'This Red Label on a Little Butterfly'

Neighbors ordered forty milkweed plants to grow in their backyard to attract monarch butterflies. The caterpillars feed exclusively on the leaves of milkweed. Adult butterflies have been sufficiently interested in the milkweed garden for two chrysalises to form, but both shriveled before maturity. Our neighbors suspect pesticides. Also, lizards, which are at least as common in Houston as butterflies, are eating the caterpillars.

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).]