In Canto Two of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN's novel Pale Fire, 1962) tells about his dead daughter. Asking her mother what this or that word means, Hazel Shade mentions the word sempiternal:
She was my darling - difficult, morose -
But still my darling. You remember those
Almost unruffled evenings when we played
Mah-jongg, or she tried on your furs, which made
Her almost fetching; and the mirrors smiled,
The lights were merciful, the shadows mild,
Sometimes I'd help her with a Latin text,
Or she'd be reading in her bedroom, next
To my fluorescent lair, and you would be
In your own study, twice removed from me,
And I would hear both voices now and then:
"Mother, what's grimpen?" "What is what?" "Grim Pen."
Pause, and your guarded scholium. Then again:
"Mother, what's chtonic?" That, too, you'd explain,
Appending, "Would you like a tangerine?"
"No. Yes. And what does sempiternal mean?"
You'd hesitate. And lustily I'd roar
The answer from my desk through the closed door. (ll. 357-376)
The word sempiternal was used by T. S. Eliot at the beginning of Little Gidding, the fourth and final poem of Eliot's Four Quartets (a book that Hazel is reading):
Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic. (I)
In philosophy and theology, sempiternity is "existence within time but infinitely into the future, as opposed to eternity, understood as existence outside time." The adjective sempiternal (eternal and unchanging; everlasting) combines semper (Lat., always) with aeternus (Lat., etern). Semper = sempre (Italian for "always"). In Chapter Eight (XXXV: 14) of Eugene Onegin Pushkin uses the prhase e sempre bene (it's always good):
Стал вновь читать он без разбора.
Прочел он Гиббона, Руссо,
Манзони, Гердера, Шамфора,
Madame de Stael, Биша, Тиссо,
Прочел скептического Беля,
Прочел творенья Фонтенеля,
Прочел из наших кой-кого,
Не отвергая ничего:
И альманахи, и журналы,
Где поученья нам твердят,
Где нынче так меня бранят,
А где такие мадригалы
Себе встречал я иногда:
Е sempre bene, господа.
Again, without discrimination,
he started reading. He read Gibbon,
Rousseau, Manzoni, Herder,
Chamfort, Mme de Staël, Bichat, Tissot.
He read the skeptic Bayle,
he read the works of Fontenelle,
he read some [authors] of our own,
without rejecting anything —
the “almanacs” and the reviews
where sermons into us are drummed,
where I'm today abused so much
but where such madrigals addressed tome
I used to meet with now and then:
e sempre bene, gentlemen.
In his EO Commentary (vol. II, pp. 310-311) VN points out that in his great poem Ya pamyatnkik sebe vozdvig… (“Exegi monumentum,” 1836) Pushkin line for line parodies Derzhavin’s Pamyatnik (1795). Derzhavin's poem begins with the line Ya pamyatnkik sebe vozdvig chudesnyi, vechnyi (I built myself a monument miraculous, eternal):
Я памятник себе воздвиг чудесный, вечный,
Металлов тверже он и выше пирамид;
Ни вихрь его, ни гром не сломит быстротечный,
И времени полет его не сокрушит.
I built myself a monument miraculous, eternal,
It is harder than metals and higher than the pyramids;
Swift winds and thunder cannot knock it down
The flight of time cannot demolish it.
In his unfinished last poem (composed on July 6, 1816, two days before his death) Derzhavin mentions vechnost' (eternity):
Река времён в своём стремленьи
Уносит все дела людей
И топит в пропасти забвенья
Народы, царства и царей.
А если что и остаётся
Чрез звуки лиры и трубы,
То вечности жерлом пожрётся
И общей не уйдёт судьбы.
Time’s river in its rushing course
carries away all human things,
drowns in oblivion’s abyss
peoples and kingdoms and their kings.
And if the trumpet or the lyre
should rescue something, small or great,
eternity will gulp it down
and it will share the common fate.
