Dear List,
Nabokov must have valued Fyodor Tyutchev's poetry more
than one may surmise from the poet's biographical sketch VN wrote.
One poem in particular deserved three versions (but
only two are acknowledged, in the Index, under the translated title "The
Journey", although all three were selected for printing). It struck a familiar chord that led me to Borges and Umberto
Eco.
Fyodor Tyutchev's poem ( written
in 1830) describes a bleak neighborhood at dusk, when all the shadows
merge into one and riders are sunk knee-deep in powdery sand.
The lines that interested me were (following VN's
three versions):
(a) "Moody night peers like a
hundred-eyed beast/ out of every bush in the wood" ( 1941-44);
(b)
"Grim night like a beast with a hundred eyes/ peers out of
the underwood" (41-44);
(c) "Grim night like a
hundred-eyed beast/ looks out of every
bush." (1951-57)
Umberto Eco, writing about artistic representation
of distance, time and space, mentioned a technique which he relates to
ancient texts that deal with the "sublime": the hard to
define "hipotiposis." The zoomorphization of natural
events also gives rise to several examples in this category.
In one of them he describes Walt Disney's
Snow-White's flight into a dark forest, while, in her terror, she
feels the shadows merge and, from every bush, a
hundred shining eyes that are watching her.
Nabokov, in his early novels, often resorts to
the anthropomorfization and personification of inanimate things.
This brings out an alarmingly, or amusingly observant world
- and it often endows his style with a vertiginous cinematic
quality.
In his translation of Tyutchev's verses there are
emphatic substitutions (moody/grim; peers out/looks out;
every bush in the wood/underwood/ every bush; beast with a hundred eyes/ a
hundred-eyed beast), as if he were still striving after a special
audio-visual volume.
J.L.Borges, in his lecture
on metaphors, examines how shared images serve to
express different moods. When he departs from metaphors that
associate "eyes" and "stars", he mentions a poem, which
he supposes was authored by Plato himself :
"I would like to be the night because I would
then be able to shield your sleep with a thousand
eyes."
His second example offers a common image: "
Stars are watching us from on-high".
The third comes from Chesterton's "A second
childhood":
"But I shall not grow too old to see enormous night
arise,/A cloud that is larger than the world/And a monster made of
eyes."
According to Borges, in the first instance the poet is
expressing protective tenderness, in the second, we encounter the divine
indiference towards human worries. In the third, a once familiar night is
turned into a nightmare.
Tyutchev's night is similarly haunting. There
is no reference in it to stars nor skies. Darkness lies low like a
multi-eyed beast that is ready to jump on a prey. There is a metaphor
indicating a kind of opposite operation, found in G.M. Hopkins' poem
"As dragonflies draw fire" ( it is the godhead that shines through a thousand
eyes and in the "features of man's faces")
.......................................................................................................
PS: In another posting [ why gentlement prefer
blondes], while describing the gibbous moon on the wane I could see
(whereas Paris remained unreachable), I was referring to what are currently
called "blonde jokes".