Let me repeat: 1 have never met Mr. Girodias. He has been described as «fascinating», and «debonair», and «exuding French charm»; that is about all I have to go upon when trying to picture him to myself as a physical being (his moral aspect I know well enough). However, half-a-dozen years after the beginning of our gappy correspondence, he suddenly proclaimed in a Playboy article («Pornologist on Olympus», April, 1961) that we had been actually introduced to each other at a cocktail party given by Gallimard on October 23, 1959, in Paris, despite my warning my agent I did not want to meet him. The details he gave were so absurd that I saw myself obliged to call his bluff, and did so in the July issue of Playboy, 1961. Instead of the stunned silence that I expected would last for ever, Mr. Girodias after brooding on my little note and his imaginary past during the next four years, comes up now with a new version of the event in his Evergreen piece. The discrepancies between the two variants are typical of what scholars call «waning» apocrypha. In Playboy we have a classical description of «the members of Gallimard family» looking «horrified» while Mr. Girodias «slowly progressed toward the author through a sea of bodies» (a splendid image, that sea). In Evergreen, there are no Gallimards, but we find, instead, Monique Grail «doubled over in helpless mirth, in a corner» and another lady, Doussia Ergaz, «hiding in a corner» (i.e., another corner) and, most unconvincingly, «choking on a macaroon». In the Playboy codex, Mme. Ergaz is described as Mr. Nabokov's «literary agent and patient supporter». In the Evergreen scroll, she has become Mr. Girodias' «dear, suffering, terrified friend». In Playboy, he and I exchange a few «not unfriendly» sentences. In Evergreen, the great meeting is wordless: I limit myself to a «vacuous grin» and immediately turn away to talk «ardently» to a «Czech reporter» (an unexpected and rather sinister personage of whom one would like to hear more from our chronicler). Finally, and rather disappointingly the passage in Playboy about the quaint way I «plunged backwards and sideways with the easy grace of a dolphin» is now replaced by the «graceful ease of a circus seal»; whereupon Mr. Girodias «went o the bar and had a drink» (plain Playboy) or «went to down a few glasses of champagne» (lush Evergreen).
As I pointed out in my rejoinder: even if Mr. Girodias was introduced to me (which I doubt), I did not catch his name; but what especially invalidates the general veracity of his account is the little phrase he slips in about my having «very obviously recognized» him as he was slowly swimming toward me amid the “bodies”. Very obviously, I could not have recognized somebody I had never seen in my life; nor can I insult his sanity by suggesting he assumed I had somehow obtained his pir.tiie (in the days of the famous curriculum vitae) and had been cherishing it all those years.
I am looking forward to Mr. Girodias' third version of our mythical meeting. Perhaps he will discover at last that he had crashed the wrong party and talked to a Slovak poet who was being feted next door.
Written on February 15, 1966, and published in Evergreen Review, xlv, February, 1967. I have not head from Mr. Girodias since 1965.
ON ADAPTATION
Here is a literal translation of a great poem by Mandelshtam (note the correct form of his name), which appears in the original Russian on pp. 142 and 144 of Olga Carlisle's anthology Poets on Street Corners (Random House, New York, 1968). It consists of sixteen tetrametric (odd) and trimetric (even) anapaestic lines with a masculine rhyme scheme bcbc.
1. For the sake of the resonant valor of ages to come,
for the sake of a high race of men,
I forfeited a bowl at my fathers' feast,
4. and merriment, and my honor.
On my shoulders there pounces the wolfhound age,
but no wolf by blood am I;
better, like a fur cap, thrust me into the sleeve
8. of the warmly fur*coated Siberian steppes,
so that I may not see the coward, the bit of soft
muck,
the bloody bones on the wheel,
so that all night the blue-fox furs may blaze
12. for me in their pristine beauty.
Lead me into the night where the Enisey flows,
and the pine reaches up to the star,
because no wolf by blood am I,
16. and injustice has twisted my mouth.
A number of details in the text are ambiguous (for example, the word translated as «coward» is a homonym of the old Russian trus, meaning «quaking» (thus «earthquake»), and the word translated as «injustice» has the additional meaning of «falsehood»), but I will limit myself to discussing some of the quite unambiguous passages misinterpreted, or otherwise mangled, by Robert Lowell in his «adaptation» on pp. 143 and 145 of the same collection.
Line 1, «resonant valor», gremuchaya doblest'(nom.): Mandelshtam improves here on the stock phrase «ringing glory» (gremyashchaya slava). Mr. Lowell renders this as «foreboding nobility», which is meaningless, both as translation and adaptation, and can be only explained by assuming that he worked out an ominous meaning from the «rumbling» improperly given under gremuchiy (see also gremuchaya zmeya, rattlesnake) by some unhelpful informer, e.g. Louis Segal, M.A., Ph.D. (Econ.), D. Phil., compiler of a RussianEnglish dictionary.
Line 5, «wolfhound», volkodav: lexically «wolfcrusher», «wolfstrangler»; this dog gets transformed by Mr. Lowell into a «cutthroat wolf», another miracle of misinformation, mistransfiguralion, and misadapiaiion.
Line 6, «wear the hide of a wolf» (Lowell) would mean to impersonate a wolf, which is not at all the sense here.
Line 8, actually «of the Siberian prairie's hot furcoat», zharkoy shuby sibirskih stepey. The rich heavy pelisse, to which Russia's wild East is likened by the poet (this being the very blazon of its faunal opulence) is demoted by the adapter to a «sheepskin» which is «shipped to the steppes» with the poet in its sleeve. Besides being absurd in itself, this singular importation totally destroys the imagery of the composition. And a poet's imagery is a sacred, unassailable thing.
Lines 11-12: the magnificent metaphor of line 8 now culminates in a vision of the arctic starlight overhead, emblemized by the splendor of gray-blue furs, with a suggestion of astronomical heraldry (cf. Vulpecula, a constellation). Instead of that the adaptor has «I want to run with the shiny blue foxes moving like dancers in the night», which is not so much a pretty piece of pseudo-Russian fairytale as a foxtrot in Disneyland.