VF: I
wonder, are there cultures which do NOT distinguish OGON' or PLAMYA (fire) from
SVET (light)?
JM:How about the English word
"lighter" for the flame-producing instrument used to "light a
cigarette"?
GS ( to V.Fet's ...VN's novel is NOT called "Pale
Light"..): True, but to be precise I replaced 'light' (свет) not 'fire' with 'gift' (дар).
In the sense that "Pale Fire" and "The Gift" are synonyms.
JM: I thought I had understood your
original comparison ( light/gift), even though I speak no Russian. Now I'm
confused because visually these words (ogon, plamya, svet, ceem, dar) look very
different. The clue is in Lermontov?
R.S.Gwynn: VN is a late-born symboliste who dislikes "symbol" as a
literary term, with many good reasons [...]The details in his own works gain
that status (symbolic?) by the way that certain images are repeated and dwelt
upon [...] Perhaps "metaphoric" is a term that is better than "allegoric" in
dealing with how VN uses his life in his work. "Allegoric" is a prose
term; "metaphoric" is a poetic one. We are, after all, dealing with a
poet here.
JM: A sentence such as "Gone the panache of steam, gone the thunder and blaze, gone the
romance of the railroad" (SO, Vintage,p.203) is, indeed a consumate
poet's, the movement of the train, sound and visual images -
mainly the the compression of past bravura and elegance, round gestures
with a feathered hat - and the white plumes of steam in
"panache": absolute novelty by one single word placed in the
right place.
"Panache" is more than an analogy and more than a
"symbol." It is actually a precise and objective description of a
perceived scene but, at the same time, it is so much more than
that! Would "metaphor" be
also adequate?
On p.44, also in SO: "I have never
been able to see any generic difference between poetry and artistic prose. As a
matter of fact, I would be inclined to define a good poem of any length as a
concentrate of good prose with or without the addition of recurrent rhythm and
rhyme [...]in plain prose there are also certain rhythmic patterns, the
music of precise phrasing, the beat of thought rendered by recurrent
peculiarities of idim and intonation. As in today's scientific classifications,
there is a lot of overlapping in our concept of poetry and prose today. The
bamboo bridge between them is the metaphor ."