'An Eccentric Lost in Paradise'

Borges often pictured paradise as a vast library, as in his prologue to “Catalog of the Exhibition Books from Spain” (trans. Suzanne Jill Levine, Selected Non-Fictions, 1999): 

“Each in his own way imagines Paradise; since childhood I have envisioned it as a library. Not as an infinite library, because anything infinite is somewhat uncomfortable and puzzling, but as a library fit for a man. A library in which there will always be books (and perhaps shelves) to discover, but not too many. In brief, a library that would allow for the pleasure of rereading, the serene and faithful pleasure of the classics, or the gratifying shock of revelation and of the foreseen.”

 

The blind librarian’s qualifications are charming and reader- (not librarian-) friendly: “fit for a man,” not infinite; books previously unknown, “but not too many.” Like any serious reader, Borges’ envisions his paradisal library built with “the pleasure of rereading” in mind.

 

Nabokov the lepidopterist imagines a different sort of paradise, one in which loss and frustration are not absent. “In Paradise” was published in Russian on this date, March 18, in 1928, in the émigré newspaper Rul' (“Rudder”), founded by Nabokov’s father in Berlin. Here is the author’s translation:

 

“My soul, beyond distant death

your image I see like this:

a provincial naturalist,

an eccentric lost in paradise.

 

“There, in a glade, a wild angel slumbers,

a semi-pavonian creature.

Poke at it curiously

with your green umbrella,

 

“speculating how, first of all,

you will write a paper on it

then — But there are no learned journals,

nor any readers in paradise!

 

“And there you stand, not yet believing

your wordless woe.

About that blue somnolent animal

whom will you tell, whom?

 

“Where is the world and the labeled roses,

the museum and the stuffed birds?

And you look and look through your tears

at those unnamable wings.”

 

Pavonian is an adjective that means resembling a peacock. Nabokov uses the word again in a beautiful passage in Speak, Memory, which begins: “The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait.”

 

He then recalls a memory his father shared with him, of catching a rare butterfly with his German tutor on Aug. 17, 1883, sixteen years before the novelist’s birth:

 

“He and his brothers had stopped short in helpless excitement at the sight of the coveted insect poised on a log and moving up and down, as though in alert respiration, its four cherry-red wings with a pavonian eyespot on each.”

 

In their note to the poem in Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (Beacon Press, 2000), editors Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle suggest the insect described may be the moth Saturnia pavonia, found throughout the Palearctic region, including Russia.