(transl. P. France)
The pyramids mentioned by Derzhavin in the second line of his imitation of Horace bring to mind the Ancient Egyptians who, according to Gottfried Semper (a German architect, 1803-79, who designed and built the Dresden Opera House, die Semperoper), used the situlae (pl. of situla, Latin for bucket or pail) to scoop water from the Nile. Describing his escape from the Royal Palace in Onhava, Kinbote (Shade's mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions a seaside situla (toy pail) that he saw in the secret passage leading to the Royal Theater:
His English tutor who, after a picnic in Mandevil Forest, was laid up with a sprained ankle, did not know where that circus might be; he advised looking for it in an old lumber room at the end of the West Gallery. Thither the Prince betook himself. That dusty black trunk? It looked grimly negative. The rain was more audible here owing to the proximity of a prolix gutter pipe. What about the closet? Its gilt key turned reluctantly. All three shelves and the space beneath were stuffed with disparate objects: a palette with the dregs of many sunsets; a cupful of counters; an ivory backscratcher, a thirty-twomo edition of Timon of Athens translated into Zemblan by his uncle Conmal, the Queen's brother; a seaside situla (toy pail); a sixty-five-carat blue diamond accidentally added in his childhood, from his late father's knickknackatory, to the pebbles and shells in that pail; a finger of chalk; and a square board with a design of interlaced figures for some long-forgotten game. He was about to look elsewhere in the closet when on trying to dislodge a piece of black velvet, one corner of which had unaccountably got caught behind the shelf, something gave, the shelf budged, proved removable, and revealed just under its farther edge, in the back of the closet, a keyhole to which the same gilt key was found to fit. (note to Line 130)
In his poem Snimok ("The Snapshot," 1927) included in Poems and Problems (1973) VN mentions vedertso (a toy pail) and dve lopaty (two beach spades):
На пляже в полдень лиловатый,
в морском каникульном раю
снимал купальщик полосатый
свою счастливую семью.
И замирает мальчик голый,
и улыбается жена,
в горячий свет, в песок веселый,
как в серебро, погружена.
И полосатым человеком
направлен в солнечный песок,
мигнул и щелкнул черным веком
фотографический глазок.
Запечатлела эта пленка
все, что могла она поймать:
оцепеневшего ребенка,
его сияющую мать,
и ведерцо, и две лопаты,
и в стороне песчаный скат.
И я, случайный соглядатай,
на заднем плане тоже снят.
Зимой в неведомом мне доме
покажут бабушке альбом,
и будет снимок в том альбоме,
и буду я на снимке том:
мой облик меж людьми чужими,
один мой августовский день,
моя не знаемая ими,
вотще украденная тень.
Upon the beach at violet-blue noon,
in a vacational Elysium
a striped bather took
a picture of his happy family.
And very still stood his small naked boy,
and his wife smiled,
in ardent light, in sandy bliss
plunged as in silver.
An by the striped man
directed at the sunny sand
blinked with a click of its black eyelid
the camera's ocellus.
That bit of film imprinted
all it could catch,
the stirless child, his radiant mother,
and a toy pail and two beach spades,
and some way off a bank of sand,
and I, the accidental spy,
I in the background have been also taken.
Next winter, in an unknown house,
grandmother will be shown an album,
and in that album there will be a snapshot,
and in that snapshot I shall be.
My likeness among strangers,
one of my August days,
my shade they never noticed,
my shade they stole in vain.
In the secret passage the King notices the thirty-year-old patterned imprint of Oleg's shoe, as immortal as the tracks of an Egyptian child's tame gazelle made thirty centuries ago on blue Nilotic bricks drying in the sun:
The secret passage seemed to have grown more squalid. The intrusion of its surroundings was even more evident than on the day when two lads shivering in thin jerseys and shorts had explored it. The pool of opalescent ditch water had grown in length; along its edge walked a sick bat like a cripple with a broken umbrella. A remembered spread of colored sand bore the thirty-year-old patterned imprint of Oleg's shoe, as immortal as the tracks of an Egyptian child's tame gazelle made thirty centuries ago on blue Nilotic bricks drying in the sun. And, at the spot where the passage went through the foundations of a museum, there had somehow wandered down, to exile and disposal, a headless statue of Mercury, conductor of souls to the Lower World, and a cracked krater with two black figures shown dicing under a black palm. (ibid.)
In his poem Kirpichi ("The Bricks," 1928) VN mentions the footprints left by a little Egyptian boy, his dog and tame gazelle on some ten bricks that lie drying in the sun in the twelfth century BC:
Ища сокровищ позабытых
и фараоновых мощей,
ученый в тайниках разрытых
набрел на груду кирпичей,
среди которых был десяток
совсем особенных: они
хранили беглый отпечаток
босой младенческой ступни,
собачьей лапы и копытца
газели. Многое за них
лихому времени простится —
безрукий мрамор, темный стих,
обезображенные фрески…
Как это было? В синем блеске
я вижу красоту песков.
Жара. Полуденное время.
