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")
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