Pasternak's lyric: A study of sound and imagery 9783111682785, 9783111296029

Citation preview

PASTERNAK'S LYRIC: A STUDY OF SOUND AND IMAGERY

SLAVISTIC PRINTINGS AND REPRINTINGS

edited by

C. H. VAN S C H O O N E V E L D Indiana University

LIX

1966

MOUTON & CO. THE HAGUE · PARIS

PASTERNAK'S LYRIC A STUDY OF SOUND AND IMAGERY

by

DALE L. P L A N K University of Colorado

m 1966

M O U T O N & CO. THE HAGUE · PARIS

© Copyright 1966 by Mouton & Co., Publishers, The Hague, The Netherlands. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS

To my Mother and Father

PREFACE

This book is built around a group of readings of poems written by Pasternak between 1916 and 1932. The unifying intention is less that of interpreting a body of poetry than that of investigating certain possibilities of meaning in the poetic use of language. But it was the peculiar achievement of Pasternak's poetics that suggested the study: the result could not have been extracted from just any poetry. Reading him, one becomes aware of a necessity at work in the language itself, such that the poet's will and intention are replaced by a purposive energy of sounds, words, and images. I wanted, then, to put to the test Coleridge's claim "... that poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, ... [has] a logic of its own as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets, ... there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word" (Biographia Literaria, London, 1956, p. 3). The hero turns out to be metaphor, not as an expressive figure, but as the exemplar of a philosophy. I find it necessary to try to extend the notion of metaphor beyond its usual limits in such a way that the semantic metaphor becomes a special case of a much broader concept. At the same time, I have to suppress the frequently held opinion that metaphor is indispensable and elemental to the poetic use of language; that sounds, for example, always have a metaphorical value in poetry. This study is limited not only by its concentration on theoretical problems of poetic language, but also by the usual constriction of purview of the student of a literature not in his own language. One runs the risk of overlooking what is obvious and important to the native reader and laboring what may seem irrelevant to him. But the foreigner's reading may even be useful for the sake of the perspective which it brings to the manifold meanings of poetry; and here the study comes to have an interpretive aspect after all. With hardly any exceptions, Pasternak's

6

PREFACE

translators have put an inept Romantic in the place of a poet whose "chaotic gift" is brought into poetry through an astonishing command of technique. I provided translations first in order to make my argument accessible to the reader who knows no Russian; but it became evident that the translations, which sought to be as literal as possible, still had a lot of poetry in them, and a poet as well, who is almost absent from the productions of his "authorized" translators. I have also transcribed those lines whose sounds were the object of attention. Since only an approximation of the sounds is adequate for this analysis, I have used a conventional transliteration system rather than a phonetic transcription. With the following exceptions, the letters used have, very roughly, their conventional values in English: c is pronounced like is in "boots"; $ like the s in "sure"; f is the voiced version of s (like the s in "pleasure"); c is pronounced like ch in "choose"; χ like German ch in "nach"; y stands for a sound something like the i in "silly", but pronounced with the tongue pulled back; / is like the y in "yes" and, after a consonant, stands for palatalization of that consonant; " ' " is used for the same purpose when there is no vowel following the consonant: e.g., t is roughly as in English (but dental), but tj- or f is more like the t in "meet you". This study would never have been completed without the help and encouragement of Professor Victor Erlich, under whose guidance I began my studies of Russian poetics at the University of Washington. I would also like to express my gratitude to Professor Donald W. Treadgold, of the University of Washington, who first introduced me to the poetry of Boris Pasternak. I wish, finally, to thank my wife, Beverly, for her critical and editorial advice and, most of all, for her interest, which led me to hope that other nonspecialists may find something of worth here. Boulder, Colorado March, 1965

D.L.P.

CONTENTS

Preface I. Introduction II. Sound Designs

5 9 16

III. Sound and Imagery

29

IV. Dictation from Nature

42

V. Sound as Theme VI. The Sound as Image VII. The Voice of the Image VIII. The Grammatical Metaphor IX. Melody and Metaphor Selected Bibliography