Еще одиннадцать веков
до звездной ночи в Вифлееме.
Кирпичик спит, пока лучи
пекут, работают беззвучно.
Он спит, пока благополучно
на солнце сохнут кирпичи.
Но вот по ним дитя ступает,
отцовский позабыв запрет,
то скачет, то перебегает,
невольный вдавливая след,
меж тем как, вкруг него играя,
собака и газель ручная
пускаются вперегонки.
Внезапно — окрик, тень руки:
конец летучему веселью.
Дитя с собакой и газелью
скрывается. Все горячей
синеет небо. Сохнут чинно
ряды лиловых кирпичей.
Улыбка вечности невинна.
Мир для слепцов необъясним,
но зрячим все понятно в мире,
и ни одна звезда в эфире,
быть может, не сравнится с ним.
A line in VN's poem, Ulybka vechnosti nevinna ("The smile of eternity is innocent"), makes one think of Professor C.'s ultramodern villa that eternity shall not dislodge:
Higher up on the same wooded hill stood, and still stands I trust, Dr. Sutton's old clapboard house and, at the very top, eternity shall not dislodge Professor C.'s ultramodern villa from whose terrace one can glimpse to the south the larger and sadder of the three conjoined lakes called Omega, Ozero, and Zero (Indian names garbled by early settlers in such a way as to accommodate specious derivations and commonplace allusions). On the northern side of the hill Dulwich Road joins the highway leading to Wordsmith University to which I shall devote here only a few words partly because all kinds of descriptive booklets should be available to the reader by writing to the University's Publicity Office, but mainly because I wish to convey, in making this reference to Wordsmith briefer than the notes on the Goldsworth and Shade houses, the fact that the college was considerably farther from them than they were from one another. It is probably the first time that the dull pain of distance is rendered through an effect of style and that a topographical idea finds its verbal expression in a series of foreshortened sentences.
After winding for about four miles in a general eastern direction through a beautifully sprayed and irrigated residential section with variously graded lawns sloping down on both sides, the highway bifurcates: one branch goes left to New Wye and its expectant airfield; the other continues to the campus. Here are the great mansions of madness, the impeccably planned dormitories - bedlams of jungle music - the magnificent palace of the Administration, the brick walls, the archways, the quadrangles blocked out in velvet green and chrysoprase, Spencer House and its lily pond, the Chapel, New Lecture Hall, the Library, the prisonlike edifice containing our classrooms and offices (to be called from now on Shade Hall), the famous avenue to all the trees mentioned by Shakespeare, a distant droning sound, the hint of a haze, the turquoise dome of the Observatory, wisps and pale plumes of cirrus, and the poplar-curtained Roman-tiered football field, deserted on summer days except for a dreamy-eyed youngster flying - on a long control line in a droning circle - a motor-powered model plane.
Dear Jesus, do something. (note to Lines 47-48)
Hazel Shade drowned in Lake Omega. Ozero is Russian for "lake." Lebedinoe ozero ("Swan Lake," 1877) is a ballet by Tchaykovsky (the composer who put to music Pushkin's Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades). Gottfried Semper was a friend of Richard Wagner (a German composer, 1813-83). Describing his insomnias, Kinbote mentions a Wagner record:
The Goldsworth château had many outside doors, and no matter how thoroughly I inspected them and the window shutters downstairs at bedtime, I never failed to discover next morning something unlocked, unlatched, a little loose, a little ajar, something sly and suspicious-looking. One night the black cat, which a few minutes before I had seen rippling down into the basement where I had arranged toilet facilities for it in an attractive setting, suddenly reappeared on the threshold of the music room, in the middle of my insomnia and a Wagner record, arching its back and sporting a neck bow of white silk which it could certainly never have put on all by itself. I telephoned 11111 and a few minutes later was discussing possible culprits with a policeman who relished greatly my cherry cordial, but whoever had broken in had left no trace. It is so easy for a cruel person to make the victim of his ingenuity believe that he has persecution mania, or is really being stalked by a killer, or is suffering from hallucinations. Hallucinations! Well did I know that among certain youthful instructors whose advances I had rejected there was at least one evil practical joker; I knew it ever since the time I came home from a very enjoyable and successful meeting of students and teachers (at which I had exuberantly thrown off my coat and shown several willing pupils a few of the amusing holds employed by Zemblan wrestlers) and found in my coat pocket a brutal anonymous note saying: "You have hal..... s real bad, chum," meaning evidently "hallucinations," although a malevolent critic might infer from the insufficient number of dashes that little Mr. Anon, despite teaching Freshman English, could hardly spell. (note to Line 62)
Wagner is the author of Siegfried, the third of the four music dramas that constitute Der Ring des Nibelungen (“The Ring of the Nibelung”). In the Prologue to his poem Vozmezdie (“Retribution,” 1910-21) Alexander Blok mentions Siegfried's sword Notung and Mime, karlik litsemernyi (Mime, the hypocritical dwarf), who falls in confusion at Siegfried’s feet:
Так Зигфрид правит меч над горном:
То в красный уголь обратит,
То быстро в воду погрузит —
И зашипит, и станет чёрным
Любимцу вверенный клинок…
Удар — он блещет, Нотунг верный,
И Миме, карлик лицемерный,
В смятеньи падает у ног!
