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Re: [NABOKV-L] University PoemStan Kelly:...The poem does not directly name the university 'townlet' (sic) as Cambridge, but every detail of architecture, fauna, and college life is unmistakably Cantabrigian beyond the bounds of student cliché. Nabokov's general disdain for his Cambridge years emerges in overplus, a flaw we Cantabrigian Nabokovians have learned to shrug off. Nobody (recall VN's misreading of his own name?!) is perfect[ ] Whenever DN translated it (any clues on this?), he was clearly confused at the time over basic university terminology...We find 'capes' rather than 'gowns' (the origin of the well-known Oxbridge Town-Gown dichotomy)... It would be interesting to see VN's Russian for these ever-so-Brit items...
Jansy Mello: I just found an article about Nabokov and Cambridge. I selected a few excerpts and it is still rather long. My ignorance of things Cantabrigian impedes me when I try to imagine the shape of caps (VN's in SM), capes (DN's version of a gown in the University Poem) and a 1922 gown (would it look like any dark drapery found in "Inspector Morses"'s Oxford?)
Here is the interesting article: Smithsmyths - Travel essays Saturday, April 09, 2005
Little England - with Nabokov in Cambridge
"I do not know if anyone will ever go to Cambridge in search of the imprints which the teat-cleats on my soccer-boots have left in the black mud before a gaping goal or follow the shadow of my cap across the quadrangle to my tutor's stairs; but I know that I thought of Milton, and Marvell, and Marlowe, with more than a tourist's thrill as I passed beside the reverend walls." - Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory
"Nabokov was at Cambridge University from 1919 to 1922. He stayed in Trinity College lodgings. In the early 1980s, that college was a Bastille-like edifice overlooking a dingy street-Trinity Lane-which was only fleetingly, in my memory at least, brought into the light of day by wheeling car head-lamps....Nabokov's dressing-gowned and sponge-bag carrying shade was not yet a feature of the place...Today (April 1st, 2005), I see that he had to pass along Trinity Lane each morning on his way to the Baths (there were no bathrooms in his digs), eschewing woolly underwear and unmanly overcoats. Nearly thirty years after the event, his bones, he insists, have not forgotten the bleakness of that walk, nor its English fatuity.
While at Trinity, Nabokov was distracted by memories of his lost homeland, its blue snow-freighted firs and humid lepidopteral summers...Cambridge would make on his life in the artful reconstructions of his retrospective. (That sentence, by the way, is how I see him writing his prose, a linear text arcing through space like the line that is said to link the light of one star to another, finally turning back on itself, ending not in its beginning but in some tropic verisimilitude of a pig's tail. Himself, he likened the trick, or treat, to a spiral.) In his final year, his father died, murdered by two 'Russian Fascists' in Berlin, which perhaps accounts both for the druggy wistfulness of his memories of punting on the Cam ('Now and then, shed by a blossoming tree, a petal would come down, down, down, and with the odd feeling of seeing something neither worshiper nor casual spectator ought to see, one would manage to glimpse its reflection which swiftly-more swiftly than the petal fell-rose to meet it; and, for a fraction of a second, one feared the trick would not work, that the blessed oil would not catch fire, that the reflection might miss and the petal float away alone, but every time the delicate union did take place, with the magic precision of a poet's word meeting halfway his, or his reader's, recollection') and the tetchiness of his encounters with a recently Leninised ur-Cannon & ur-Ball, cunningly pseudonomised and palindromised, in his narrative, as 'Nisbet' and 'Ibsen'.
Nisbet or Ibsen was an English socialist. He thought that Lenin was a sophisticated patron of the arts, gentling its nervous curiosities with a horse-whisperer's hand and promoting its latest trends. Nabokov felt that this was overstating things somewhat, and blamed Nisbet's or Ibsen's credulity on his English ignorance and lack of discrimination...
Nabokov's favourite spot appears to have been the goal-mouth on the football field at St John's or Christ. Here, he could indulge his love of goal-keeping, or enjoy the reflection of its attendant glamour-for goal-keepers, he states periphrastically, were celebrities in the non-Anglophone world, heroic as matadors and flying aces and much-adulated by small boys. At the same time, he could nurse in neuralgic solitude the nostalgia that came with late-night Russian versifying and insomnia. Here, while the game went on...he could think of himself, not so much as a precursor of the great Lev Yashin, but as 'a fabulous exotic being in an English footballer's disguise, composing verse in a tongue nobody understood about a remote country nobody knew'.
