Melting with Tenderness: Vladimir Nabokov on “Apostrophes”(the-tls.co.uk)
the-tls.co.uk
Melting with Tenderness: Vladimir Nabokov on “Apostrophes”
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/melting-with-tenderness/
7 comments
Visible (at least in part) on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpjTgHMUbAk
The language is sumptuous. Reading Nabokov is to me the linguistic equivalent of eating ice-cream.
> People of settled professions, calm oysters firmly attached to their native mother-of-pearl
> A very strong bedside light, the lighthouse of my insomnias
> the fluted and sonorous song of the blackbirds
> Sometimes it’s a digression that turns into a drama in a corner of the narrative, or the metaphors of an extended essay that join up to form a new story.
> I remember with what a shiver of delight, envy, and anguish I watched on the television screen man’s first floating steps on the talcum powder of our satellite and how I despised all those who maintained it wasn’t worth the expense of billions of dollars to walk in the dust of a dead world.
> One must draw everything one can from words, because it’s the one real treasure a true writer has. Big general ideas are in yesterday’s newspaper. If I like to take a word and turn it over to see its underside, shiny or dull or adorned with motley hues absent on its upperside, it’s not at all out of idle curiosity, one finds all sorts of curious things by studying the underside of a word – unexpected shadows of other words, harmonies between them, hidden beauties that suddenly reveal something beyond the word. Serious wordplay, as I have in mind, is neither a game of chance nor a mere embellishment of style. It’s a new verbal species that the marvelling author offers to the poor reader, who doesn’t want to look; to the good reader, who suddenly sees a completely new facet of an iridescent sentence.