On his deathbed Conmal (the King's uncle who translated all Shakespeare into Zemblan) called his nephew (Charles the Beloved) “Karlik:”
To return to the King: take for instance the question of personal culture. How often is it that kings engage in some special research? Conchologists among them can be counted on the fingers of one maimed hand. The last king of Zembla—partly under the influence of his uncle Conmal, the great translator of Shakespeare (see notes to lines 39-40 and 962), had become, despite frequent migraines, passionately addicted to the study of literature. At forty, not long before the collapse of his throne, he had attained such a degree of scholarship that he dared accede to his venerable uncle’s raucous dying request: “Teach, Karlik!” Of course, it would have been unseemly for a monarch to appear in the robes of learning at a university lectern and present to rosy youths Finnegans Wake as a monstrous extension of Angus MacDiarmid's "incoherent transactions" and of Southey's Lingo-Grande ("Dear Stumparumper," etc.) or discuss the Zemblan variants, collected in 1798 by Hodinski, of the Kongsskugg-sio (The Royal Mirror), an anonymous masterpiece of the twelfth century. Therefore he lectured under an assumed name and in a heavy make-up, with wig and false whiskers. All brown-bearded, apple-checked, blue-eyed Zemblans look alike, and I who have not shaved now for a year, resemble my disguised king (see also note to line 894). (note to Line 12)
The dwarf Mime brings to mind a mimeographed letter circulated by Professor Hurley after Shade's death:
Lines 376-377: was said in English Lit to be
This is replaced in the draft by the more significant - and more tuneful - variant:
the Head of our Department deemed
Although it may be taken to refer to the man (whoever he was) who occupied this post at the time Hazel Shade was a student, the reader cannot be blamed for applying it to Paul H., Jr., the fine administrator and inept scholar who since 1957 headed the English Department of Wordsmith College. We met now and then (see Forward and note to line 894) but not often. The Head of the Department to which I belonged was Prof. Nattochdag - "Netochka" as we called the dear man. Certainly the migraines that have lately tormented me to such a degree that I once had to leave in the midst of a concert at which I happened to be sitting beside Paul H., Jr., should not have been a stranger's business. They apparently were, very much so. He kept his eye on me, and immediately upon John Shade's demise circulated a mimeographed letter that began:
Several members of the Department of English are painfully concerned over the fate of a manuscript poem, or parts of a manuscript poem, left by the late John Shade. The manuscript fell into the hands of a person who not only is unqualified for the job of editing it, belonging as he does to another department, but is known to have a deranged mind. One wonders whether some legal action, etc.
"Legal action," of course, might be taken by somebody else too. But no matter; one's just anger is mitigated by the satisfaction of foreknowing that the engagé gentleman will be less worried about the fate of my friend's poem after reading the passage commented here. Southey liked a roasted rat for supper - which is especially comic in view of the rats that devoured his Bishop.
Southey's ballad God's Judgment on a Wicked Bishop was translated into Russian (as Sud bozhiy nad episkopom) by Zhukovski (one of Blok's favorite poets). In one of his poems on Florence (in "The Italian Verses," 1909) Blok compares Florence to a smoky iris. Iris Acht (the mistress of Thurgus the Turgid, grandfather of Charles the Beloved) brings to mind Hab' acht, Tristan! ("Be careful, Tristan!", an aria in Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde). Acht means in German "eight." The Italian word for "eight" is otto. In his story Putevoditel' po Berlinu ("A Guide to Berlin," 1925) VN mentions the name Otto written on the snow. Semper's pupil Otto Simonson (a German Jewish architect) designed and built the synagoge in Leipzig (the Semper synagoge in Dresden and the Leipzig synagoge were destroyed by the Nazis on Kristallnacht in November 1938). The boy in VN's story Signs and Symbols (1948) was born in Leipzig (his parents, who hail from Minsk, moved to Germany after the 1917 Revolution). At the age of six he drew wonderful birds and suffered from insomnia like a grown-up man. According to Kinbote, even at six he fell asleep with difficulty:
Many years ago--how many I would not care to say--I remember my Zemblan nurse telling me, a little man of six in the throes of adult insomnia: "Minnamin, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan" (my darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty). Well, folks, I guess many in this fine hall are as hungry and thirsty as me, and I'd better stop, folks, right here.
