Стихотворения - Владимир Набоков

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{*}

The room a dying poet tookat nightfall in a dead hotelhad both directories — the Bookof Heaven and the Book of Bell.

It had a mirror and a chair,it had a window and a bed,its ribs let in the darkness whererain glistened and a shopsign bled.

Not tears, not terror, but a blendof anonymity and doom,it seemed, that room, to condescendto imitate a normal room.

Whenever some automobilesubliminally slit the night,the walls and ceiling would reveala wheeling skeleton of light.

Soon afterwards the room was mine.A similar striped cageling, Igroped for the lamp and found the line«Alone, unknown, unloved, I die»

in pencil, just above the bed.It had a false quotation air.Was it a she, wild-eyed, well-read,or a fat man with thinning hair?

I asked a gentle Negro maid,I asked a captain and his crew,I asked the night clerk. Undismayed,I asked a drunk. Nobody knew.

Perhaps when he had found the switchhe saw the picture on the walland cursed the red eruption whichtried to be maples in the fall?

Artistically in the styleof Mr. Churchill at his best,those maples marched in double filefrom Glen Lake to Restricted Rest.

Perhaps my text is incomplete.A poet's death is, after all,a question of technique, a neatenjambment, a melodic fall.

And here a life had come apartin darkness, and the room had growna ghostly thorax, with a heartunknown, unloved — but not alone.

421. VOLUPTATES TACTIONUM[16]{*}

Some inevitable dayOn the editorial pageOf your paper it will say,«Tactio has come of age».

When you turn a knob, your setWill obligingly exhaleForms, invisible and yetTangible — a world in Braille.

Think of all the things that willReally be within your reach!Phantom bottle, dummy pill,Limpid limbs upon a beach.

Grouped before a Magnotact,Clubs and families will clutchEverywhere the same compactParadise (in terms of touch).

Palpitating fingertipsWill caress the flossy hairAnd investigate the lipsSimulated in midair.

See the schoolboy, like a blindLover, frantically gropeFor the shape of love — and findNothing but the shape of soap.

422. RESTORATION{*}

To think that any fool may tearby chance the web of when and where.O window in the dark! To thinkthat every brain is on the brinkof nameless bliss no brain can bear,

unless there be no great surprise —as when you learn to levitateand, hardly trying, realize— alone, in a bright room — that weightis but your shadow, and you rise.

My little daughter wakes in tears:She fancies that her bed is drawninto a dimness which appearsto be the deep of all her fearsbut which, in point of fact, is dawn.

I know a poet who can stripa William Tell or Golden Pipin one uninterrupted peelmiraculously to reveal,revolving on his fingertip,

a snowball. So I would unrobe,turn inside out, pry open, probeall matter, everything you see,the skyline and its saddest tree,the whole inexplicable globe,

to find the true, the ardent coreas doctors of old pictures dowhen, rubbing our a distant dooror sooty curtain, they restorethe jewel of a bluish view.

423. THE POPLAR{*}

Before this house a poplar growsWell versed in dowsing, I suppose,

But how it sighs! And every nightA boy in black, a girl in white

Beyond the brightness of my bedAppear, and not a word is said.

On coated chair and coatless chairThey sit, one here, the other there.

I do not care to make a scene:I read a glossy magazine.

He props upon his slender kneeA dwarfed and potted poplar tree.

And she — she seems to hold a dimHand mirror with an ivory rim

Framing a lawn, and her, and meUnder the prototypic tree,

Before a pillared porch, last seenIn July, nineteen seventeen.

This is the silver lining ofPathetic fallacies: the sough

Of Populus that taps at lastNot water but the author's past.

And note: nothing is ever said.I read a magazine in bed

Or the Home Book of Verse; and note:This is my shirt, that is my coat.

But frailer seers I am toldGet up to rearrange a fold.

424. LINES WRITTEN IN OREGON{*}