Recent postings stimulated me to return to the German
translation of "Fahles Feuer". It is interesting to
compare DZ's style and the commentaries I'm more familiar with.
DZ's (the few I read) are very succint and
matter-of-fact, inspite of the condensed precise information that they
convey.
On page 434, verse 90 ("next baby","nächste Baby"), it takes him only nine
lines to inform that there was a "Klatschgeschichte" (an
idle talk) concerning Shade's hypothetical baby, whose
mother (the girl in the black leotard) had died, together with her
child, in an accident and to offer his reading ("Tatsächlich besagt der Vers
nur"): "Maud Shade, born in 1869, lived in the house with her
nephew's parents and witnessed John's birth (1898) and his daughter Hazel's
(1934). Maud died in 1950."
Now for Pale Fire's lines
238-46 ( "An empty emerald case, squat and frog-eyed/
Hugging the trunk; and its companion piece,/ A gum-logged ant. / That
Englishman [...] je nourris/les pauvres cigales [...] Lafontaine was
wrong:[...] Dead is the mandible, alive the song." )
Also Kinbote's commentaries: line
238 ..."semitransparent envelope left on a tree
trunk by an adult cicada[...]Lafontaine's La Cigale et la Fourmi (see lines
243-244)...the ant, is about to be embalmed in amber; line 240: "the sea gulls of 1933 are
all dead, of course...a bulky monument [...] not yet
unshrouded."
In his notes to the poem, DZ (page 437:
"La Fontaine irrte") straightforwardly offers
the traditional spelling , instead of Shade's and Kinbote's
( "Lafontaine") - from which the reference
to a "fountain" almost disappears, before he informs that ants, with their
strong mandibles, often eat up cicada-larvae,
whereas in PF the cicada-nymph survives whereas the ant is
embalmed. The reader is trusted to deduce
from this information that "dead is the mandible, alive
the song" refers to the victorious cicada, to make the
connection bt. "sea gulls" and "cicadas" and, perhaps, even to conjecture
about those two different "shrouds" that antecipate the monumental Queen
Victoria's, soon to be innaugurated.