Стихотворения - Владимир Набоков

Иоганн Вольфганг Гете

414. ПОСВЯЩЕНИЕ К «ФАУСТУ»{*}

Вы снова близко, реющие тени.Мой смутный взор уже вас видел раз.Хочу ль теперь безумия видений?Запечатлеть попробую ли вас?Теснитесь вы! Средь дымных испарений —да будет так! — вы явитесь сейчас;по-юному мне сердце потрясаеттуман чудес, что вас сопровождает.

Отрада в вас мне чудится былая,а тень встает родная не одна,встает любовь и дружба молодая,как полузвук, преданье, старина,и снова — боль, и, жалуясь, блуждаяпо лабиринту жизненного сна,зову я милых, счастием жестокообмеренных, исчезнувших до срока.

Те, для кого я пел первоначально,не слышат песен нынешних моих,ушли друзья, и замер отзвук дальнийиз первого привета. Для чужих,неведомых, звучит мой стих печальный,боюсь я даже одобренья их,а верные мне души, если живы,скитаются в изгнанье сиротливо.

По истовом и тихом царстве духаво мне тоска забытая зажглась,трепещет песнь, неясная для слуха,как по струнам эоловым струясь,и плачу я, и ужасаюсь глухо,в суровом сердце нежность разлилась;всё настоящее вдали пропало,а прошлое действительностью стало.

СТИХОТВОРЕНИЯ НА АНГЛИЙСКОМ И ФРАНЦУЗСКОМ ЯЗЫКАХ

POEMS AND PROBLEMS{*}

415. A LITERARY DINNER{*}

Come here, said my hostess, her face making roomfor one of those pink introductory smilesthat link, like a valley of fruit trees in bloom,the slopes of two names.I want you, she murmured, to eat Dr. James.

I was hungry. The Doctor looked good. He had readthe great book of the week and had liked it, he said,because it was powerful. So I was broughta generous helping. His mauve-bosomed wifekept showing me, very politely, I thought,the tenderest bits with the point of her knife.I ate — and in Egypt the sunsets were swell;The Russians were doing remarkably well;had I met a Prince Poprinsky, whom he had knownin Caparabella, or was it Mentone?They had traveled extensively, he and his wife;her hobby was People, his hobby was Life.All was good and well cooked, but the tastiest partwas his nut-flavored, crisp cerebellum. The heartresembled a shiny brown date,and I stowed all the studs on the edge of my plate.

416. THE REFRIGERATOR AWAKES{*}

Crash!And if darkness could sound, it would sound like this giantwaking up in the torture house, trying to dieand not dying, and tryingnot to cry and immediately cryingthat he will, that he will, that he will do his bestto adjust his dark soul to the pressing requestof the only true frost,and he pants and he gasps and he rasps and he wheezes:ice is the solid form when the water freezes;a volatile liquid (see «Refrigerating»)is permitted to pass into evaporatingcoils, where it boils,which somehow seems wrong,and I wonder how longit will rumble and shudder and crackle and pound;Scudder, the Alpinist, slipped and was foundhalf a century later preserved in blue icewith his bride and two guides and a dead edelweiss;a German has proved that the snowflakes we seeare the germ cells of stars and the sea life to be;holdthe line, hold the line, lest its tale be untold;let it amble along through the thumping painand horror of dichlordisomethingmethane,a trembling white heart with the frost froth upon it,Nova Zembla, poor thing, with that В in her bonnet,stunned bees in the bonnets of cars on hot roads,Keep it Kold, says a poster in passing, and lo,loads,of bright fruit, and a ham, and some chocolate cream,and three bottles of milk, all contained in the gleamof that wide-open whitegod, the pride and delightof starry-eyed couples in dream kitchenettes,and it groans and it drones and it toils and it sweats —Shackleton, pemmican, penguin, Poe's Рут —collapsing at last in the criminalnight.

417. A DISCOVERY{*}

I found it in a legendary landall rocks and lavender and tufted grass,where it was settled on some sodden sandhard by the torrent of a mountain pass.

The features it combines mark it as newto science: shape and shade — the special tinge,akin to moonlight, tempering its blue,the dingy underside, the checquered fringe.

My needles have teased our its sculptured sex;corroded tissues could no longer hidethat priceless mote now dimpling the convexand limpid teardrop on a lighted slide.

Smoothly a screw is turned; our of the misttwo ambered hooks symmetrically slope,or scales like battledores of amethystcross the charmed circle of the microscope.

I found it and I named it, being versedin taxonomic Latin; thus becamegodfather to an insect and its firstdescriber — and I want no other fame.

Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep),and safe from creeping relatives and rust,in the secluded stronghold where we keeptype specimens it will transcend its dust.

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,poems that take a thousand years to diebut ape the immortality of thisred label on a little butterfly.

418. THE POEM{*}

Not the sunset poem you make when you think aloud,with its linden tree in India inkand the telegraph wires across its pink cloud;

not the mirror in you and her delicate bareshoulder still glimmering there;not the lyrical click of a pocket rhyme —the tiny music that tells the time;

and not the pennies and weights on thoseevening papers piled up in the rain;not the cacodemons of carnal pain;not the things you can say so much better in plain prose —

but the poem that hurtles from heights unknown— when you wait for the splash of the stonedeep below, and grope for your pen,and then comes the shiver, and then —

in the tangle of sounds, the leopards of words,the leaflike insects, the eye-spotted birdsfuse and form a silent, intense,mimetic pattern of perfect sense.

