C. Kunin: "Ovid like Dante and VN suffered exile, but
I don't recall any Nabokovian references to that."
Jansy Mello: While searching online after a few
S,M ready-made quotes for Nabokov's lines on "Ex Ponto",
I came to:"Radiating Nests: Metalingual Tropes in Poetry of
Exile" by Vladimir Zoric, from the University of
Nottingham#. In his Abstract the author doesn't
mention Nabokov, but his name appears in the list of
bibliographical references and once in the main article*. At
first sight, the tropes about the poetry of exile selected
by V.Zoric would be equally important in VN's poem "Pale
Fire," namely the American John Shade's preterists, oppressed by
Zemblan Kinbote's lofty commentaries. Unfortunately further discussion lies beyond the scope of my
abilities.**
V.Zoric compares the images found in "Lament
nad Beogradom" by Milos Crnjanski, "to metaphors of interlinguality used by
other poets in exile such as Ovid, Marina Tsvetaeva, Joseph Brodsky, and Eva
Hoffman. Four images are singled out: the capsule, the mountaintop, the nest,
and the abyss." His conclusion focuses on Crnkanski,
when his "article concludes by considering how the
imagery of “Lament over Belgrade” converges towards some of these four tropes of
interlinguality in creating the poem's metalanguage."
His reference to Nabokov comes through Ascher, Maria Louise.
“The Exile as Autobiographer: Nabokov's Homecoming.”Realms of Exile:
Nomadism, Diasporas, and Eastern European Voices. Ed. Domnica Radulescu.
Lanham: Lexington Books, 2002. 67–86 - and from his reading
of "Speak, Memory: An Autobiography
Revisited." He chose from Ovid,
"Tristia, Ex Ponto." Trans. A. L. Wheeler. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
2002.***
...........................................................................................................
# Cf. Comparative Literature Summer 2010 62:3
201-227 // © 2010 by University of Oregon.
* - "However, such a segregative model, in its two
versions, is not the only trope that has been articulated to represent the
condition and processes of the writer’s linguistic consciousness in exile. as we
have already seen, Tsvetaeva created metalingual effect through the metaphor of
the nest, the elevated place laboriously built from many branches taken from
different trees. When in his memoir Speak, Memory Nabokov recollects how his
father, a passionate cyclist, used to “take one’s ‘bike by the horns’ (bïka za
roga),” he creates a supreme interlingual pun based on the scriptural homology
and phonetic similitude of the English word “bike” and the russian word “бык”
(bull or ox) (Nabokov 33). Since in russian taking the bull by the horns implies
someone taking control over a situation, Nabokov consciously mistranslates бык
as “bike” and has his authoritative father taking the bike by its metaphorical
horns (the handlebars). This is a supreme example of what can be called the
“nesting” strategy. Just as in Picasso’s Tête de taureau (1942) the animal’s
head is conjured by a metal bike-seat and its horns by the handlebars, so
Nabokov uses an interlingual transfer to convey a point that would not be
accessible without such interaction. like the capsule, the interlingual nest is
an insulated place of incubation for a fledgling; like the mountaintop, it is an
elevated point that gives a panoramic view. Unlike both the capsule and the
mountaintop however, the nest does not keep languages separate one from the
other; rather, it brings them together in a stereoscopic view made possible by
the nest’s composite construction." (219)
** - Other excerpts (selected at
random)
"There is in modern poetry a distinct class of poems
characterized by the presence of lexical units from more than one language. most
of these poems are associated with some form of exilic displacement and
thematically dwell upon that experience. Though often considered as an
exceptional case of poetic discourse, interlingual poems of exile raise
important challenges to conventional views about the relationship between
language and poetry. First, they question the underlying assumption that poetic
language is an essentially monolingual idiom independent of social and
historical developments. Second, they present a problem for existing literary
theoretical models, which usually deal with such highly atypical texts by
bracketing at least one of the constituent features: either exile or poetry.
