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How do you guys like the poem itself? I love it, personally, but it's an odd duck. Heroic couplets seem like a childishly simple form for a modern work. At times, the rhythm slips carelessly. It's hard to imagine a contemporary poet who would've been satisfied with the basic meter found in Pale Fire. But the images wind so wonderfully through the lines: White butterflies turn lavender as they Pass through its shade where gently seems to sway The phantom of my little daughter's swing. The house itself is much the same. One wing We've had revamped... You can almost see the implicit little ghost of a butterfly fluttering around the lonely house from that word choice, "wing." Nabokov was, by this point, an expert narrative writer, but I don't think he ever mastered poetry. There's some quote to that effect (maybe in Pale Fire?) where he says that he found himself able to emulate anyone's prose, but not their verse.
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Aug 7, 2016 12:03
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 11:47 |
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I must say, I found the work quite Engazhay and compelling.
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Aug 13, 2016 06:08
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House Louse posted:Something I don't have an opinion on is how unfinished "Pale Fire" is. The number of lines in each canto is symmetrical, assuming it's a 1000-line poem. On the other hand, the last line can't be the first, as it doesn't make sense by itself; and if Shade only had one more line to go, surely he would have written it, or at least jotted some notes, before knocking off for the night? I feel certain that Line 1000 is exactly the same as Line 1. Yes, as you point out, that doesn't make sense: why not just scribble one more already-written line? But it's perfect poetic irony to snatch those mirrored death-words from his mouth, and Line 999 sets up exactly that rhyme. Nabokov knew it didn't make sense, but he couldn't help himself.
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Aug 13, 2016 06:13
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Enfys posted:I have just started this and read the forward. Two for two.
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Aug 19, 2016 22:04
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House Louse posted:We agree it doesn't make sense (either narratively, or because line 1 is the first half of a couplet and has nothing to do with line 999) and the person advocating this idea is Kinbote, so... I don't see how it can be. Maybe, though, 999 is the last line? It would be pretty bathetic but Canto 4 is a let-down... Or maybe we just have no idea how much is missing. Kinbote mentions other professors in the Introduction saying we don't know how long it should have been, or how reliable the text is, so he raises the possibility that he's got things totally wrong even on a basic, literal level, never mind predicting how long it should be. A man, unheedful of the butterfly— Some neighbor's gardener, I guess—goes by Trundling an empty barrow up the lane— I was the shadow of the waxwing slain. Shade had seen the gardener before, and would see him again just before the murder, so the image allows Shade to write about his own death unknowingly (and likewise to come across that "empty barrow"...) In life, he could not have completed the poem with that line, but it makes sense when death writes it for him. Zorodius fucked around with this message at 10:48 on Aug 23, 2016 |
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Aug 23, 2016 10:12
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 11:47 |
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mcustic posted:Herman Hesse's Siddhartha? I'm always up for a reread of that one. It's on Gutenberg, as well. I've been meaning to finish reading that. I also meant to write something about narrator unreliability in Pale Fire. So, uh, if you're going to doubt one big thing in a story, where do you draw the line? How do you rule out something crazy like "Kinbote invented Shade"? Speaking of crazy: Nabokov really didn't show an accurate picture of mental illness, did he? Someone mentioned the unrealistic 1950s stereotype of a homosexual, and I think you could say the same for psychosis in Pale Fire.
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Aug 30, 2016 08:37
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