...Nabokov returned only once to Cambridge, seventeen years later. He was looking for a job and had decided to meet up with Nisbet or Ibsen who might prove helpful. Not so. Everything was wrong, out-of-kilter. The February weather was scaldingly cold, Nisbet or Ibsen was distracted, and the 'little place' they'd arranged to meet in had changed.
I've returned to Cambridge several times, always in search of shoes. Ball and Cannon have long moved on...So, rather like Nabokov, who went for a rainy walk along the Backs, casting doleful glances at the rooks in the elms and the crocuses in 'the mist-beaded turf', I went off in the drizzle to examine, with very little interest, a new range of pimple creams and the prophylactics in Boots.
...Nabokov has a way with words. His prose, with its ability to bring the world, in all its subtle clunkiness, up against your nose, is all that you could wish for (or, of course, not, if of too delicate a disposition). Another example, this time from the piece 'Mademoiselle O': Nabokov describes his Swiss governess's room as 'reeking, among other effluvia, of the brown smell of oxidised apple peel'. For me, the trick lies not so much in the crisp synaesthesic image, or the oddly satisfying pinch of chemical knowledge Nabokov stirs into it, or even in the suppressed bourgeois history (Mademoiselle first peeling her apple, rather than biting directly through the skin) he flirts with; it lies in the artless-seeming placement of the adverbial phrase that precedes it. Amongst other effluvia. Everybody says something like that (though, of course, not everybody says 'effluvia'). This is what grounds the image in the rest of the world, and then releases each into the ether on tenuous cords. Through Nabokov's closely worked verbal sensuousness, language finally fulfils Wittgenstein's logical prescriptiveness: it not only reveals the world, it is happy to show itself doing it; and it is that sinuously doubled unfolding that can elude prescription altogether, hinting at the troublesome perversity of great art. Other examples might be the evocations of the nymphet's knee hairs (fine and golden as watch-springs) in Lolita and what Kinbote thinks of Gradus in Pale Fire.
A story that currently drifts on the scummy surface of memory's gradually accelerating millpond is 'Torpid Smoke' in which the narrator observes: 'it dawned upon me that exactly as I recalled such images of the past as the way my dead mother had of making a weepy face and clutching her temples when mealtime squabbles became too loud, so one day I would recall, with merciless, irreparable sharpness, the hurt look of my father's shoulders as he leaned over that torn map, morose, wearing his warm indoor jacket powdered with ashes and dandruff; and all this mingled creatively with the recent vision of blue smoke clinging to dead leaves on a wet roof'. Mingled creatively, brothers. I have already alluded to Despair and a game of chess.
I can't let this go without one last citation: the description of reviving a dying fire in his Trinity digs. Nabokov would spread a sheet of the London Times over the jaws of the fireplace, making sure no air could enter from the room. This technique was supposed to ensure a powerful up draught, which would suck air through the embers, setting the coals alight, and so restoring vigour to a dying fire. But that is a dull-an offensively dull-evocation. This is what Nabokov writes: 'A humming noise would start behind the taut paper, which would acquire the smoothness of drumskin and the beauty of luminous parchment'. Exactly. I have seen this too... Nabokov watches an orange spot form in the middle of the paper and sees how the print that happens to be there take on 'ominous clarity'. Then, suddenly, the spot bursts into flame and the sheet whirrs up the chimney like 'a liberated phoenix'. .
How does such art work? Why is it that a single image can occupy the heart and mind more completely than a lover or an army? And why is it that, when done, when the plunder has been accomplished, and all the riches of response have been exhausted, it can as completely decamp, leaving an immense bewildered panic? What will I do? Where will I go?
Nabokov went to Berlin, then to Paris, then to New York. I went to London, then to Paris, then to Mexico. In Pale Fire, Kinbote, in the midst of interpolating into Shade's epic poem another autobiographical monstrosity imagines his own shadow and would-be nemesis Gradus, arch-incompetent and slouching botcher of assassinations, setting out on a transatlantic journey in search of a crowning kill. At the book's end, Gradus makes it to Kinbote's Arcadian North American fastness but only succeeds in shooting, with his customary ineptitude, the wrong man. In the same way, let me conclude by imagining a missile, this time fired by an older version of myself from another remote country, or its semblance, which then falls invisibly from the dull grey heavens, to burst through and demolish, accompanied by a shower of dust and mouse-droppings, the roof-tiles of this, my own house of cards.
