Isola di Rifiuti: Notebook (Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Spicer, &c.)
Is it enough to be briefly amused by Nabokov's rather Khlebnikovian / Mayakovskyan “futurist poet Alexis Pan” (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 1941 )?
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I don’t know. (A statement my own emendatory wag cannot pronounce without an “I eschewknowing” bounding up to nip its dragging heels, encumbering the heave of the matutinal sigh with relief and defiance both . . .) Is it enough to be briefly amused by Nabokov’s rather Khlebnikovian / Mayakovskyan “futurist poet Alexis Pan” (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight,1941)?
He was a noisy robust little man with a gleam of real talent concealed in the messy obscurity of his verse. But because he did his best to shock people with his monstrous mass of otiose words (he was the inventor of the ‘submental grunt’ as he called it), his main output seems now so nugatory, so false, so old-fashioned (super-modern things have a queer knack of dating much faster than others) that his true value is only remembered by a few scholars who admire the magnificent translations of English poems made by him at the very outset of his literary career,—one of these at least being a very miracle of verbal transfusion: his Russian rendering of Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.”
Other sentence-ry items: “Now and then, between two poems, Pan would perform a slow dance—a mixture of Javanese wrist-play and his own rhythmic inventions. After recitals he got gloriously soused—” and “later Pan enjoyed a short artificial vogue in Bolshevik surroundings which was due I think to the queer notion (mainly based on a muddle of terms) that there is a natural connection between extreme politics and extreme art. Then, in 1922 or 1923 Alexis Pan committed suicide with the aid of a pair of braces.” That eschewal, that shunning percipience.

All private editorial communications are read by both co-editors.