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[EO Commentary Three IV p.329 on a hundred-eyed beast
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While searching for VN's words about chert and cherta in his major translation of EO, I came accross a set of notes where Nabokov comments on Pushkin's line "What silly country"
"This line is curiously echoed by I.6 (Kakie grústnie mestá) of Tyutchev's famous little poem ( ) written in 1830, published in 1837 in Pushkin's literary review The Contemporary, Sovremnik ):
The crumbly sand is knee-high,
We're driving late. The day is darkening,
and on the road the shadows of the pines
into one shadow have already fused.
Blacker and denser is the deep pine wood,
What melancholy country!
Grim night like a hundred-eyed beast
looks out of every bush.
Then he adds: "As has been pointed out by Russian critics, the image in II. 7-8 is an improvement upon a metaphor in Goethe's Willkommen und Abschied: 'Wo Finsternis aus dem Gesträuche mit hundert schwarzen Augen sah'." Cf. Eugene Onegin, a Novel in Verse, vol. II (Three: IV pag 329)
Together with the Russian critics, Nabokov emphasizes a reference to Goethe's "Willkommen und Abschied" only. After all other similar metaphors could not be included in his notes to EO because they were unfamiliar to Pushkin. However, at this point, Nabokov's words related to the "hundred-eyed beast" led me back to J.L.Borges's observations about poetic metaphors. To my surprise I discovered that I had already posted several paragraphs mentioning these images in the VN-List - and also Tyutchev's poem [ in the note to the Princeton Bollingen 1990 (faulty) edition we find that Nabokov chose the translation he'd made in 1951-1957.]
As it happens now, I'm seldom able to recover the complete information related to an old posting when I use the Google (there appear no dates and no signatures...) This is why I will reproduce it directly, with no further links.
The recovered posting:
Nabokov must have valued Fyodor Tyutchev's poetry more than one may surmise from the poet's biographical sketch VN wrote.
One poem in particular deserved three versions (but only two are acknowledged, in the Index, under the translated title "The Journey", although all three were selected for printing). It struck a familiar chord that led me to Borges and Umberto Eco.
Fyodor Tyutchev's poem ( written in 1830) describes a bleak neighborhood at dusk, when all the shadows merge into one and riders are sunk knee-deep in powdery sand.
The lines that interested me were (following VN's three versions):
(a) "Moody night peers like a hundred-eyed beast/ out of every bush in the wood" ( 1941-44);
(b) "Grim night like a beast with a hundred eyes/ peers out of the underwood" (41-44);
(c) "Grim night like a hundred-eyed beast/ looks out of every bush." (1951-57)
Umberto Eco, writing about artistic representation of distance, time and space, mentioned a technique which he relates to ancient texts that deal with the "sublime": the hard to define "hipotiposis." The zoomorphization of natural events also gives rise to several examples in this category. In one of them he describes Walt Disney's Snow-White's flight into a dark forest, while, in her terror, she feels the shadows merge and, from every bush, a hundred shining eyes that are watching her. Nabokov, in his early novels, often resorts to the anthropomorfization and personification of inanimate things. This brings out an alarmingly, or amusingly observant world - and it often endows his style with a vertiginous cinematic quality.
In his translation of Tyutchev's verses there are emphatic substitutions (moody/grim; peers out/looks out; every bush in the wood/underwood/ every bush; beast with a hundred eyes/ a hundred-eyed beast), as if he were still striving after a special audio-visual volume.
J.L.Borges, in his lecture on metaphors, examines how shared images serve to express different moods. When he departs from metaphors that associate "eyes" and "stars", he mentions a poem, which he supposes was authored by Plato himself :
"I would like to be the night because I would then be able to shield your sleep with a thousand eyes."
His second example offers a common image: " Stars are watching us from on-high".
The third comes from Chesterton's "A second childhood":
"But I shall not grow too old to see enormous night arise,/A cloud that is larger than the world/And a monster made of eyes."
According to Borges, in the first instance the poet is expressing protective tenderness, in the second, we encounter the divine indiference towards human worries. In the third, a once familiar night is turned into a nightmare. Tyutchev's night is similarly haunting. There is no reference in it to stars nor skies. Darkness lies low like a multi-eyed beast that is ready to jump on a prey.
There is a metaphor indicating a kind of opposite operation, found in G.M. Hopkins' poem "As dragonflies draw fire" ( it is the godhead that shines through a thousand eyes and in the "features of man's faces")
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PS: by: Jansy Mello, April 27,2012.
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