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07-01-2021, 01:05 PM
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Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Posts: 6,766
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V. Nabokov
“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Loving the metaphor for six lines, I’m unable to unpack it from L7 to the end. Can someone with better explication powers help me out?
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Ralph
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07-01-2021, 01:34 PM
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Join Date: Sep 2020
Location: York
Posts: 665
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I'm reading, very simply, that when it gets dark outside and the inside is lighter, when you look through a window you get to see the inside projected on the outside. So the furniture inside appears to hang over the garden outside. And the extra height of snow appears as a new floor for the bed. Or is that too simple?
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07-01-2021, 02:15 PM
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Join Date: Jul 2017
Location: Gloucestershire, UK
Posts: 1,790
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I had that too, Joe; Ralph, were you hoping for something deeper? I think the title might be significant, perhaps for the sense of a pale life, a life lived mostly indoors where the world of the window takes on immense significance.
Of course I suggest this as someone whose broken leg confined her to bed in one room for almost three months last year. A lot of window watching occurred!
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07-01-2021, 03:00 PM
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Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Posts: 6,766
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But “uncurtaining the night” sounds like removing what lets in light, so how’s the glass “dark” ? That’s where my mind freezes.
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Ralph
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07-01-2021, 05:22 PM
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Join Date: Mar 2017
Location: TX
Posts: 6,630
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Hi Ralph,
I think if you read uncurtaining as "removing the curtains that block out the night," the conundrum will be resolved. :-)
Cheers,
John
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07-02-2021, 02:25 PM
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Moderator
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Join Date: Oct 2018
Location: UK
Posts: 1,687
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Quote:
Originally Posted by John Isbell
Hi Ralph,
I think if you read uncurtaining as "removing the curtains that block out the night," the conundrum will be resolved. :-)
Cheers,
John
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Exactly that, in my reading too. Draw the curtains, and all will be revealed. Inside/outside and scale blurring. The watcher/narrator inhabits an in-between space where in their very vision, imagination and real is blurred and the impossible becomes real.
Sarah-Jane
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07-01-2021, 05:33 PM
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Join Date: May 2020
Location: England
Posts: 1,331
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