*librarian nonfiction story*
Once three years ago I visited the library I frequented. I spent some time looking through the books when I heard such a conversation --
A big schoolgirl asked the librarian, who was sitting at the desk: “I need Shakespeare’s play ‘Ophelia’”.
The librarian looked up at her and said: “May be you meant Shakespeare’s play ‘Hamlet’?”
“No”, said the schoolgirl. “The play ‘Ophelia’”.
“But there is no a play ‘Ophelia’. There is the play ‘Hamlet’”.
Silence.
The librarian asked the schoolgirl: “Do you want me to give you the play ‘Hamlet’?”
“No”, said the schoolgirl. “I want the play ‘Ophelia’”.
The librarian cast her eyes down. Silence. She was serious, but the schoolgirl was serous too. Benumbed I never joined this odd conversation that sounded supernatural to me.
When I told this nonfiction story to my English friend at our yahoogroup, a middle-aged man of letters, he said: “I’m not surprised. In the UK there are librarians who do not know who is Shakespeare”.
Congratulations to us all.
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*in the library again*
“Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” asked the Hatter in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
“Why is a scholar like a squirrel?” I ask.
In the text of Nabokov’s novel Pnin an image of a squirrel appeared four times. For the firs time it was a poker-worked drawing on a Japan screen, a squirrel holding a small reddish thing in its little forepaws, obviously a nut. Now in the excerpt, which I’d like to bring to your notice, Pnin himself appears as a squirrel. Professor Pnin designed writing The Small History of Russian literature, and for the present…
“For the present he was at the blessed initial stage of compiling, and many decent young men took as honour and pleasure observing Pnin who extracted a catalogue drawer out of the spacious card index inside, carried it as a big nut to a secluded corner [of the library], and there tasted quietly the spiritual food now moving his lips in silent comments--critical, puzzled, satisfied--now lifting his rudimental eyebrows and forgetting to lower them, and they had been on the large brow for a long while after all the traces of displeasure and doubt had been lost”.
I never saw the English text of the novel; I’ll be thankful if someone cites this excerpt in original.
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*Mr. Nabokov the Poet*
The great American writer Nabokov, the author of the greatest novel Pale Fire was an outstanding poet. These are two my favorite poems written in English:
LINES WRITTEN IN OREGON
Esmeralda! Now we rest
Here, in the bewitched and blest
Mountain forest 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 road-signs softly speak
Of Lake Merlin, Castle Creek,
And (obliterated) Peak.
Do you recognize that clover?
Dandelions, l’or du pauvre?
(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 canyon’s laugh! And there is
Still the forest with its fairies.
And I rest where I awoke
In the sea shade – l’ombre glauque –
Of a legendary oak.
Where the woods get ever dimmer,
Where the Phantom Orchids glimmer –
Esmeralda, immer, immer.
1953
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 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 out a distant door
or sooty curtain, they restore
the jewel of a bluish view.
1952
In this poem Nabokov mentions his little daughter--in fact he had no a daughter; he had a son.
In 2005 I had a friend, an English man of letters; he and I exchanged letters via the Internet. But in 2006 he stopped our correspondence. I don’t know why, but I think it’s because I annoyed him with my reasoning on Nabokov’s works. For some reason he believed Nabokov was a pedophile--such a disappointing misapprehension.
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