53 63 76 91 104 119

I. I N T R O D U C T I O N

KoCilX KapTHH JieTHmHX JIHBMfl

C rnocce 3a«yBmero CBeiy,

C κριοκοΒ η CTeH cpbmaTbCfl κ ρκφΜβ H naflart Β TaKT He oTony.1

More than forty years afterward, Pasternak writes about how the poems of his first book came into being: To write these verses, rub out and restore what had been crossed out, was a profound necessity and brought me a pleasure - comparable to nothing else that reduced me to tears.3 He directs us to the mechanics of their composition: "to write" is first of all the graphic experience; the paper, with its marks and smudges, replaces the poem in remembrance. He speaks of the book itself as immature and says that it should not have been published. Only about half of the poems of Twin in Clouds survived into later collections. He calls the title "pretentious to the point of stupidity", and "imitative of the cosmological profundities which were typical of the book titles of the Symbolists and the names of their publishing houses". 3 After forty years, in the pages of his autobiography, he is able, and finds it worthwhile, to describe the site of their composition: under the leaves of an old birch which, though toppled, continued to grow. The birch may have wanted to be a lyrical hero, but what is valuable to us right now is simply that the poet enjoyed writing these poems and 1

The pictures tilting, flying in torrents From the road that blew the candle out: I can't break them from tearing loose into rhyme From hooks and walls and falling in time. (from Themes and Variations). 8 Pasternak, B. L., Soiinenija, II (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1961), p. 32. * Ibid., p. 31.

10

INTRODUCTION

that he needed to write them. Pasternak says that he did not "express, reflect, represent, or depict": "I needed nothing from myself, from the readers, or from the theory of art. I needed only that one poem should contain the city of Venice...."4 Pasternak's "Venice" seems to be "about" a single musical chord which wants so badly to persist that it becomes a spatial entity. It is, as he tells us, the water lights, fugitive like the chord from the anonymous guitar, that wanted longevity. An abstraction hangs on the end of an oar, and there are no streets or landmarks. The tourist will not find his Venice here. Pasternak's remarks are meant not only to disarm, but to define. The word "contain" is too capacious to say much by itself, but he is clear about what he did not do in the poem. If we are not too intimidated, we may want to use words like "embody", but in the sense that we will be talking about the concrete properties of the verse itself; just as the sense of "contain" may be faithful to the analogy between the poem and a dipper of muddy water lights from the canal. I have called attention to the author's own emphasis on the poetic act, its locale and mechanics, not because I want to bridge the dangerous gap between intention and realization, but because Pasternak's poems have the peculiar ability to engage the reader in the poetry as process, activity. One result of this particular sort of realization is that ostensible, often conventional, themes are displaced by the act which originates them. As Jurij Tynjanov, whose insights will often come to our aid in these pages, put it: "The better half of Pasternak's verses are about poetry". 5 It is to be expected then that Pasternak would come to have the reputation of a poet's poet. The response from the critics to the "new thing" which Tynjanov said that Pasternak had brought was generally unfavorable. Vladimir Weidle, in an ambitious essay of 1928, wrote: One may read through two or three of Pasternak's poems and notice nothing in them, but it is impossible to read many of his poems and not see beyond them, in their depths, the opaque, elemental, chaotic gift that gave birth to them. And it is remarkable that as soon as we have caught that gift his verses begin to seem different from what they were before: no longer the cold experiment of an experimenter (one cannot however deny that this is present in them), but the cruel failure of a poet.® 4

Ibid., p. 32. Tynjanov, Ju., Arxaisty i novatory (Leningrad, 1929), p. 543. • Vejdle, V., "Stixi i proza Pasternaka", Sovremeiuiye zapiski, XXXVI (Paris, 1928), p. 464. 6

INTRODUCTION

11

Meanwhile, a poet, Marina Cvetaeva, who reads him with the same sensibility that can distinguish the potentiality from the result, comes to the opposite conclusion: ... concerning his poetic gift. I think that his gift is enormous, for its substance is enormous; it comes through in its entirety. His talent is obviously on a par with the substance, a most rare occurrence, a miracle...7 Another poet, Eduard Bagrickij, honors him with a rhyme: Matches and tobacco In my pack, Tixonov, Sel'vinskij, Pasternak...8 (In the Russian, Pasternak rhymes with another necessity of life, tabak.) His name became eponymous for a generation of poetic sins. His influence is feared like a disease. Writing (under the spell of some inscrutable historical irony) of Nabokov's poetry, Georgij Adamoviö said: He is undoubtedly the only genuine poet in the emigration who has studied Pasternak and learned something from him. Concerning the influence of Pasternak, we are constantly saying, while however for the most part citing him mechanically, uncritically: if a poem is not wholly intelligible it means that the author is following in the footsteps of Pasternak - and such opinions are not only to be overheard but seen in print as well.9 Many of Pasternak's critics were admitting the success of his poetic accomplishment in the terms of their rejection of it, obscuring what was really a difference in philosophies. Maxim Gor'kij, for example, in a personal letter to Pasternak, dated November 30, 1927: To imagine means to bring form, a pattern into chaos. Sometimes I am painfully aware that the world's chaos overwhelms the force of your creativity and is reflected only as chaos in a disharmonic [sic] manner.10 But, to Pasternak, poetry is not a drill-at-arms in a dishevelled landscape or a statement of withdrawals and deposits. To describe the poetics that we will be talking about, we will use the words, from a fairly remote context, of John Crowe Ransom: ... the moral Universal of the poem does not use nature as a means but as 7

