Describing the campus of Wordsmith University, 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) mentions the famous avenue of all the trees mentioned by Shakespeare (the so-called Shakespeare Avenue):
After winding for about four miles in a general eastern direction through a beautifully sprayed and irrigated residential section with variously graded lawns sloping down on both sides, the highway bifurcates: one branch goes left to New Wye and its expectant airfield; the other continues to the campus. Here are the great mansions of madness, the impeccably planned dormitories - bedlams of jungle music - the magnificent palace of the Administration, the brick walls, the archways, the quadrangles blocked out in velvet green and chrysoprase, Spencer House and its lily pond, the Chapel, New Lecture Hall, the Library, the prisonlike edifice containing our classrooms and offices (to be called from now on Shade Hall), the famous avenue of all the trees mentioned by Shakespeare, a distant droning sound, the hint of a haze, the turquoise dome of the Observatory, wisps and pale plumes of cirrus, and the poplar-curtained Roman-tiered football field, deserted on summer days except for a dreamy-eyed youngster flying - on a long control line in a droning circle - a motor-powered model plane.
Dear Jesus, do something. (note to Lines 47-48)
Line 49: shagbark
A hickory. Our poet shared with the English masters the noble knack of transplanting trees into verse with their sap and shade. Many years ago Disa, our King's Queen, whose favorite trees were the jacaranda and the maidenhair, copied out in her album a quatrain from John Shade's collection of short poems Hebe's Cup, which I cannot refrain from quoting here (from a letter I received on April 6, 1959, from southern France):
THE SACRED TREE
The gingko leaf, in golden hue, when shed,
A muscat grape,
Is an old-fashioned butterfly, ill-spread
In shape.
When the new Episcopal church in New Wye (see note to line 549) was built, the bulldozers spared an arc of those sacred trees planted by a landscaper of genius (Repburg) at the end of the so-called Shakespeare Avenue, on the campus. I do not know if it is relevant or not but there is a cat-and-mouse game in the second line, and "tree" in Zemblan is grados.
In his epigram on N. Kh. Ketscher (a Russian doctor and Shakespeare's translator of Swedish descent, 1809-86) Turgenev says that Ketscher perepyor ("transplodded") Shakespeare na yazyk rodnykh osin (to the language of native aspen trees):
Вот еще светило мира!
Кетчер, друг шипучих вин;
Перепёр он нам Шекспира
На язык родных осин.
Here is another luminary of the world!
Ketscher, a friend of fizzling wines;
he transpodded for us Shakespeare
to the language of native aspen trees.
The maiden name of Irina Pavlovna Ratmirov, a character in Turgenev's novel Dym (Smoke, 1867), Osinin comes from osina (aspen tree). In Turgenev’s novel, a fragrance of fresh heliotrope stirs something in Litvinov’s memory:
Литвинов сломил крупную гербовую печать и принялся было читать... Сильный, очень приятный и знакомый запах поразил его. Он оглянулся и увидел на окне в стакане воды большой букет свежих гелиотропов. Литвинов нагнулся к ним не без удивления, потрогал их, понюхал ... Что-то как будто вспомнилось ему, что-то весьма отдаленное... но что именно, он не мог придумать.
Litvinov broke the thick heraldic seal, and was just setting to work to read it . . . when he was struck by a strong, very agreeable, and familiar fragrance, and saw in the window a great bunch of fresh heliotrope in a glass of water. Litvinov bent over them not without amazement, touched them, and smelt them. . . . Something seemed to stir in his memory, something very remote . . . but what, precisely, he could not discover. (Smoke, Chapter Six)
In his commentary Kinbote mentions heliotropes (Heliotropium turgenevi):
I am happy to report that soon after Easter my fears disappeared never to return. Into Alphina's or Betty's room another lodger moved, Balthasar, Prince of Loam, as I dubbed him, who with elemental regularity fell asleep at nine and by six in the morning was planting heliotropes (Heliotropium turgenevi). This is the flower whose odor evokes with timeless intensity the dusk, and the garden bench, and a house of painted wood in a distant northern land. (note to Line 62)
Kinbote met his black gardener (Balthasar, Prince of Loam) in one of the most famous avenues in Appalachia (the so-called Shakespeare Avenue):
