Gary Lipon [to RSGwynn
quoting William Monroe's Zembla essay on "Pale Fire": "Nabokov himself calls
attention to the humorous potential of rhyme in his Notes on Prosody, part of
his scholarly apparatus originally attached to Eugene Onegin. His depreciation
of "fancy rhymes" in English poetry is invaluable for an analysis of Shade's
poem."] "I wholly agree with the [general] argument that a humorous effect
occurs when more than one syllable rhymes...Focusing on these jingly effects,
it's understandable one might recoil....and whether such an ironic piece is
capable of expressing and evoking ..This is the question: does Shade know he's
being ironic in using these rhymes and trite banalities? With regards to the
multi-syllabic rhyming, on purely logical grounds, it would seem impossible for
Shade not to be aware...It's possible that Shade only knows an ironic mode...I
think the value of a poem to be most reliably adduced by a close inspection of
the poem itself. Inference from other sources may be useful, but not as
satisfying as direct textual analysis..."
JM: To expand the analogies
bt. fancy rhymes, irony and Shade's technique in PF, I refer you
to some of the EW-VN letters, particularly letters 48 and 200,
plus Simon Karlinski's Introduction on p.16-18, from which I'll
extract a few paragraphs (although this subject lies way outside my scope
of comprehension).
Perhaps Nabokov's interplay bt. Kinbote's
Zemblan, Conmal's Shakespeare, and Shade, parodies part of his
own misunderstandings with Wilson and the dangers related to split-rhymes,
or to rhyming a monosyllable with a polisyllable, when
transposing one language system into another. Those in the know might even find fresh clues about who
wrote PF: an "American native poet," or Kinbote himself? (should this
have not been explored before in the List). Anyway, should this be the
case (right now, I'm merely a writing parrot), PF must have an
additional significance, besides its status as an "independent poem." .
In EW's letter n.200 (page 255, Sept.28,
1949):
"I found out from Struve, that Russian words,
however long, have actually only one stress...Thus the emphasis in Russian verse
is different from that of English. In English, the secondary accents are used to
make the beat just as the main ones are. The sophistication of English
verse...consists partly of displacing these accents. There is nothing that
corresponds to this in Russian - hence your inability to grasp the reality of
what I called substitutions of feet. You can't substitute or syncopate in
Russian...The metrical sophistication comes in another way: the number of
syllables in Russian is usually perfectly regular, as it is only rarely in
English, but there are many fewer stresses and you juggle with these. This
juggling is what you were trying to tell me about, but you made the mistake of
supposing that we had the same thing in English..."
Karlinski observes that VN had outlined to
Wilson an earlier version of 'Notes on Prosody,' ( with "the
discovery by Andrei Bely that a 'variable rhythmic current' ran 'through the
constant structure of the Russian iamb.") For SK, because VN hadn't
realized that Wilson didn't know the Russian system of stress, or the standard
Russian meters, he'd vainly occupied himself with the description
of Bely's finds in order to teach Wilson the "counterpoint of Russian
verse."