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 first two lines of Goethe’s Erlkönig (1782) in Zemblan translation:
Line 662: Who rides so late in the night and the wind
This line, and indeed the whole passage (lines 653-664), allude to the well-known poem by Goethe about the erlking, hoary enchanter of the elf-haunted alderwood, who falls in love with the delicate little boy of a belated traveler. One cannot sufficiently admire the ingenious way in which Shade manages to transfer something of the broken rhythm of the ballad (a trisyllabic meter at heart) into his iambic verse:
662 Who rídes so láte in the níght and the wind
663 …………………………………………………………………..
664 .... Ít is the fáther with his child
Goethe's two lines opening the poem come out most exactly and beautifully, with the bonus of an unexpected rhyme (also in French: vent - enfant), in my own language:
Ret wóren ok spoz on nátt ut vétt?
Éto est vótchez ut míd ik détt.
Another fabulous ruler, the last king of Zembla, kept repeating these haunting lines to himself both in Zemblan and German, as a chance accompaniment of drumming fatigue and anxiety, while he climbed through the bracken belt of the dark mountains he had to traverse in his bid for freedom.
In his Noten und Abhandlungen zu besserem Verständnis des westöstlichen Divans Goethe says:
Wer das Dichten will verstehen,
muß ins Land der Dichtung gehen;
wer den Dichter will verstehen,
muß in Dichters Lande gehen.
(To understand poetry you must go to the land of poems; to understand the poet you must go to the land of the poet.)
In a letter of February 3, 1879, to Leo Tolstoy Afanasiy Fet quotes (not quite correctly) the second part of Goethe's apothegm:
Я с наслаждением стараюсь забрать Wirklichkeit над Шопенгауэром. Начал перевод. Ваше выражение круто-превосходно. И в этом смысле кладу оружие. Кому же и судить об этом, как не Вам, и я нисколько не намерен отстаивать крутость того или другого стихотворения. Это они сами делают. Иное выходит -- сайка, а иное -- выборгский крендель. Рецепта на них я не знаю. Но что касается концепции всего стихотворения, то тут я буду, как Вы говорите, доходить. Доказывать, собственно, значит разбирать по частям, чтобы не потеряться в целом. Слово Жюль Верн ужасное слово для поэта. Это слово -- мелькало у меня в голове при самом зарождении стихотворения -- и -- и не остановило меня. Во-первых, второй год я живу в крайне для меня интересном философском мире, и без него едва ли можно понять источник моих последних стихов. "Wer den Dichter will verstehen muss ins Land des Dichters gehen" -- говорил Гете. Вы скажете, что, мол-де, все оправдание, как если бы юноша, на вопрос любимой женщины о его беспорядочном виде, объяснял ей: "Это меня били". Коли тебя били, не ходи любезничать. Но рождается вопрос: если в церковь, в собрание ходил Жюль Верн -- следует ли уже никому туда и не ходить. Обязан ли поэт, да еще лирический, выбирать только строго-реально -- возможные положения и состояния? Его дело звонить по всем видам, и по дубовому дубу, и по серебряному. Звенит -- хорошо -- не звенит -- плохо, хоть бы сама скрипка Страдивариуса.
In the same letter of Feb. 3, 1879, Fet uses the words zemlya (earth) and zemlyak (fellow earthling):
Воскресение из мертвых придумано не мной. В Иосафатской долине нам приказано явиться целиком, как жил в Воробьевке, для этого и волк приносит во рту мою ногу. А ну как приказано будет поднять Шеншина для репетиции? Послушают ли его, что это, мол, положение для бывшего человека невозможно? Да ведь и родиться из земли, и писать другому такому же земляку то, что пишу, -- еще менее возможно, а ведь нас не послушали, говорят пиши. Не забудьте, что это уже эпос, сказка, и поэтому меня суждение детей бесконечно обрадовало. Тут они самые настоящие судьи. Хороша сказка или неинтересна? Никто лучше их не знает. Не могу воздержаться и не присоединить к ним голос седовласого младенца Страхова: "Стихи чудесные. Из числа лучших Ваших стихов". Далее, говоря о всех последних, которые читает, как пишет, всем встречным: "Да, я забыл прибавить, что действие стихов неотразимо и что всего сильнее действует "Alter ego", как тому и следует быть".
