Subject
Re: [NABOKOV] [ THOUGHTS] Gradus and Shade converge on a
birthday; Ashen Glow and Pale Fire
birthday; Ashen Glow and Pale Fire
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Samuel Schuman: Also of great interest in this concluding paragraph of Pale Fire, of course, is the blurring of the line between Kinbote and his maker ("I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art"), coupled with the speaker's theist reference to another maker ("God will help me..."). Who is the "me?" Who, for that matter, is the "God?"
Jansy In a typical equivocation we read about an "old, happy, healthy, heterosexual* Russian, a writer in exile" and Vladimir Nabokov hiumself seems to enter to overtake Kinbote. But Nabokov was he then "sans fame, sans future, sans audience"? Certainly not. Another Prof. Pnin dashing away in a little blue car?
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* the insistent "h-sounds" and the three "sans" that seem so familiar... where do they come from?
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For those who are interested, a little more on Ashen Glow, Earthshine and Leonardo, with a passage through icicles, botkins...
Wrote C.Kinbote:
Lines 39-40: [Was close my eyes to reproduce the leaves,/ Or indoor scene, or trophies of the eaves.]
These lines are represented in the drafts by a variant reading: and home would haste my thieves,/40 The sun with stolen ice, the moon with leaves. One cannot help recalling a passage in Timon of Athens (Act IV, Scene 3) ... for the purpose of quick citation to retranslate this passage into English prose from a Zemblan poetical version of Timon...
The sun is a thief: she lures the sea
and robs it. The moon is a thief:
he steals his silvery light from the sun.
The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.
Da Vinci's Explanation of the lumen cinereum in the moon:
Having proved that the part of the moon that shines consists of water, which mirrors the body of the sun and reflects the radiance it receives from it; and that, if these waters were devoid of waves, it would appear small, but of a radiance almost like the sun...[...] Some have thought that the moon has a light of its own, but this opinion is false, because they have founded it on that dim light seen between the hornes of the new moon[...] And that brightness at such a time itself is derived from our ocean and other inland-seas. These are, at that time, illuminated by the sun which is already setting in such a way as that the sea then fulfils the same function to the dark side of the moon as the moon at its fifteenth day does to us when the sun is set... Taken from The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci edited by Jean Paul Richter, 1880.
......................................................
The theme of eaves, ice and leaves, now linked to sun and moon as thieves, reappears in another set of variant lines( with the sound of stillicide ringing in "still life in her style"?):
her room...
SHADE:
We've kept intact. Its trivia create
A still life in her style: the paperweight
Of convex glass enclosing a lagoon,
The verse book open at the Index (Moon,
Moonrise, Moor, Moral),...
KINBOTE VARIANT:
We've kept intact. Her trivia for us
Retrace her style: the leaf sarcophagus
(A Luna's dead and shriveled-up cocoon)
I suspect Shade altered this passage because his moth's name clashed with "Moon" in the next line.
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Jansy In a typical equivocation we read about an "old, happy, healthy, heterosexual* Russian, a writer in exile" and Vladimir Nabokov hiumself seems to enter to overtake Kinbote. But Nabokov was he then "sans fame, sans future, sans audience"? Certainly not. Another Prof. Pnin dashing away in a little blue car?
....................................
* the insistent "h-sounds" and the three "sans" that seem so familiar... where do they come from?
...................................
For those who are interested, a little more on Ashen Glow, Earthshine and Leonardo, with a passage through icicles, botkins...
Wrote C.Kinbote:
Lines 39-40: [Was close my eyes to reproduce the leaves,/ Or indoor scene, or trophies of the eaves.]
These lines are represented in the drafts by a variant reading: and home would haste my thieves,/40 The sun with stolen ice, the moon with leaves. One cannot help recalling a passage in Timon of Athens (Act IV, Scene 3) ... for the purpose of quick citation to retranslate this passage into English prose from a Zemblan poetical version of Timon...
The sun is a thief: she lures the sea
and robs it. The moon is a thief:
he steals his silvery light from the sun.
The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.
Da Vinci's Explanation of the lumen cinereum in the moon:
Having proved that the part of the moon that shines consists of water, which mirrors the body of the sun and reflects the radiance it receives from it; and that, if these waters were devoid of waves, it would appear small, but of a radiance almost like the sun...[...] Some have thought that the moon has a light of its own, but this opinion is false, because they have founded it on that dim light seen between the hornes of the new moon[...] And that brightness at such a time itself is derived from our ocean and other inland-seas. These are, at that time, illuminated by the sun which is already setting in such a way as that the sea then fulfils the same function to the dark side of the moon as the moon at its fifteenth day does to us when the sun is set... Taken from The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci edited by Jean Paul Richter, 1880.
......................................................
The theme of eaves, ice and leaves, now linked to sun and moon as thieves, reappears in another set of variant lines( with the sound of stillicide ringing in "still life in her style"?):
her room...
SHADE:
We've kept intact. Its trivia create
A still life in her style: the paperweight
Of convex glass enclosing a lagoon,
The verse book open at the Index (Moon,
Moonrise, Moor, Moral),...
KINBOTE VARIANT:
We've kept intact. Her trivia for us
Retrace her style: the leaf sarcophagus
(A Luna's dead and shriveled-up cocoon)
I suspect Shade altered this passage because his moth's name clashed with "Moon" in the next line.
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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