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Fwd: Jakobson, Pale Fire
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Dear list,
In his published lecture "Co je poezie" (What is poetry?), 1934, Roman
Jakobson, comes up with the following (tr. M.Heim):
"The borderline dividing what is a work of poetry from what is not is
less stable than the frontiers of the Chinese empire's territories.
Novalis and Mallarmé regarded the alphabet as the greatest work of
poetry. Russian poets have admired the poetic qualities of a wine list
(Vjazemskij), an inventory of the tsar's clothes (Gogol'), a timetable
(Pasternak) and even a laundry bill (Krucenyx) How many poets now claim
that reportage is a more artistic genre than the novel or short story?
[...]
Do not believe the critic who rakes a poet over the coals in the name of
the True and the Natural. All he has in fact done is to reject one
poetic school, that is, one set of devices deforming material in the
name of another poetic school, another set of deformational devices. The
artist is playing no less a game when he announces that this time he is
dealing with naked Wahrheit rather than Dichtung as when he assures his
audience that a given work is sheer invention, that "poetry as a whole
is one big lie, and the poet who fails to lie audaciously from the word
go is worthless"."
Have this piece in general or this passage in particular already been
linked to Nabokov, for example Speak,Memory (the "precious" letters of
the alphabet given to him by his mother) or Pale Fire (the tedious
commentary form (sorry) becoming itself "poetical")?
More generally speaking, why is it so hard to find bibliography on
Jakobson and Nabokov, and why do commentators, when discussing the issue
of Nabokov's "formalism", concentrate on Sklovskij and his LEF-period
views, and not on the more subtle (if less "mediatic") formalists such
as Tynjanov or Eichenbaum and on the Prague Circle (in my eyes, the true
successor of formalism, not the LEF), who, as the above extract
purportedly shows, are far closer to Nabokov's poetics? (If I'm being
ignorant, please shower me with references and I'll happily shut up...)
Greetings from Praha,
PF
PS: For those of you on the Joyce thread, the article contains
interesting comments about the relation between the salacious diaries
(in this case those of the czech romantic poet Karel Hynek Macha) and
the lyric poetry of a given author, Jakobson implies (with explicit
reference to Joyce) that a modern poet would publish the diary rather
than the poems.
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