Proc.” Roth locates these fragmentary lines of poetry (with the same line numbers and ellipses) in a 1946 article by Samuel Noah Kramer, published in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. This card also contains a marginal notation at the bottom, which is circled: “1930 Am. One is reminded of a certain fragment from a Sumerian poem discussed some thirty years ago, I believe, in ^an amphilogical society’s^ proceedings :ħ1. 11-12):Ģ35 Life is a message scribbled in the dark It contains a fragment of text that did not make it into the final version of Pale Fire, Charles Kinbote’s note to line 235 of the poem (Roth, 2015 pp. One index card in particular caught my attention. Roth carefully combed through the 1092 individual index cards that make up Nabokov’s holograph manuscript of Pale Fire, collecting and investigating variants and cancellations throughout the text. Matthew Roth’s article, “The Composition of Nabokov’s Pale Fire,” in the most recent issue of Nabokov Online Journal has, however, changed my mind. I never see this connection made or explored in critical writings and, until recently, I was unaware that Nabokov himself made such a connection, so I have assumed that there is nothing here worth pursuing.
Both have a circular composition both explore grief and the search for meaning in the face of mortality and both include a quest for immortality that ends in apparent failure. The theme and structure of the poem “Pale Fire,” have long put me in mind of the ancient, near eastern epic of Gilgamesh.
0 kommentar(er)