Posted by Piers Smith
Smithsmyths: Little England - with Nabokov in Cambridge
smyths.blogspot.com/.../little-england-with-nabo...Em cache - Traduzir esta página
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Jansy Mello: I just found an article about Nabokov and Cambridge. I selected a few excerpts and it is still rather long. My ignorance of things Cantabrigian impedes me when I try to imagine the shape of caps (VN's in SM), capes (DN's version of a gown in the University Poem) and a 1922 gown (would it look like any dark drapery found in "Inspector Morses"'s Oxford?)
Here is the interesting article: Smithsmyths - Travel essays Saturday, April 09, 2005
Little England - with Nabokov in Cambridge
"I do not know if anyone will ever go to Cambridge in search of the imprints which the teat-cleats on my soccer-boots have left in the black mud before a gaping goal or follow the shadow of my cap across the quadrangle to my tutor's stairs; but I know that I thought of Milton, and Marvell, and Marlowe, with more than a tourist's thrill as I passed beside the reverend walls." - Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory
"Nabokov was at Cambridge University from 1919 to 1922. He stayed in Trinity College lodgings. In the early 1980s, that college was a Bastille-like edifice overlooking a dingy street-Trinity Lane-which was only fleetingly, in my memory at least, brought into the light of day by wheeling car head-lamps....Nabokov's dressing-gowned and sponge-bag carrying shade was not yet a feature of the place...Today (April 1st, 2005), I see that he had to pass along Trinity Lane each morning on his way to the Baths (there were no bathrooms in his digs), eschewing woolly underwear and unmanly overcoats. Nearly thirty years after the event, his bones, he insists, have not forgotten the bleakness of that walk, nor its English fatuity.
While at Trinity, Nabokov was distracted by memories of his lost homeland, its blue snow-freighted firs and humid lepidopteral summers...Cambridge would make on his life in the artful reconstructions of his retrospective. (That sentence, by the way, is how I see him writing his prose, a linear text arcing through space like the line that is said to link the light of one star to another, finally turning back on itself, ending not in its beginning but in some tropic verisimilitude of a pig's tail. Himself, he likened the trick, or treat, to a spiral.) In his final year, his father died, murdered by two 'Russian Fascists' in Berlin, which perhaps accounts both for the druggy wistfulness of his memories of punting on the Cam ('Now and then, shed by a blossoming tree, a petal would come down, down, down, and with the odd feeling of seeing something neither worshiper nor casual spectator ought to see, one would manage to glimpse its reflection which swiftly-more swiftly than the petal fell-rose to meet it; and, for a fraction of a second, one feared the trick would not work, that the blessed oil would not catch fire, that the reflection might miss and the petal float away alone, but every time the delicate union did take place, with the magic precision of a poet's word meeting halfway his, or his reader's, recollection') and the tetchiness of his encounters with a recently Leninised ur-Cannon & ur-Ball, cunningly pseudonomised and palindromised, in his narrative, as 'Nisbet' and 'Ibsen'.
Nisbet or Ibsen was an English socialist. He thought that Lenin was a sophisticated patron of the arts, gentling its nervous curiosities with a horse-whisperer's hand and promoting its latest trends. Nabokov felt that this was overstating things somewhat, and blamed Nisbet's or Ibsen's credulity on his English ignorance and lack of discrimination...
Nabokov's favourite spot appears to have been the goal-mouth on the football field at St John's or Christ. Here, he could indulge his love of goal-keeping, or enjoy the reflection of its attendant glamour-for goal-keepers, he states periphrastically, were celebrities in the non-Anglophone world, heroic as matadors and flying aces and much-adulated by small boys. At the same time, he could nurse in neuralgic solitude the nostalgia that came with late-night Russian versifying and insomnia. Here, while the game went on...he could think of himself, not so much as a precursor of the great Lev Yashin, but as 'a fabulous exotic being in an English footballer's disguise, composing verse in a tongue nobody understood about a remote country nobody knew'.
...Nabokov returned only once to Cambridge, seventeen years later. He was looking for a job and had decided to meet up with Nisbet or Ibsen who might prove helpful. Not so. Everything was wrong, out-of-kilter. The February weather was scaldingly cold, Nisbet or Ibsen was distracted, and the 'little place' they'd arranged to meet in had changed.
