Carolyn Forte Piano Kunin: Na und? Forgive my flippancy, but really, so what if VN preferred the authorship of de Vere of Oxford over that of William of Stratford? He was after all a notorious snob..The opening of the poem in Dmitri's translation however is particularly fine, and reinforces my belief that VN was a superb poet and has yet to be properly recognized as such. So, perhaps a day late - or nine early - I salute his memory with my own brand of jaundice-tinged hosannahs...

In your opinion VN was a superb poet who "has yet to be properly recognized as such." The article Brian Piano Forte quoted* apparently confirms your opinion. P.Howerton,Jr. mentions in it that "In 1914 he published his first work, a small book of poems in a lilac folder. It carried an epigraph from Romeo and Juliet. At the time of his death in 1977, he left behind an enormous oeuvre which included, in the opinion of many, some of the finest novels in Russian and English written in this century[ ] While at Cornell he published his literal translation of Eugene Onegin in four volumes, together with almost nine hundred pages of seminal notes (over thirty references to Shakespeare) and his "Notes on Prosody." The latter was a book-length "outline of the differences and similarities" between English and Russian iambic tetrameters and revealed an astonishing knowledge of English as well as Russian poetry."

If there was a lilac folder with VN's fifteen-year old productions, his first intimation about tip- leaf- dip -relief must be still availabe, or so I hope. Actually, "the artist's signature" is not the image of a cyclical leaf-drop release being metamorphosed into a line of verse, as I'd initially suggested, but the "suspended pavilion".