Some neighbor's! The poet had seen my gardener many times, and this vagueness I can only assign to his desire (noticeable elsewhere in his handling of names, etc.) to give a certain poetical patina, the bloom of remoteness, to familiar figures and things - although it is just possible he might have mistaken him in the broken light for a stranger working for a stranger. This gifted gardener I discovered by chance one idle spring day, when I was slowly wending my way home after a maddening and embarrassing experience at the college indoor swimming pool. He stood at the top of a green ladder attending to the sick branch of a grateful tree in one of the most famous avenues in Appalachia. His red flannel shirt lay on the grass. We conversed, a little shyly, he above, I below. I was pleasantly surprised at his being able to refer all his patients to their proper habitats. It was spring, and we were alone in that admirable colonnade of trees which visitors from England have photographed from end to end. I can enumerate here only a few kinds of those trees: Jove's stout oak and two others: the thunder-cloven from Britain, the knotty-entrailed from a Mediterranean island; a weather-fending line (now lime), a phoenix (now date palm), a pine and a cedar (Cedrus), all insular; a Venetian sycamore tree (Acer); two willows, the green, likewise from Venice, the hoar-leaved from Denmark; a midsummer elm, its barky fingers enringed with ivy; a midsummer mulberry, its shade inviting to tarry; and a clown's sad cypress from Illyria. (note to Line 998)
O Shekspire v perevode Ketchera ("On Shakespeare in Ketscher's Translation," 1841) is an essay by Vasiliy Botkin (1811-69). In his Pis'mo iz Italii ("A Letter from Italy," 1842) Botkin describes his first arrival in Rome on October 29, 1841, and mentions the architraves of an ancient temple dedicated to the goddess Felicitas:
Теперь видите направо восемь колоссальных колонн, поддерживающих остатки карниза, и архитравы: это был храм Счастия; возле, пониже, стоят три колонны превосходной работы; на куске большого прелестного карниза, уцелевшего на них, можно еще прочесть: "tonante"; это был храм Юпитера Громовержца. Недалеко от них вышла в половину из земли роскошная арка Септимия Севера. Там подальше в поле одиноко стоят три колонны; они поддерживают широкий, величественный карниз самой изящной работы: это остатки здания, в котором принимала республика чужестранных послов. Далее всю правую сторону горизонта заслоняет длинная гора мусора, кирпича и мраморных обломков, заросших густою травою. Это было здание, которого великолепие недоступно нашему воображению, -- это был дворец цезарей. Около развалин этих глядят в пустынное поле великолепная, почти вся уцелевшая, но чуждая древнего изящества арка Константина и нежная тень арки Титовой. Наконец, обращаясь влево, глаза останавливаются на громадной, полуразрушившейся массе, поднявшейся широкими арками в 5 величайших рядов. Это Колизей... Сурово стоишь ты, памятник величия римского! Но не битвы гладиаторов, не ристалища, не представления занимают в нем меня -- нет, здесь защищал Рим свое существование от неслыханного и последнего противника своего: тысячи христиан замучены на широкой арене этого амфитеатра.
In a sonnet that he composed directly in colorful, if not quite correct, English the king's uncle Conmal (the Zemblan translator of Shakespeare) mentions the architrave:
Line 962: Help me, Will. Pale Fire.
Paraphrased, this evidently means: Let me look in Shakespeare for something I might use for a title. And the find is "pale fire." But in which of the Bard's works did our poet cull it? My readers must make their own research. All I have with me is a tiny vest pocket edition of Timon of Athens - in Zemblan! It certainly contains nothing that could be regarded as an equivalent of "pale fire" (if it had, my luck would have been a statistical monster).
English was not taught in Zembla before Mr. Campbell's time. Conmal mastered it all by himself (mainly by learning a lexicon by heart) as a young man, around 1880, when not the verbal inferno but a quiet military career seemed to open before him, and his first work (the translation of Shakespeare's Sonnets) was the outcome of a bet with a fellow officer. He exchanged his frogged uniform for a scholar's dressing gown and tackled The Tempest. A slow worker, he needed half a century to translate the works of him whom he called "dze Bart," in their entirety. After this, in 1930, he went on to Milton and other poets, steadily drilling through the ages, and had just completed Kipling's "The Rhyme of the Three Sealers" ("Now this is the Law of the Muscovite that he proves with shot and steel") when he fell ill and soon expired under his splendid painted bed ceil with its reproductions of Altamira animals, his last words in his last delirium being "Comment dit-on 'mourir' en anglais?" - a beautiful and touching end.
It is easy to sneer at Conmal's faults. They are the naive failings of a great pioneer. He lived too much in his library, too little among boys and youths. Writers should see the world, pluck its figs and peaches, and not keep constantly meditating in a tower of yellow ivory - which was also John Shade's mistake, in a way.
We should not forget that when Conmal began his stupendous task no English author was available in Zemblan except Jane de Faun, a lady novelist in ten volumes whose works, strangely enough, are unknown in England, and some fragments of Byron translated from French versions.
A large, sluggish man with no passions save poetry, he seldom moved from his warm castle and its fifty thousand crested books, and had been known to spend two years in bed reading and writing after which, much refreshed, he went for the first and only time to London, but the weather was foggy, and he could not understand the language, and so went back to bed for another year.
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!