Стихотворения

Набоков Владимир Владимирович

418. THE POEM ^{*}

Not the sunset poem you make when you think aloud, with its linden tree in India ink and the telegraph wires across its pink cloud; not the mirror in you and her delicate bare shoulder 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 those evening 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 stone deep 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 birds fuse and form a silent, intense, mimetic pattern of perfect sense. <10 июня> 1944

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…»

From a letter addressed to the visiting speaker

The subject chosen for tonight's discussion is 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 beam project my name or any such-like phantom in 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 words when 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 flowers that 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 seem to foreign ears as if it could not rouse the limp iambus from its pyrrhic dream. But close your eyes and listen to the line. The melody unwinds; the middle word is marvelously long and serpentine: you hear one beat, but you have also heard the shadow of another, then the third touches the gong, and then the fourth one sighs. It makes a very fascinating noise: it opens slowly, like a greyish rose in pedagogic films of long ago. The rhyme is the line's birthday, as you know, and there are certain customary twins in 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 sun and 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 ahlaand 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 dead but hanging still, and still I see the slender white 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 throat render 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 liked the jeweler's window in the rainy night. My back is Argus-eyed. I live in danger. False shadows turn to track me as I pass and, wearing beards, disguised as secret agents, creep in to blot the freshly written page and read the blotter in the looking glass. And in the dark, under my bedroom window, until, with a chill whirr and shiver, day presses its starter, warily they linger or silently approach the door and ring the bell of memory and run away. Let me allude, before the spell is broken, to Pushkin, rocking in his coach on long and 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 follow throughout our poetry. We want the mole to be a lynx or turn into a swallow by some sublime mutation of the soul. But to unneeded symbols consecrated, escorted by a vaguely infantile path for bare feet, our roads were always fated to lead into the silence of exile. Had I more time tonight I would unfold the whole amazing story — neighukluzhe, nevynossimo— but I have to go. What did I say under my breath? I spoke to a blind songbird hidden in a hat, safe from my thumbs and from the eggs I broke into the gibus brimming with their yolk. An now I must remind you in conclusion, that I am followed everywhere and that space is collapsible, although the bounty of 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 muddy red road between an orchard and a veil of tepid rain) it came, that sudden shudder, a Russian something that I could inhale but 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 check comes forward in its smiling envelope. «How would you say „delightful talk“ in Russian?» «How would you say „good night“?» Oh, that would be: Bessonnitza, tvoy vzor oonyl i strashen; lubov moya, otstoopnika prostee. (Insomnia, your stare is dull and ashen, my love, forgive me this apostasy.) <2 декабря 1944>; Кембридж, Масс.

420. THE ROOM ^{*}

The room a dying poet took at nightfall in a dead hotel had both directories — the Book of 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 where rain glistened and a shopsign bled. Not tears, not terror, but a blend of anonymity and doom, it seemed, that room, to condescend to imitate a normal room. Whenever some automobile subliminally slit the night, the walls and ceiling would reveal a wheeling skeleton of light. Soon afterwards the room was mine. A similar striped cageling, I groped 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 switch he saw the picture on the wall and cursed the red eruption which tried to be maples in the fall? Artistically in the style of Mr. Churchill at his best, those maples marched in double file from Glen Lake to Restricted Rest. Perhaps my text is incomplete. A poet's death is, after all, a question of technique, a neat enjambment, a melodic fall. And here a life had come apart in darkness, and the room had grown a ghostly thorax, with a heart unknown, unloved — but not alone. <13 мая> 1950; Итака

421. VOLUPTATES TACTIONUM [16] ^{*}

Some inevitable day On the editorial page Of your paper it will say, «Tactio has come of age». When you turn a knob, your set Will obligingly exhale Forms, invisible and yet Tangible — a world in Braille. Think of all the things that will Really be within your reach! Phantom bottle, dummy pill, Limpid limbs upon a beach. Grouped before a Magnotact, Clubs and families will clutch Everywhere the same compact Paradise (in terms of touch). Palpitating fingertips Will caress the flossy hair And investigate the lips Simulated in midair. See the schoolboy, like a blind Lover, frantically grope For the shape of love — and find Nothing but the shape of soap. <27 января> 1951

16

Радости осязания (лат.). — Ред.

