In his commentary to Shade's poem Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) quotes the beginning of a sonnet that Conmal (the Zemblan translator of Shakespeare) composed directly in English:
English being Conmal's prerogative, his Shakspere remained invulnerable throughout the greater part of his long life. The venerable Duke was famed for the nobility of his work; few dared question its fidelity. Personally, I had never the heart to check it. One callous Academician who did, lost his seat in result and was severely reprimanded by Conmal in an extraordinary sonnet composed directly in colorful, if not quite correct, English, beginning:
I am not slave! Let be my critic slave.
I cannot be. And Shakespeare would not want thus.
Let drawing students copy the acanthus,
I work with Master on the architrave! (note to Line 962)
Shakespeare is a sonnet by Henrietta Cordelia Ray (1852-1916), a black American poet whose parents were well known abolitionists:
We wonder what the horoscope did show
When Shakespeare came to earth. Were planets there,
Grouped In unique arrangement ? Unaware
His age of aught so marvelous, when lo !
He speaks! men listen ! what of joy or woe
Is not revealed! love, hatred, carking care,
All quiv'ring 'neath his magic touch. The air
Is thick with beauteous elves, a dainty row.
Anon, with droning witches, and e'en now
Stalks gloomy Hamlet, bent on vengeance dread.
One after one they come, smiling or scarred,
Wrought by that mind prismatic to which bow
All lesser minds. They by thee would be fed,
Poet incomparable! Avon's Bard!
Avon's Bard (as Henrietta Cordelia Ray calls Shakespeare) brings to mind Nova Zembla mentioned by Kinbote in a conversation at the Faculty Club:
Professor Pardon now spoke to me: "I was under the impression that you were born in Russia, and that your name was a kind of anagram of Botkin or Botkine?"
Kinbote: "You are confusing me with some refugee from Nova Zembla” [sarcastically stressing the "Nova"]. (note to Line 894)
and present-day bards who, according to Kinbote, look like gorillas or vultures:
Oh, there were many such incidents. In a skit performed by a group of drama students I was pictured as a pompous woman hater with a German accent, constantly quoting Housman and nibbling raw carrots; and a week before Shade's death, a certain ferocious lady at whose club I had refused to speak on the subject of "The Hally Vally" (as she put it, confusing Odin's Hall with the title of a Finnish epic), said to me in the middle of a grocery store, "You are a remarkably disagreeable person. I fail to see how John and Sybil can stand you," and, exasperated by my polite smile, she added: "What's more, you are insane." But let me not pursue the tabulation of nonsense. Whatever was thought, whatever was said, I had my full reward in John's friendship. This friendship was the more precious for its tenderness being intentionally concealed, especially when we were not alone, by that gruffness which stems from what can be termed the dignity of the heart. His whole being constituted a mask. John Shade's physical appearance was so little in keeping with the harmonies hiving in the man, that one felt inclined to dismiss it as a coarse disguise or passing fashion; for if the fashions of the Romantic Age subtilized a poet's manliness by baring his attractive neck, pruning his profile and reflecting a mountain lake in his oval gaze, present-day bards, owing perhaps to better opportunities of aging, look like gorillas or vultures. My sublime neighbor's face had something about it that might have appealed to the eye, had it been only leonine or only Iroquoian; but unfortunately, by combining the two it merely reminded one of a fleshy Hogarthian tippler of indeterminate sex. His misshapen body, that gray mop of abundant hair, the yellow nails of his pudgy fingers, the bags under his lusterless eyes, were only intelligible if regarded as the waste products eliminated from his intrinsic self by the same forces of perfection which purifed and chiseled his verse. He was his own cancellation. (Foreword)
Henrietta Cordelia Ray's sonnet on the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L'Overture is notable for its engagement in black politics (absent from her earlier verse) and for its allusions to William Wordsworth's famous sonnet To Toussaint L'Overture:
To those fair isles where crimson sunsets burn,
We send a backward glance to gaze on thee,
Brave Toussaint! thou was surely born to be
A hero; thy proud spirit could but spurn
Each outrage on the race. Couldst thou unlearn
The lessons taught by instinct? Nay! and we
Who share the zeal that would make all men free,
Must e’en with pride unto thy life-work turn.
Soul-dignity was thine and purest aim;
And ah! how sad that thou wast left to mourn
In chains ’neath alien skies. On him, shame! shame!
That mighty conqueror who dared to claim
The right to bind thee. Him we heap with scorn,
And noble patriot! guard with love thy name.
An English poet, William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is the author of Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798. The poet in Pale Fire, John Shade lives in New Wye (a small University town in New England), in the frame house between Goldsworth and Wordsmith. Shade's neighbor, Judge Goldsworth is Kinbote's landlord in New Wye. Henrietta Cordelia Ray calls Toussaint L'Overture "noble patriot." The King's staunch friend who helps him to escape from Zembla, Odon is a world-famous actor and Zemblan patriot:
Odon, pseudonym of Donald O'Donnell, b .1915, world-famous actor and Zemblan patriot; learns from K. about secret passage but has to leave for theater, 130; drives K. from theater to foot of Mt. Mandevil, 149; meets K. near sea cave and escapes with him in motorboat, ibid.; directs cinema picture in Paris, 171; stays with Lavender in Lex, 408; ought not to marry that blubber-lipped cinemactress, with untidy hair, 691; see also O'Donnell, Sylvia. (Index)
Henrietta Cordelia Ray died on January 5, 1916, in Brooklyn, New York. Kinbote and Gradus (Shade's murderer) were born on July 5, 1915, in Onhava (the capital of Kinbote's Zembla). Onhava-onhava means in Zemblan "far, far away." July 5 is also Shade's birthday (Shade was born in 1898).