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[NABOKOV-L] Wandering in a crystal landscape
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Kinbote writes: "Knowing Shade's combinational turn of mind and subtle sense of harmonic balance, I cannot imagine that he intended to deform the faces of his crystal by meddling with its predictable growth." (referring to Shade's poem, written in English).
He similarly considers Zembla his "crystal land" and a snowflake, settling on Shade's watch, is like "crystal on crystal."
I'm mentioning these items to stress the importance of the angular world of snow and rock crystals in "Pale Fire," the flashing arrows of light streaming out from prisms and crystal mirrors. In a crystal world nothing is well-rounded and softly ondulating. This sets a curious contrast to Nabokov's other poem, when he describes his feel of the Russian landscape, objects, alphabet, verse as round and bent (Cf. "An Evening of Russian Poetry") and closes it with a list of words in Russian.
"On mellow hills the Greek, as you remember,
fashioned his alphabet from cranes in flight;
his arrows crossed the sunset, then the night.
Our simple skyline and a taste for timber,
The influence of hives and conifers,
reshaped the arrows and the borrowed birds.
...all hangs together - shape and sound
heather and honey, vessel and content.
Not only rainbows - every line is bent,
and skulls and seeds and all good words are round,
like Russian verse, like our colossal vowels:
those painted eggs, those glossy pitcher flowers
that swallow whole a golden bumblebee
those shells that hold a thimble and the sea."
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Bessonitza, tvoy vzor oonyl I strashen;
lubov' moya, outsoopnika prostee.
(Insomnia, your stare is dull and ashen,
my love, forgive me this apostasy.)
I wonder if the characterization of Zembla as "a crystal land" and the poem as a crystal would in any way result from Nabokov's deliberate effort to express how the new landscape relates to the sensations that impinge on him when he inhabits the English language, namely, his dolorous "apostasy" of the Russian world.
Nabokov affirmed several times that he doesn't think in words but in images. And yet, when the time is ripe to transform his vision into verse and his colored Russian letters, into English consonants and vowels, would the difference he felt be clear cut enough to bring back the angularity he found in the Greek words, unsoftened by the Russian ones, in his employ of texture and sound in his verses? *
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* This is question is not very rational but it's intended to set rolling a different (emotional, synesthetic, regretful) thread in our discussion.
(It took me some time before I realized the excruciating pain contained in Nabokov's closing lines in the poem quoted above. May be I'm too slow...)
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