Dear List,
In the first place I would like to apologize
for having mentioned Marvell and then passed onto Marlowe without any further
explanation. I only realized the non-sequitur much later, while I was mulling
over the eroticism of Marlowe and Donne, in contrast to that of
other poets when the name Marvell came to my mind.
Until then I had been wondering if "Donne and Marvell",
mentioned together in Shade's poem ( where he refers to Sybil's translation of
their works into French), could indicate the famous line, "Come live with
me, and be my love", employed by Donne and Marlowe ( when, by mistake, I
was thinking about Marvell!). In my posting I suggested that the poets'
names, and their lines in common, might unveil Nabokov's opinions on poetic
echoes and replies, plagiarism and the transformations any poem undergoes when
quoted or translated.
R S Gywnn's comment ( "If I'm not
mistaken, one of the poems that Sybil translated was the "Nymph Complaining of
the Death of Her Faun," which of course connects to Kinbote in a couple of
ways.") could have been directed to the false connection I had
suggested with “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.”. Please, excuse me
for a misleading argumentation ( if such was the case of R.S.G's reference,
passing from shepherd and fauns to Kinbote).
The theme of a "giant shepherd" ( mentioned
already in the story "Double Monster") will appear in "Ada",
in a link bt. shepherds and pederasty, when Nabokov parodies the Romantic and the arcadian theme. It is when
he mentions a Poet Laureate Robert Brown and describes milkmaids and
an enormous shepherd, represented in "a century-old
lithograph of Ardis, by Peter de Rast, as a young colossus protecting four cows
and a lad in rags, one shoulder bare".
In his "Introduction"
to Bend Sinister, Nabokov discusses another kind of metamorphosis in relation to
"nymphs and fauns" ( artistically crafted and intentional) when he wrote:
"Stéphane Mallarmé has left three or four immortal bagatelles, and among
these is L'Après-Midi d'un Faune (first drafted in 1865). Krug is haunted by a
passage from this voluptuous eclogue where the faun accuses the nymph of
disengaging herself from his embrace 'sans pitié du sanglot dont j'étais encore
ivre' ('spurning the spasm with which I still was drunk'). Fractured parts of
this line re-echo through the book, cropping up for instance in the malarma ne
donje of Dr Azureus' wail of rue (Chapter Four) and in the donje te zankoriv of
apologetic Krug when he interrupts the kiss of the university student and his
little Carmen (foreshadowing Mariette) in the same
chapter" . In a posting dated Feb
24,2007, a reference to Monica Manolescu's article in "The
Nabokovian" (number 57,2006), discusses several passages in "Lolita" in which
Nijinski is brought up and that Susan Elizabeth Sweeney
had connected to Nijinksi's role as a faun in the Debussy ballett,
based on Mallarmé's " L ' Après Midi d' Un Faune".
All these versions and translations, from English into French,
French into English, etc might be worth looking into again if we keep in
mind the Index entry in PF under " Translations, poetical" and Kinbote's own translation
and interpretation of Goethe's "Erlkönig" (line 662).(Of course
nothing here can excuse me for having mixed up the names of Marlowe
and Marvell!)