“Time takes
center stage appearing
Rounded like
the letter O
And the
whole time screaming O
This makes
life so very dreary
For me and
everyone I know
“O if only
time were different
For example
like a square
Life for me
and everybody
Would be
grand beyond compare
“I’d hide in
a corner and
Never make a
sound again”
That big O
echoes through the poem. Time is orotund, opalescent and oracular, never
otiose, obesogenic
or oleaginous. Like a wheel it rolls, mostly forward. Say O and make an O
with your oral cavity. O, no, don’t confuse it with zero. Time to go.
O makes an appearance in
the work of another time-minded Russian writer. Probably my favorite among
Nabokov’s stories is “A Guide to Berlin,” written in Russian in 1925 and translated
into English by the author and his son Dmitri in 1976, when it was published in
Details of a Sunset. It’s about the possibility of transcending time by willing
ourselves into the memories of others. In the opening section, titled “Pipes,”
our narrator says:
“Today
someone wrote ‘Otto’ with his finger on the strip of virgin snow and I thought how beautifully that name, with its two soft o’s flanking the pair of
gentle consonants, suited the silent layer of snow upon that pipe with its two
orifices and its tacit tunnel."
Nabokov’s narrator
has no wish to hide from time, to live forever. He wishes to subvert time with
the only tool available, memory. Nabokov called the story “one of my trickiest
pieces.” At the end, the narrator and a friend are seated in a Berlin pub,
looking into the proprietor’s apartment at the rear. A boy sits at a table. His
mother feeds him soup and he looks at a magazine. The narrator projects himself
imaginatively into the boy (precisely what any good writer does) and looks back
into the pub, at the narrator and his friend:
“[The boy]
has long since grown used to this scene and is not dismayed by its proximity.
Yet there is one thing I know. Whatever happens to him in life, he will always
remember the picture he saw every day of his childhood from the little room
where he was fed his soup. He will remember the billiard table and the coatless
evening visitor who used to draw back his sharp white elbow and hit the ball
with his cue, and the blue-gray cigar smoke, and the din of voices, and my
empty right sleeve and scarred face, and his father behind the bar, filling a
mug for me from the tap.”
Two
paragraphs remain in the story: “‘I can’t understand what you see down there,’
says my friend, turning back toward me.”
“What
indeed! How can I demonstrate to him that I have glimpsed somebody’s future
recollection?”
Memory
recovers another story of O – Nabokov, in 1965, instructing an interviewer how to properly pronounce his surname:
“As to
pronunciation, Frenchmen of course say Nabokoff, with the accent on the
last syllable. Englishmen say Nabokov, accent on the first, and Italians
say Nabokov, accent in the middle, as Russians also do. Na-bo-kov.
A heavy open ‘o’ as in ‘Knickerbocker.’ My New England ear is not
offended by the long elegant middle ‘o’ of Nabokov as delivered in
American academies. The awful ‘Na-bah-kov’ is a despicable gutterism.”
Elsewhere,
he noted that his last name’s middle syllable is accented and pronounced to
rhyme with smoke.
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