Describing Gradus’ day in New York, Kinbote mentions Nikita Khrushchyov's visit to Zembla and "quotes" the Soviet leader's words "Vï nazïvaete sebya zemblerami, a ya vas nazïvayu zemlyakami (You call yourselves Zemblans and I call you fellow countrymen!):"
He began with the day's copy of The New York Times. His lips moving like wrestling worms, he read about all kinds of things. Hrushchov (whom they spelled "Khrushchev") had abruptly put off a visit to Scandinavia and was to visit Zembla instead (here I tune in: "Vï nazïvaete sebya zemblerami, you call yourselves Zemblans, a ya vas nazïvayu zemlyakami, and I call you fellow countrymen!" Laughter and applause.) The United States was about to launch its first atom-driven merchant ship (just to annoy the Ruskers, of course. J. G.). Last night in Newark, an apartment house at 555 South Street was hit by a thunderbolt that smashed a TV set and injured two people watching an actress lost in a violent studio storm (those tormented spirits are terrible! C. X. K. teste J. S.). The Rachel Jewelry Company in Brooklyn advertised in agate type for a jewelry polisher who "must have experience on costume jewelry (oh, Degré had!). The Helman brothers said they had assisted in the negotiations for the placement of a sizable note: "$11, 000, 000, Decker Glass Manufacturing Company, Inc., note due July 1, 1979," and Gradus, grown young again, reread this this twice, with the background gray thought, perhaps, that he would be sixty-four four days after that (no comment). On another bench he found a Monday issue of the same newspaper. During a visit to a museum in Whitehorse (Gradus kicked at a pigeon that came too near), the Queen of England walked to a corner of the White Animals Room, removed her right glove and, with her back turned to several evidently observant people, rubbed her forehead and one of her eyes. A pro-Red revolt had erupted in Iraq. Asked about the Soviet exhibition at the New York Coliseum, Carl Sandburg, a poet, replied, and I quote: "They make their appeal on the highest of intellectual levels." A hack reviewer of new books for tourists, reviewing his own tour through Norway, said that the fjords were too famous to need (his) description, and that all Scandinavians loved flowers. And at a picnic for international children a Zemblan moppet cried to her Japanese friend: Ufgut, ufgut, velkam ut Semblerland! (Adieu, adieu, till we meet in Zembla!) I confess it has been a wonderful game - this looking up in the WUL of various ephemerides over the shadow of a padded shoulder. (note to Line 949)
Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) is the author of Shagbark Hickory:
IN the moonlight under a shag-bark hickory tree
Watching the yellow shadows melt in hoof-pools,
Listening to the yes and the no of a woman’s hands,
I kept my guess why the night was glad.
The night was lit with a woman’s eyes.
The night was crossed with a woman’s hands,
The night kept humming an undersong.
In Canto One of his poem Shade mentions his favorite young shagbark tree:
I had a favorite young shagbark there
With ample dark jade leaves and a black, spare,
Vermiculated trunk. The setting sun
Bronzed the black bark, around which, like undone
Garlands, the shadows of the foliage fell.
It is now stout and rough; it has done well.
White butterflies turn lavender as they
Pass through its shade where gently seems to sway
The phantom of my little daughter's swing. (ll. 49-57)
In his Commentary Kinbote writes:
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.
Ginkgo biloba is a poem by Goethe included in West-Eastern Divan (1819):
Dieses Baums Blatt, der von Osten
Meinem Garten anvertraut,
Giebt geheimen Sinn zu kosten,
Wie's den Wissenden erbaut,
Ist es ein lebendig Wesen,
Das sich in sich selbst getrennt?
Sind es zwei, die sich erlesen,
Daß man sie als Eines kennt?
Solche Frage zu erwidern,
Fand ich wohl den rechten Sinn,
Fühlst du nicht an meinen Liedern,
Daß ich Eins und doppelt bin?
This leaf from a tree in the East,
Has been given to my garden.
It reveals a certain secret,
Which pleases me and thoughtful people.
Is it one living being,
Which has separated in itself?
Or are these two, who chose
To be recognized as one?
Answering this kind of question,
Haven't I found the proper meaning,
Don't you feel in my songs,
That I'm one and double?
"An old-fashioned butterfly, ill-spread in shape" brings to mind Fet's poem Babochka ("The Butterfly," 1884):
Ты прав. Одним воздушным очертаньем
Я так мила.
Весь бархат мой с его живым миганьем —
Лишь два крыла.
Не спрашивай: откуда появилась?
Куда спешу?
Здесь на цветок я легкий опустилась
И вот — дышу.
Надолго ли, без цели, без усилья,
Дышать хочу?
Вот-вот сейчас, сверкнув, раскину крылья
И улечу.
Describing the last moments of Shade’s life, Kinbote mentions the forgotten butterfly of revelation:
Well did I know he could never resist a golden drop of this or that, especially since he was severely rationed at home. With an inward leap of exultation I relieved him of the large envelope that hampered his movements as he descended the steps of the porch, sideways, like a hesitating infant. We crossed the lawn, we crossed the road. Clink-clank, came the horseshoe music from Mystery Lodge. In the large envelope I carried I could feel the hard-cornered, rubberbanded batches of index cards. We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable (so I used to tell my students). Although I am capable, through long dabbling in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world (but singularly enough not verse - I am a miserable rhymester), I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do - pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web. Solemnly I weighed in my hand what I was carrying under my left armpit, and for a moment, I found myself enriched with an indescribable amazement as if informed that fireflies were making decodable signals on behalf of stranded spirits, or that a bat was writing a legible tale of torture in the bruised and branded sky.
I was holding all Zembla pressed to my heart. (note to Line 991)