -"We can never answer for sure the general question "What does this word mean?" We can list possible meanings [...] there are contextual clues. It's a "quality" or "essence" or "state"[...]based on the rich root "moll-" (found in most Indo-European languages via the Proto-IE mil/mel/mol [to grind, whence milling flour etc]. So it's the state or quality associated with or encouraging being soft/gentle/complying/coaxing ..." SK-B also disagrees from my undisciplined interpretation of VN's "luxury", as being related to one of the seven deadly sins:"luxuria" [ it "has long lost its original Latin cognates. Had VN intended the Roman lascivious/sybaritic, he had many ways of saying so."]
JM: Every reader has the choice of "possible meanings" but, sensitivity to the song/light words, plus the context of a sentence, may add to our enjoyment. For me, mollittude is a spiky word... whereas mollittiousness is round and, perhaps, its "m" color is similar to the one VN's alphabet.
Let's take the antithetical "mol" (milling together a hardcore agent with its consequent softness) in VN's LATH. There we meet a dentist and his "name was Molnar with that n like a grain in a cavity; I used him some forty years later in A Kingdom by the Sea". Grain and spikes may turn into grating cosmicomic jokes**, but the sensations lying behind them are totally subjective. So often, when one interprets something one is merely appropriating it for oneself (it usually remains as a culturally-enforced or accidental secret).
..................................................
* - Cf. SO pages 7 and 14.
Also on p.45: "I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more".
There are R's words in Transparent Things: "... that book will not be written - not merely because a dying man cannot write books but because that particular one would never express in one flash what can only be understood immediately."
Concerning visions, there is a very early poem written by VN in 1921 ( I have it only in Spanish): :"solo una palabra bastaría,/ para explicar todo el universo." ( "one single word would suffice to explain the entire universe"), or in his short-story (1923) "the Word": ..." the angel fixed his oblong diamond eyes on me - and I sensed that he had understood everything[...] Tell me what will save my country."[...]And fleetingly embracing my shoulders with his wings, the angel uttered a single word [...] I cried out the word, taking delight in each syllable[...] I do not remember what it is I cried out.
**- I keep forgetting to mention Italo Calvino's collection of fabulous stories published in 1965, the "Cosmicomics".
.....................................................................
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/