Would it be possible to construct a form of poetic discourse that accommodates
diverse linguistic codes in a way that would reflect fully the duress of the
exilic context while still presenting a verbally coherent and aesthetically
relevant response to that context? in order to address this question, in the
first part of the article I revisit some of the most prominent theories of
poetic language to assess their explanatory value for interlingual poetic
sequences. Specifically, I claim that Roman Jakobson’s theory of equational
relations, if applied with some readjustments, may show how any interlingual
sequence projects a derivative metalanguage with different codes united in an
overarching metaphoric nexus. The second part asks whether this enforced code
switching leads to images that are specific to the metalingual situation. While
the core text in my analysis is Miloš Crnjanski’s “Lament over Belgrade,” I also
examine other instances of exilic interlinguality in poems by ovid, Tsvetaeva,
Brodsky, and Milosz I argue that the apparent rhythmic and syntactic disparity
in “Lament over Belgrade” and other code switching poems is countervailed by
metaphors of outsideness that, on the one hand, project an imagined metalanguage
and, on the other, reflect the human trauma of enforced displacement [ ]
"In 'A New Type of Intellectual: The dissident,' Julia Kristeva argues for the
emancipating value of exile and specifies language as one of the key symbolic
fields that have to be estranged: “How can one avoid sinking into the mire of
common sense, if not by becoming a stranger to one’s own country, language, sex
and identity? Writing is impossible without some kind of exile” (298) [
] In Bakhtin “But this speech diversity achieves its full creative
consciousness only under conditions of an active polyglossia. Two myths perish
simultaneously: the myth of a language that presumes to be the only language,
and the myth of a language that presumes to be completely unified” (Dialogic 68)
[ ] Shklovsky’s and Bakhtin’s selfconfident inclusiveness has
led to a certain abstractness in their conclusions. The problem is not just that
Shklovsky and Bakhtin have not raised the question of how the difficulties in
poets’ acquisition of a second language are reflected in their poetic texts. at
a more fundamental level, the two theorists fail to take into account the fact
that, when exposed to languages other than their own, poets develop verbal
strategies unique to their own experience rather than follow a predictable
pattern of creativity [ ] Bakhtin’s philosophy of language enables us to
analyze interlinguality in terms of its being conditioned by, and conditioning
in its turn, socio-historical contexts (including exile), but excludes poetry,
which Bakhtin views only as an expression of monolingual consciousness; and
Jakobson’s model enables some degree of the analytic discrimination neglected by
Shklovsky and vaguely metaphorized by Bakhtin. if my application of Jakobson’s
argument seems to push it beyond what it can strictly yield—that is, beyond a
structural inquiry into the functions of language—it is important to grasp his
concepts of selection and combination in their broad heuristic potential—as
mental operations that organize experience—in the same way Jakobson himself does
in 'Two aspects of language and Two Types of aphasic disturbances'.”
*** - "it is impossible to distinguish between the
disturbance caused by Ovid’s lack of verbal communication in Latin and the one
caused by his contact with vernaculars spoken in Tomis on the Black Sea, his
designated place of exile. First, the loss of verbal memory that arises from the
isolation in exile is paralleled by a veritable auditory invasion of foreign
words that progressively take possession of the poet’s lexical store. Second,
through the same auditory channel, the rhythmic regularities of the foreign
syntax penetrate and take control over the poet’s power of versification...more
recent descriptions of verbal disorientation in exile are often remarkably
consistent with the image of linguistic death presented by the roman
poet.[ ]whereas ovid does not go further than expressing
the fear that the Thracian and Scythian tongues will infiltrate his verse,
Crnjanski’s “lament” deepens this anxiety as the perceived barbarisms take
control of his auditory imagination and step into the actual poem.What for the
Roman poet had to remain beyond the pale, in "lament” becomes the very fabric of
the poem. The intrusion of foreign words, accompanied by the images of chasms
and by catachreses, produces metaphoric equivalences tied together by the
metaphor of the abyss."
.