Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0023915, Fri, 12 Apr 2013 23:22:03 -0300

Subject
[NABOKV] [THOUGHTS] Traditional poets...cosmic
synchronicity...heroic couplets...
From
Date
Body
Carolyn Kunin recently brought up Galya Diment's "Pniniad" to our List. While trying to explore electronic links related to Nabokov's poetry, I came across another reference to Galya Diment: "Nabokov and Joyce: Portraits of Innovative Writers as Conservative Poets, where the dichotomy between traditional poetry and innovative prose is explored:

"It was in his poetry that Nabokov experienced the most direct influence of others [ ] it is here that he borrowed, not stole. While his prose in both Russian and English is distinctly Nabokovian, no matter what the outside influences could have been, as a poet he does not have a strongly individual presence"(Diment 1991,25).

Paul D. Morris, the author of "Vladimir Nabokov: Poetry and the Lyric Voice" (2011), who quoted these lines, observes that G.Diment's "reading leaves little space for the critical acknowledgment of, for example, the narrative quality of Nabokov's poetry or those poems which highlight the plasticity and physicality of the poet's relation to language and the natural environment or, much less, the - for Nabokov - central experience of cosmic synchronicity where in the distinction between body and soul is transcended in a moment of heightened consciousness and physical dissolution [ ]"

Although scholars may find my clippings redundant, they might be of interest to the more general VN readers (like me):
1. Excerpt from Wikipedia on Nabokov's "Notes on Prosody," concerning the differences between Russian and English Verse:
"The primary source of the differences between Russian and English verse is that English has many one syllable nouns, verbs, and adjectives, where Russian words typically have many syllables, and carry only a single invariable stress. The iambic rhythm of alternating accented and unaccented syllables is relatively natural in English, whereas in Russian speech many unaccented syllables may quite naturally occur in sequence.
English Iambic Tetrameters: scudless lines are more common than scudded lines.;Sequences of scudded lines are short.;Scuds are frequently associated with weak monosyllables, duplex tilts, and scudded rhymes (in the final foot); Scuds in feet 1 and 2 about as frequently as in foot 3; scuds in foot 4 are rare. The line is weighted accentually towards its end.Feminine rhymes are "scarce, insipid, or burlesque" Elisions are relatively common.
Russian Iambic Tetrameters: scudded lines are much more common than scudless lines. Scuds often form linked patterns from line to line, often in sequences of twenty or more lines.. Sequences of scudless lines rarely occur in sequences ;longer than two or three lines.Scuds are frequently associated with the unaccented syllables of long words; there are almost no duplex tilts. Rhymes are not scudded (that is, there is no scud in the final foot).Scuds in foot 3 are by far the most common. The line is weighted accentually towards its beginning.Feminine rhymes are as frequent as masculine ones. There are strictly speaking no elisions of any kind."

2. Excerpt from Edmund Wilson's "The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov" (July,1965)

"Mr. Nabokov, before the publication of his own translation of Evgeni Onegin, took up a good deal of space in these pages to denounce a previous translation by Professor Walter Arndt. [ ] Professor Arndt had attempted the tour de force of translating the whole of Onegin into the original iambic tetrameter and rather intricate stanza form. Mr. Nabokov decided that this could not be done with any real fidelity to the meaning and undertook to make a "literal" translation which maintains an iambic base but quite often simply jolts into prose [ ] It has produced a bald and awkward language which has nothing in common with Pushkin or with the usual writing of Nabokov. One knows Mr. Nabokov's virtuosity in juggling with the English language, the prettiness and wit of his verbal inventions. One knows also the perversity of his tricks to startle or stick pins in the reader; and one suspects that his perversity here has been exercised in curbing his brilliance; that-with his sado-masochistic Dostoevskian tendencies so acutely noted by Sartre *-he seeks to torture both the reader and himself by flattening Pushkin out and denying to his own powers the scope for their full play.abokov does not quite understand, as he occasionally betrays, in his otherwise delightful English verse, when he momentarily runs off the rails, and as he makes very plain in this essay. In order to deal with English verse, you need to talk about only five feet: the iambus, the trochee, the anapaest, the dactyl, and the spondee. The very conception of the spondee seems for some reason to irritate Nabokov. He denies that real spondees exist, for the strange reason that "no poem, not even a couplet, can be wholly made up of them." [ ] This appendix, however, contains admirable pages on the differences between Russian and English. For example: " The Russian iambic tetrameter [the meter in which Onegin is written] is a solid, polished, disciplined thing, with rich concentrated meaning and lofty melody fused in an organic entity: It has said in Russian what the pentameter has said in English, and the hexameter in French. Now on the other hand, the English iambic tetrameter is a hesitating, loose, capricious form, always in danger of having its opening semeion chopped off, or of being diluted by a recurrent trimeter, or of developing a cadential lilt. The English form has been instrumental in producing a quantity of admirable short poems but has never achieved anything approaching, either in sheer length or artistic importance, a stanzaic romance comparable to Eugene Onegin.'."

3. A sighting from implicatedisorder.wordpress.com/.../emily-dickin... - In relation to the frequently used metres in English poetry, "the iambic pentameter is the most common, probably entering the language through Chaucer in imitation of his Italian inspirations before being mastered by Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser. John Milton's Paradise Lost, most sonnets and an estimated three quarters of most everything else is written in iambic pentameter.[ ] Lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter are commonly known as blank verse (think of the plays of Shakespeare and the great works of Milton). If they rhyme, they are heroic couplets - think Pope or Dryden. Heroic couplets were perhaps overused in the 18th century to the point they're now mostly used for comic effect, though Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire would be a notable exception." .

...................................

* C.Kunin, you mentioned John Bailey in a recent posting. At the time I was reminded of Iris Murdoch, whose booklet on Sartre I read while still a wide-eyed adolescent. It occurred to me that Bailey might have been influenced by Sartre's negative views on Nabokov - but I couldn't find the article to indicate it to you or to check that hunch. After I re-read. Edmund Wilson's famous article, with his mention to Nabokov's "sado-masochistic tendencies...noted by Sartre," I was led back to that one query of yours. It's not a very good explanation, sure, but perhaps it can encourage others to ponder the eggs you've been offering to the VN-L...

btw: When I mentioned the name of one of the translators of the Russian poems to Portuguese, I made a mistake when I wrote his name down. Instead of Boris Schneider read Boris Schnaiderman.
A mispelling in another posting transformed "pursuit" into 'pusauit". Sorry.

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/







Attachment