422. RESTORATION ^{*}

To think that any fool may tear by chance the web of when and where. O window in the dark! To think that every brain is on the brink of nameless bliss no brain can bear, unless there be no great surprise — as when you learn to levitate and, hardly trying, realize — alone, in a bright room — that weight is but your shadow, and you rise. My little daughter wakes in tears: She fancies that her bed is drawn into a dimness which appears to be the deep of all her fears but which, in point of fact, is dawn. I know a poet who can strip a William Tell or Golden Pip in one uninterrupted peel miraculously to reveal, revolving on his fingertip, a snowball. So I would unrobe, turn inside out, pry open, probe all matter, everything you see, the skyline and its saddest tree, the whole inexplicable globe, to find the true, the ardent core as doctors of old pictures do when, rubbing our a distant door or sooty curtain, they restore the jewel of a bluish view. 9 марта 1952

423. THE POPLAR ^{*}

Before this house a poplar grows Well versed in dowsing, I suppose, But how it sighs! And every night A boy in black, a girl in white Beyond the brightness of my bed Appear, and not a word is said. On coated chair and coatless chair They sit, one here, the other there. I do not care to make a scene: I read a glossy magazine. He props upon his slender knee A dwarfed and potted poplar tree. And she — she seems to hold a dim Hand mirror with an ivory rim Framing a lawn, and her, and me Under the prototypic tree, Before a pillared porch, last seen In July, nineteen seventeen. This is the silver lining of Pathetic fallacies: the sough Of Populusthat taps at last Not 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 told Get up to rearrange a fold. 1952

424. LINES WRITTEN IN OREGON ^{*}

Esmeralda! Now we rest Here, in the bewitched and blest Mountain forests of the West. Here the very air is stranger. Damzel, anchoret, and ranger Share the woodland's dream and danger. And to think I deemed you dead! (In a dungeon, it was said; Tortured, strangled); but instead — Blue birds from the bluest fable, Bear and hare in coats of sable, Peacock moth on picnic table. Huddled roadsigns softly speak Of Lake Merlin, Castle Creek, And (obliterated) Peak. Do you recognize that clover? Dandelions, I'or du pauvre? [17] (Europe, nonetheless, is over). Up the turf, along the burn, Latin lilies climb and turn Into Gothic fir and fern. Cornfields have befouled the prairies But these canyons laugh! And there is Still the forest with its fairies. And I rest where I awoke In the sea shade — l'ombre glauque [18] — Of a legendary oak; Where the woods get ever dimmer, Where the Phantom Orchids glimmer — Esmeralda, immer, immer. [19] <20 июня> 1953

17

Солнце бедных (фр.). — Ред.

18

Тень цвета морской волны (фр.). — Ред.

19

Погружайся, погружайся (фр.). — Ред.

425. ODE TO A MODEL ^{*}

I have followed you, model, in magazine ads through all seasons, from dead leaf on the sod to red leaf on the breeze, from your lily-white armpit to the tip of your butterfly eyelash, charming and pitiful, silly and stylish. Or in kneesocks and tartan standing there like some fabulous symbol, parted feet pointing outward — pedal form of akimbo. On a lawn, in a parody Of Spring and its cherry tree, near a vase and a parapet, virgin practicing archery. Ballerina, black-masked, near a parapet of alabaster. «Can one — somebody asked — rhyme „star“ and „disaster“?» Can one picture a blackbird as the negative of a small firebird? Can a record, run backward, turn «repaid» into «diaper»? Can one marry a model? Kill your past, make you real, raise a family, by removing you bodily from back numbers of Sham? <8 октября> 1955

426. ON TRANSLATING «EUGENE ONEGIN» ^{*}

1

What is translation? On a platter A poet's pale and glaring heard, A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter, And profanation of the dead. The parasites you were so hard on Are pardoned if I have your pardon, O, Pushkin, for my stratagem: I traveled down your secret stem, And reached the root, and fed upon it; Then, in a language newly learned, I grew another stem and turned Your stanza patterned on a sonnet, Into my honest roadside prose — All thorn, but cousin to your rose.

2

Reflected words can only shiver Like elongated lights that twist In the black mirror of a river Between the city and the mist. Elusive Pushkin! Persevering, I still pick up Tatiana's earring, Still travel with your sullen rake. I find another man's mistake, I analyze alliterations That grace your feasts and haunt the great Fourth stanza of your Canto Eight. This is my task — a poet's patience And scholiastic passion blent: Dove-droppings on your monument.

427. RAIN ^{*}

How mobile is the bed on these nights of gesticulating trees when the rain clatters fast, the tin-toy rain with dapper hoof trotting upon an endless roof, traveling into the past. Upon old roads the steeds of rain Slip and slow down and speed again through many a tangled year; but they can never reach the last dip at the bottom of the past because the sun is there. 1956