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Re: Ron Rosenbaum At Slate Is Wrong About Nabokov's Pale Fire ...
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S.Klein forwards item posted by S.J.Gertz): "What remains puzzling about this is that every Nabokov fan on the planet was likely aware of the Arion Press first separate edition of 1994 and yet I don't recall headlines heralding a new Nabokov controversy as a result of its printing. And Hoyem's essay has been around for thirteen years, plenty of time for Nabokov critics and scholars to engage in a literary food fight. There was none that I can recall. Is it possible that the only controversy here is that Ron Rosenbuam may be shilling for his friend, Mo Cohen of Gingko Press?" [The poem 'Pale Fire' ...published in its first separate edition in 1994, by Arion Press in San Francisco. ]
JM: My digital illiteracy impedes me to find again a link, present in Sandy Klein's/Gertz's original posting, from which I read that the book was published only for a selected few (the only reminder of that notice lies in the reproduction of the book's colophon, laid out by Andrew Hoyem, namely, a handwritten notice that this was "copy 126").
Methinks we're confronted with two distinct editorial strategies: "Pale Fire" for the "elect" (a collectible) versus "Pale Fire" for the world ( a different kind of "collector's item"). Apparently the first option didn't engage Nabokov critics and scholars as much as it hads been expected to.
Leaving collector's and businesspeople's interests out, I ask: In the universe of Nabokov scholarship which of these two editions (if any of them) will make a ("the") difference?
Sandy Klein second link [ http://www.dailytidings.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100728/NEWS02/7280308/-1/NEWSMAP ] : "Nabokov used the same language to describe the Blue butterfly in his scientific writing as he did to describe Lolita in his novel, Pyle said. "This is Nabokov's big caper, that he used some of the same language to describe the girl and the butterfly," he said. "He probably wondered if anyone would ever notice." Just as Humphrey loved Lolita, Nabokov loved butterflies..."
JM: When I read "Lines Written in Oregon," by Vladimir Nabokov, in the Mount Ashland context, I was struck by something that carried me away from butterflies and nymphets.
Maar has pointed out to the presence of the "Esmeralda-Mermaid" theme in Thomas Mann and to the recurrent lines about greens (Lucette, for example) and mermaids in Nabokov's work (btw: I'm writing from memory & not confronting any former Nab-L postings).
My recollection of emerald greens also brings to my mind's ears the gusto with which Nabokov read the word "esmeralda" in an old recording of the poem. Until today, though, I'd never realized that, in a way, "Esmeralda" may also indicate Nabokov's lost childhood in Russia, its magic, its fairies.
I got the impression that among the butterflies in Oregon's greens Nabokov encountered, once more, that particular "unreal estate" he always longed for and despaired of finding again. His immemorial Russia, as in the lines: "Here, in the bewitched and blest/Mountain forests of the West/ .../Damzel, anchoret, and ranger/Share the woodland's dream and danger./And to think I deemed you dead!/(In a dungeon, it was said;/Tortured, strangled); but instead -/ Blue birds from the bluest fable,/.../Huddled road signs softly speak/Of Lake Merlin, Castle Creek,/.../Do you recognize that clover?/.../And I rest where I awoke/ In the sea shade - l'ombre glauque -/.../Esmeralda, immer, immer." (excerpts from the poem presented as a courtesy of Shelley Austin, executive director of the Jackson County Library Foundation, from SK's forwarded article). Reality, indeed, "is a very subjective affair."
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