419. AN EVENING OF RUSSIAN POETRY{*}

«…seems to be the best train. Miss Ethel Winter of the Department of English will meet you at the station and…»

The subject chosen for tonight's discussionis everywhere, though often incomplete:when their basaltic banks become too steep,most rivers use a kind of rapid Russian,and so do children talking in their sleep.My little helper at the magic lantern,insert that slide and let the colored beamproject my name or any such-like phantomin Slavic characters upon the screen.The other way, the other way. I thank you.

On mellow hills the Greek, as you remember,fashioned his alphabet from cranes in flight;his arrows crossed the sunset, then the night.Our simple skyline and a taste for timber,the influence of hives and conifers,Yes, Sylvia?

             «Why do you speak of wordswhen all we want is knowledge nicely browned?»

Because all hangs together — shape and sound,heather and honey, vessel and content.Not only rainbows — every line is bent,and skulls and seeds and all good words are round,like Russian verse, like our colossal vowels:those painted eggs, those glossy pitcher flowersthat swallow whole a golden bumblebee,those shells that hold a thimble and the sea.Next question.

                 «Is your prosody like ours?»

Well, Emmy, our pentameter may seemto foreign ears as if it could not rousethe limp iambus from its pyrrhic dream.But close your eyes and listen to the line.The melody unwinds; the middle wordis marvelously long and serpentine:you hear one beat, but you have also heardthe shadow of another, then the thirdtouches the gong, and then the fourth one sighs.

It makes a very fascinating noise:it opens slowly, like a greyish rosein pedagogic films of long ago.

The rhyme is the line's birthday, as you know,and there are certain customary twinsin Russian as in other tongues. For instance,love automatically rhymes with blood,nature with liberty, sadness with distance,humane with everlasting, prince with mud,moon with a multitude of words, but sunand song and wind and life and death with none.

Beyond the seas where I have lost a scepter,I hear the neighing of my dappled nouns,soft participles coming down the steps,treading on leaves, trailing their rustling gowns,and liquid verbs in ahla and in ili,Aonian grottoes, nights in the Altai,black pools of sound with «l» s for water lilies.The empty glass I touched is tinkling still,but now 'tis covered by a hand and dies.

«Trees? Animals? Your favorite precious stone?»

The birch tree, Cynthia, the fir tree, Joan.Like a small caterpillar on its thread,my heart keeps dangling from a leaf long deadbut hanging still, and still I see the slenderwhite birch that stands on tiptoe in the wind,and firs beginning where the garden ends,the evening ember glowing through their cinders.

Among the animals that haunt our verse,that bird of bards, regale of night, comes first:scores of locutions mimicking its throatrender its every whistling, bubbling, bursting,flutelike or cuckoolike or ghostlike note.But lapidary epithets are few;we do not deal in universal rubies.The angle and the glitter are subdued;our riches lie concealed. We never likedthe jeweler's window in the rainy night.

My back is Argus-eyed. I live in danger.False shadows turn to track me as I passand, wearing beards, disguised as secret agents,creep in to blot the freshly written pageand read the blotter in the looking glass.And in the dark, under my bedroom window,until, with a chill whirr and shiver, daypresses its starter, warily they lingeror silently approach the door and ringthe bell of memory and run away.

Let me allude, before the spell is broken,to Pushkin, rocking in his coach on longand lonely roads: he dozed, then he awoke,undid the collar of his traveling cloak,and yawned, and listened to the driver's song.Amorphous sallow bushes called rakeety,enormous clouds above an endless plain,songline and skyline endlessly repeated,the smell of grass and leather in the rain.And then the sob, the syncope (Nekrasov!),the panting syllables that climb and climb,obsessively repetitive and rasping,dearer to some than any other rhyme.And lovers meeting in a tangled garden,dreaming of mankind, of untrammeled life,mingling their longings in the moonlit garden,where trees and hearts are larger than in life.This passion for expansion you may followthroughout our poetry. We want the moleto be a lynx or turn into a swallowby some sublime mutation of the soul.But to unneeded symbols consecrated,escorted by a vaguely infantilepath for bare feet, our roads were always fatedto lead into the silence of exile.

Had I more time tonight I would unfoldthe whole amazing story — neighuklúzhe,nevynossímo — but I have to go.

What did I say under my breath? I spoketo a blind songbird hidden in a hat,safe from my thumbs and from the eggs I brokeinto the gibus brimming with their yolk.

An now I must remind you in conclusion,that I am followed everywhere and thatspace is collapsible, although the bountyof memory is often incomplete:once in a dusty place in Mora county(half town, half desert, dump mound and mesquite)and once in West Virginia (a muddyred road between an orchard and a veilof tepid rain) it came, that sudden shudder,a Russian something that I could inhalebut could nor see. Some rapid words were uttered —and then the child slept on, the door was uttered —and then the child slept on, the door was shut.

The conjurer collects his poor belongings —the colored handkerchief, the magic rope,the double-bottomed rhymes, the cage, the song.You tell him of the passes you detected.The mystery remains intact. The checkcomes forward in its smiling envelope.

«How would you say „delightful talk“ in Russian?»«How would you say „good night“?»

                        Oh, that would be:

Bessónnitza, tvoy vzor oonýl i stráshen;lubóv moyá, otstóopnika prostée.

(Insomnia, your stare is dull and ashen,my love, forgive me this apostasy.)

420. THE ROOM{*}