Yes, better stop. My notes and self are petering out. Gentlemen, I have suffered very much, and more than any of you can imagine. I pray for the Lord's benediction to rest on my wretched countrymen. My work is finished. My poet is dead.
God will help me, I trust, to rid myself of any desire to follow the example of the other two characters in this work. I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, health heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art. I may join forces with Odon in a new motion picture: Escape from Zembla (ball in the palace, bomb in the palace square). I may pander to the simple tastes of theatrical critics and cook up a stage play, an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash between the two figments. Oh, I may do many things! History permitting, I may sail back to my recovered kingdom, and with a great sob greet the gray coastline and the gleam of a roof in the rain. I may huddle and groan in a madhouse. But whatever happens, wherever the scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out--somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plane, has landed, is walking toward a million photographers, and presently he will ring at my door--a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus. (note to Line 1000)
Semper + orda = emperor + sad
Semper + Baron Bland + lice = Semberland + barn + police
orda - horde (cf. Zolotaya Orda, the Golden Horde; Sember is the Tatar name of Ulyanovsk, Lenin's home city, formerly Simbirsk)
sad - garden; Vishnyovyi sad ("The Cherry Orchard," 1904) is a play by Chekhov
"What Emperor?" is King Alfin's only mot; an incredibly brilliant, luxurious, and cruel monarch whose whistling whip made Zembla spin like a rainbow top, Uran the Last (reigned 1798-1799) was the Emperor of Zembla
Baron Bland - the Keeper of the Treasure who jumped or fell from the North Tower of the royal palace in Onhava
The Haunted Barn is a scene (which involves Hazel Shade) offered by Kinbote to the reader
Semberland is the Zemblan name of Zembla:
Pictures of the King had not infrequently appeared in America during the first months of the Zemblan Revolution. Every now and then some busybody on the campus with a retentive memory, or one of the clubwomen who were always after Shade and his eccentric friend, used to ask me with the inane meaningfulness adopted in such cases if anybody had told me how much I resembled that unfortunate monarch. I would counter with something on the lines of "all Chinese look alike" and change the subject. One day, however, in the lounge of the Faculty Club where I lolled surrounded by a number of my colleagues, I had to put up with a particularly embarrassing onset. A visiting German lecturer from Oxford kept exclaiming, aloud and under his breath, that the resemblance was "absolutely unheard of," and when I negligently observed that all bearded Zemblans resembled one another - and that, in fact, the name Zembla is a corruption not of the Russian zemlya, but of Semblerland, a land of reflections, of "resemblers" - my tormentor said: "Ah, yes, but King Charles wore no beard, and yet it is his very face! I had [he added] the honor of being seated within a few yards of the royal box at a Sport Festival in Onhava which I visited with my wife, who is Swedish, in 1956. We have a photograph of him at home, and her sister knew very well the mother of one of his pages, an interesting woman. Don't you see [almost tugging at Shade's lapel] the astounding similarity of features - of the upper part of the face, and the eyes, yes, the eyes, and the nose bridge?"
"Nay, sir" [said Shade, refolding a leg and slightly rolling in his armchair as wont to do when about to deliver a pronouncement] "there is no resemblance at all. I have seen the King in newsreels, and there is no resemblance. Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences." (note to Line 894)
Semberland is a land of reflections. In the second stanza of his poem On Translating "Eugene Onegin" (1955) VN mentions “reflected words:”
Reflected words can only shiver
Like elongated lights that twist
In the black mirror of a river
Between the city and the mist.
Elusive Pushkin! Persevering,
I still pick up your damsel’s earring,
Still travel with your sullen rake.
I find another man's mistake,
I analize alliterations
That grace your feasts and haunt the great
Fourth stanza of your Canto Eight.
This is my task -- a poet's patience
And scholiastic passion blent:
Dove-dropping on your monument.