Nabokov speak memory6/2/2023 ![]() ![]() While translating Eugene Onegin from Russian -and shortly before composing “Pale Fire” in English- Vladimir Nabokov wrote up the rules by which he engaged with both Russian and English iambic verse. Finally, we discover that Charles Kinbote was right: we can actually see Jakob Gradus woven into the prosody of Pale Fire, riding up “…on the escalator of the pentameter." NOJ, Vol. ![]() Similarly, the most concentrated Russian rhythm in “Pale Fire” is bracketed by a dying man who “conjures in two tongues” and a spirit who raps out messages from the afterlife. For example, the émigré professor of “An Evening of Russian Poetry” lectures to his audience in Russian rhythms, at first to illustrate his didactic points and then later when confronted by a spectral, “Russian something” that follows him everywhere. ![]() ![]() These ‘foreign’ rhythms mark themes of exile and dislocation, and help create the unsettling sense that another, unseen world lies close at hand (потусторонность). Dyche Mullins studies the prosody of Vladimir Nabokov’s poetry in “Conjuring in Two Tongues: The Russian and English Prosodies of Nabokov’s ‘Pale Fire’,” employing analytical tools described by Nabokov himself in Notes on Prosody to demonstrate how the poet wove cryptic Russian rhythms into his English verse. ![]()
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