Perhaps Borges was right in Pierre
Ménard: the same word when it is uttered by a poet or by a child
becomes a different word, its ressonances may be ample or shallow
- even when they are heard in isolation, distanced from context, rythm or
verse.
If in the early sixties, in an interview published
in SO, VN described his work on Pushkin as demanding of him "the precision
of poetry" and "the passion of science", I found that he'd expressed the
same feeling, or so it seems, long before - with an added grain of
irony in "On Translating 'Eugene Onegin' " for its closing
lines are:
"This is my task - a poet's
patience/ And scholiastic passion blent/ Dove-droppings on your
monument." (1954).
It looks that this mottled statue gained wing
(TRLSK), thanks to Nabokov and his mastery.Cf. "Liberty: An Ode, 1817"
In his praise of Pushkin,
VN noted that P's "idiom combined all the
contemporaneous elements of Russian". Among the poetical and metaphysical
strain, everyday colloquialisms, stylized popular speech I saw that he included
"abundant and natural gallicisms". And now, for the L-archives, here is another instance of VN's
employ of "mollitude", related to soft Venus
(mollitude) and contrasted against martial Freedom:
"Arrive;pluck off my garland;break/ the lyre of mollitude! I wish/
Freedom to sing unto the world/ and smite iniquity on thrones."
(5-8).