Better Than Starbucks!

Vladimir Nabokov, "An Evening of Russian Poetry" *

​

The subject chosen for tonight's discussion
Is everywhere, though often incomplete:
when their basaltic bank 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,
reshaped the arrows and the borrowed birds.

​

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 open slowly, like a greyish rose
In pedagogic films of long ago.

The rhyme is the line's birthday, as you know,
and there 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 ahla and in ili,
Aonian grottoes, nights in the Altai,
black pools of sound with "I"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 very 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 reaches lie concealed. We never liked 
the jeweler's window in the rainy night.

​

​