Tuesday, May 12, 2020

'Rounded Like the Letter O'

The Russian-born team of Julia Nemirovskaya and Boris Dralyuk is at it again, enriching the language and conjuring a little wonder in our lives. Boris has translated five poems by Nemirovskaya, including “Time”:

“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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