Eric Naiman: Nabokov's best and most original Christmas story, though, is "ðÕÔÅ×ÏÄÉÔÅÌØ ÐÏ âÅÒÌÉÎÕ." (Nabokov may have forgotten it was a Christmas story when he translated it into English....). Thursday marks the 90th anniversary of its publication. Read it on Christmas Eve to appreciate Nabokov's unique contribution to the genre, if not to the "Christmas spirit."
Jansy Mello: Thanks to both Joseph Schlegel and Katherina Kokinova who came to my rescue after I wondered about the translation of the Russian title of VN’s short-story, “A Guide to Berlin”.*
I selected some of my favorite sentences in the guise of “excerpts” to stimulate Nablers (as Eric Naiman did) to read it during this festive period of beneficent good-will, beauty and hope that may shine through numbing routines, losses and in the midst of the ever present dire signs.
In the morning I visited the zoo and now I am entering a pub with my friend and usual pot companion. Its sky-blue sign bears a white inscription, "LOWENBRAU," accompanied by the portrait of a lion with a winking eye and mug of beer. We sit down and I start telling my friend about utility pipes, streetcars, and other important matters.
The Pipes: Today someone wrote "Otto" with his finger on the strip of virgin snow and I thought how beautifully that name, with its two soft o's flanking the pair of gentle consonants, suited the silent layer of snow upon that pipe with its two orifices and its tacit tunnel.
The Streetcar: In these winter days the bottom half of the forward door is curtained with green cloth, the windows are clouded with frost, Christmas trees for sale throng the edge of the sidewalk at each stop, the passengers' feet are numb with cold, and sometimes a gray worsted mitten clothes the conductor's hand.[šš ] I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.
Work: A young white-capped baker flashes by on his tricycle; there is something angelic about a lad dusted with flour. A van jingles past with cases on its roof containing rows of emerald-glittering empty bottles, collected from taverns. A long, black larch tree mysteriously travels by in a cart [šš ] A postman, who has placed the mouth of a sack under a cobalt-colored mailbox, fastens it on from below, and secretly, invisibly, with a hurried rustling, the box empties and the postman claps shut the square jaws of the bag, now grown full and heavy. But perhaps fairest of all are the carcasses, chrome yellow, with pink blotches, and arabesques, piled on a truck, and the man in apron and leather hood with a long neck flap who heaves each carcass onto his back and, hunched over, carries it across the sidewalk into the butcher's red shop.
Eden: Every large city has its own, man-made Eden on earth.// If churches speak to us of the Gospel, zoos remind us of the solemn, and tender, beginning of the Old Testament. The only sad part is that this artificial Eden is all behind bars, although it is also true that if there were no enclosures the very first dingo would savage me. It is Eden nonetheless, insofar as man is able to reproduce it, and it is with good reason that the large hotel across from the Berlin Zoo is named after that garden.[š ] Behind the glass, in bright recesses, transparent fishes glide with flashing fins, marine flowers breathe, and, on a patch of sand, lies a live, crimson five-pointed star. This, then, is where the notorious emblem originated—at the very bottom of the ocean, in the murk of sunken Atlantica, which long ago lived through various upheavals while pottering about topical Utopias and other inanities that cripple us today.
The Pub: "I can't understand what you see down there," says my friend, turning back toward me.// What indeed! How can I demonstrate to him that I have glimpsed somebody's future recollection?
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”.*šš * -The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov: note “Written in December 1925 in Berlin, Putevoditel' po Berlinu was published in Rul', December 24, 1925, and collected in Vozvrashchenie Chorba, Slovo, Berlin, 1930. Despite its simple appearance, this "Guide" is one of my trickiest pieces. Its translation has caused my son and me a tremendous amount of healthy trouble. Two or three scattered phrases have been added for the sake of factual clarity.”