Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov [79]
Lines 671-672: The Untamed Seahorse
See Browning’s My Last Duchess.
See it and condemn the fashionable device of entitling a collection of essays or a volume of poetry—or a long poem, alas—with a phrase lifted from a more or less celebrated poetical work of the past. Such titles possess a specious glamor acceptable maybe in the names of vintage wines and plump courtesans but only degrading in regard to the talent that substitutes the easy allusiveness of literacy for original fancy and shifts onto a bust’s shoulders the responsibility for ornateness since anybody can flip through a Midsummer-Night’s Dream or Romeo and Juliet, or, perhaps, the Sonnets and take his pick.
Line 678: into French
Two of these translations appeared in the August number of the Nouvelle Revue Canadienne which reached College Town bookshops in the last week of July, that is at a time of sadness and mental confusion when good taste forbade me to show Sybil Shade some of the critical notes I made in my pocket diary.
In her version of Donne’s famous Holy Sonnet X composed in his widowery:
Death be not proud, though some have calléd thee
Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so
one deplores the superfluous ejaculation in the second line introduced there only to coagulate the caesura:
Ne soit pas fière, Mort! Quoique certains te disent
Et puissante et terrible, ah, Mort, tu ne l’es pas
and while the enclosed rhyme “so-overthrow” (lines 2-3) is fortunate in finding an easy counterpart in pas-bas, one objects to the enclosing disent-prise rhymes (1-4) which in a French sonnet of circa 1617 would be an impossible infringement of the visual rule.
I have no space here to list a number of other blurrings and blunders in this Canadian version of the Dean of St. Paul’s denouncement of Death, that slave—not only to “fate” and “chance”—but also to us (“kings and desperate men”).
The other poem, Andrew Marvell’s “The Nymph on the Death of her Fawn,” seems to be, technically, even tougher to stuff into French verse. If in the Donne translation, Miss Irondell was perfectly justified in matching English pentameters with French Alexandrines, I doubt that here she should have preferred l’impair and accommodated with nine syllables what Marvell fits into eight. In the lines:
And, quite regardless of my smart,
Left me his fawn but took his heart
which come out as:
Et se moquant bien de ma douleur
Me laissa son faon, mais pris son coeur
one regrets that the translator, even with the help of an ampler prosodie womb, did not manage to fold in the long legs of her French fawn, and render “quite regardless of” by “sans le moindre égard pour” or something of the sort. Further on, the couplet
Thy love was far more better than
The love of false and cruel man
though translated literally:
Que ton amour était fort meilleur
Qu’amour d’homme cruel et trompeur
is not as pure idiomatically as might seem at first glance. And finally, the lovely closule:
Had it lived long it would have been
Lilies without, roses within
contains in our lady’s French not only a solecism but also that kind of illegal run-on which a translator is guilty of, when passing a stop sign:
Il aurait été, s’il eut longtemps
Vécu, lys dehors, roses dedans.
How magnificently those two lines can be mimed and rhymed in our magic Zemblan (“the tongue of the mirror,” as the great Conmal has termed it)!
Id wodo bin, war id lev lan,
Indran iz lil ut roz nitran.
Line 680: Lolita
Major hurricanes are given feminine names in America. The feminine gender is suggested not so much by the sex of furies and harridans as by a general professional application. Thus any machine is a she to its fond user, and any fire (even a “pale” one!) is she to the fireman, as water is she to the passionate plumber. Why our poet chose to give his 1958 hurricane a little-used Spanish name (sometimes given to parrots) instead of Linda or Lois, is not clear.
Line 681: gloomy Russians spied
There is really nothing metaphysical, or racial, about this gloom. It is merely the outward sign of congested nationalism and a provincial