Subject
[NABOKOV-LIST] [Translation] the card's fat worm metamorphoses
into a butterfly? & Natasha
into a butterfly? & Natasha
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Charles Kinbote, in his Foreword to Pale Fire, discerns the unity of Shade´s poem: "It contains not one gappy line, not one doubtful reading" (PF, 14). This is why he disclaims that Shade's poem is merely fragmentary (unlike TOOL) and that it is not simply "a small fraction of the composition he saw in a glass,darkly...
In the poem itself we find: "Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass/ Hang all the furniture above the grass," and here Kinbote's words (glass,darkly) are echoed (dark glass).
If the number of lines in Shade's poem may appear suggestive of a long fat neunhundertneunundneunzig worm then its metamorphosis into a butterfly ( the poem's butterfly-wing shape) confirms Kinbote's assessment.
The the complete butterfly is already present in the worm.
SES invites us to discuss Nabokov's ' "Natasha," the 1924 story that has just been translated by Dmitri Nabokov and published in the New Yorker' although " less formally structured this time".
She notes: It's unusual for Nabokov to make a female character the center of consciousness in a story, particularly when the plot emphasizes her desirability.
According to Alexey Sklyarenko, among the already published short-stories, there is only one female narrator, Maria Vasilevna, in "Slice of Life".
I vote for SES's suggestion to work on "Natscha".
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