I've returned to Cambridge several times, always in search of shoes. Ball and Cannon have long moved on...So, rather like Nabokov, who went for a rainy walk along the Backs, casting doleful glances at the rooks in the elms and the crocuses in 'the mist-beaded turf', I went off in the drizzle to examine, with very little interest, a new range of pimple creams and the prophylactics in Boots.
...Nabokov has a way with words. His prose, with its ability to bring the world, in all its subtle clunkiness, up against your nose, is all that you could wish for (or, of course, not, if of too delicate a disposition). Another example, this time from the piece 'Mademoiselle O': Nabokov describes his Swiss governess's room as 'reeking, among other effluvia, of the brown smell of oxidised apple peel'. For me, the trick lies not so much in the crisp synaesthesic image, or the oddly satisfying pinch of chemical knowledge Nabokov stirs into it, or even in the suppressed bourgeois history (Mademoiselle first peeling her apple, rather than biting directly through the skin) he flirts with; it lies in the artless-seeming placement of the adverbial phrase that precedes it. Amongst other effluvia. Everybody says something like that (though, of course, not everybody says 'effluvia'). This is what grounds the image in the rest of the world, and then releases each into the ether on tenuous cords. Through Nabokov's closely worked verbal sensuousness, language finally fulfils Wittgenstein's logical prescriptiveness: it not only reveals the world, it is happy to show itself doing it; and it is that sinuously doubled unfolding that can elude prescription altogether, hinting at the troublesome perversity of great art. Other examples might be the evocations of the nymphet's knee hairs (fine and golden as watch-springs) in Lolita and what Kinbote thinks of Gradus in Pale Fire.
A story that currently drifts on the scummy surface of memory's gradually accelerating millpond is 'Torpid Smoke' in which the narrator observes: 'it dawned upon me that exactly as I recalled such images of the past as the way my dead mother had of making a weepy face and clutching her temples when mealtime squabbles became too loud, so one day I would recall, with merciless, irreparable sharpness, the hurt look of my father's shoulders as he leaned over that torn map, morose, wearing his warm indoor jacket powdered with ashes and dandruff; and all this mingled creatively with the recent vision of blue smoke clinging to dead leaves on a wet roof'. Mingled creatively, brothers. I have already alluded to Despair and a game of chess.
I can't let this go without one last citation: the description of reviving a dying fire in his Trinity digs. Nabokov would spread a sheet of the London Times over the jaws of the fireplace, making sure no air could enter from the room. This technique was supposed to ensure a powerful up draught, which would suck air through the embers, setting the coals alight, and so restoring vigour to a dying fire. But that is a dull-an offensively dull-evocation. This is what Nabokov writes: 'A humming noise would start behind the taut paper, which would acquire the smoothness of drumskin and the beauty of luminous parchment'. Exactly. I have seen this too... Nabokov watches an orange spot form in the middle of the paper and sees how the print that happens to be there take on 'ominous clarity'. Then, suddenly, the spot bursts into flame and the sheet whirrs up the chimney like 'a liberated phoenix'. .
How does such art work? Why is it that a single image can occupy the heart and mind more completely than a lover or an army? And why is it that, when done, when the plunder has been accomplished, and all the riches of response have been exhausted, it can as completely decamp, leaving an immense bewildered panic? What will I do? Where will I go?
Nabokov went to Berlin, then to Paris, then to New York. I went to London, then to Paris, then to Mexico. In Pale Fire, Kinbote, in the midst of interpolating into Shade's epic poem another autobiographical monstrosity imagines his own shadow and would-be nemesis Gradus, arch-incompetent and slouching botcher of assassinations, setting out on a transatlantic journey in search of a crowning kill. At the book's end, Gradus makes it to Kinbote's Arcadian North American fastness but only succeeds in shooting, with his customary ineptitude, the wrong man. In the same way, let me conclude by imagining a missile, this time fired by an older version of myself from another remote country, or its semblance, which then falls invisibly from the dull grey heavens, to burst through and demolish, accompanied by a shower of dust and mouse-droppings, the roof-tiles of this, my own house of cards.
Posted by Piers Smith
Smithsmyths: Little England - with Nabokov in Cambridge
smyths.blogspot.com/.../little-england-with-nabo...Em cache - Traduzir esta página
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/