Our
neighbors’ three sons are disappointed but since I started writing this post I’ve
already seen an adult monarch flit past my office window. Sightings this time
of year of monarchs and other butterflies are daily, and it’s always a
revelation. On this date, May 15, in 1942, Vladimir Nabokov published the poem “On
Discovering a Butterfly” (later retitled “A Discovery”) in The New Yorker. At the time, Nabokov
was a research fellow at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Here’s the
final stanza:
“Dark
pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that
take a thousand years to die
but ape the
immortality of this
red label on
a little butterfly.”
In 1961, Mondadori,
a publisher in Milan, planned an edition of Nabokov’s poems translated into
Italian. In a Feb. 20 letter written by Véra Nabokov for her husband, she explains he various quibbles with the draft translation of “A Discovery”:
“My husband
is extremely precise in all his botanic, zoological or scientific terms and
attaches great importance to a correct translation of these terms.”
Three years
later Nabokov would publish his legendarily finicky four-volume translation of
Pushkin’s novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin. In the letter, Nabokov explains
the reference in the sixth stanza to “creeping relatives [moths] and rust” as
an allusion to Matthew 6:19-21, and goes
on to specify that a “type specimen” is not a “rare specimen” but one from which
the original description was based. The “red label” conventionally signifies a
type specimen in American museums. Ordinary specimens have white labels. As
writer and lepidopterist, Nabokov is never less than fanatically precise. All
the left brain/right brain nonsense we’ve heard in recent decades is nicely
dismissed in a lecture Nabokov delivered while teaching at Cornell:
“It seems to
me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a
merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science.”
[Find the
poem and letter in Nabokov’s Butterflies (eds. Brian Boyd and Michael
Pyle, Beacon Press, 2000).]
1 comment:
I have to say I disagree on the left brain/right brain thing. The battle over the supremacy of science or the humanities is important, especially in our technocratic big data era where people think the application of more and more science is always the answer. I have recently been reading the Two Cultures spat between FR Leavis and CP Snow, the latter of whom opened the account by deeming Ruskin, Arnold and Dickens to be luddites. Leavis's riposte that "The work of science is dependent on a prior human achievement - the creation of the human world, including language." is apposite. He also quotes brilliantly from 'Dombey and Son' to demonstrate that Dickens was far from anti-technological. A splendid rehearsal of this battle took place in the New Republic a few years back between Stephen Pinker and the editor, Leon Wieseltier who provided some marvellous fireworks. Pinker's opening salvo "Science is not our enemy" is online as are most of the counterblasts. Science and technology must always be encompassed by our humanity.
Nabokov's poem is magnificent nevertheless.
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