Cvetaeva, M., "Svetovoj liven'", Proza (New York, 1953), p. 355. Bagrickij, E., Stixi i poemy (Moscow, 1964), p. 106. • Adamoviä, G., Odinoöestvo i svoboda (New York, 1955), p. 222. 10 Translation in Soviet Survey, No. 27 (Jan.-Mar., 1959), from A. Peäkov, Sobranie soiineny, Moscow, Vol. 30, p. 48. 8

12

INTRODUCTION

an end; it goes out into nature not as a predatory conqueror and despoiler but as an inquirer, to look at nature as nature naturally is, and see what its own reception there may be.11

It is an amiable poetry. Pasternak characteristically identifies it with its site, which gives us the smell of the sausages and sweat: Poetry, I will swear By you, and end croaking: You're not the sweetsinger's pose, You are a summer with a third-class seat, You are a suburb, not a refrain.

Irrepressibly familiar, it imputes its own emotions to its companion: Whose verses raised such a ruckus That even their thunder was dumbstruck with pain? One had better be delirious at least To give his consent to be a world.

Pasternak's statements of criticism, like those of most poets, make his own work the model of all art. The following dictum must be so understood, and it becomes the more valuable for that: Art is realistic as activity, and it is symbolic as fact. It is realistic in that it itself did not invent the metaphor, but found it in nature and reproduced it with reverence...1®

There is no mention of the poet or of the act of making poems. A number of writers, beginning with Jakobson,13 have emphasized the passive nature of Pasternak's lyrical hero. This is the thematic analogue to the efFacement of the poet's will in the theory; but it is more than a demonstrative stylization. It is the necessary consequence of a poetics of discovery and surprise, of a poetry that is constantly attentive to the terms of its reception. To be surprised, one might be looking for something other than what is finally found. When Jurij Zivago sits down to write at Yarykino near the end of his happiness, it is first the site that comes alive, humming with light and frost. An incidental, the gilded inner rim of the inkwell, puts us closer to his table than anything else could have done. Then we are told something about the activity of poetry: 11

Ransom, J. C., Poems and Essays (New York, 1955), p. 166. Pasternak, B. L., Soiinenija, II, p. 243. 13 Jakobson, R., "Randbemerkungen zur Prosa des Dichters Pasternak", Slavische Rundschau, VII (Prague, 1935), p. 357 f. 18

INTRODUCTION

13

Primacy is given not to the man and the state of his soul, for which he seeks expression, but to the language with which he wants to express it. Language, the homeland and receptacle of beauty and meaning itself begins to think and speak for the man and it all becomes music, not in respect to the external acoustic properties of the verse, but in respect to the headlong drive and force of its internal current. Then like the rolling enormity of a river current, which by its very movement grinds the stones in its bed and turns millwheels, the flowing speech itself, by the power of its laws, creates along the way, in passing, meter and rhyme, and thousands of other forms and constructions that are still more important but are yet unknown, unstudied, and unnamed. 14 The chapters which follow make up a study of some of these forms and constructions. They consist of readings of poems from four of Pasternak's collections: Over the Barriers (1917), My Sister Life (1922), Themes and Variations (1923), and Second Birth (1932). 15 Each is a partial reading meant to develop an aspect of a poetics, and the selections made are naturally recommended as exemplary of the aspect in question. The first question is about one of the possible relations between poetry and music: the direct influence of the art of musical composition on the writing of poetry. When Adamoviö says: The verses of Pasternak are densely worded and now and then come to the point of an actual uproar of words, images, sounds, and metaphors, which seem to crowd and drive each other along... Sounds? His sounds are absolutely barbaric, and the collision of five or six consonants doesn't bother Pasternak a b i t . . . " we may be inclined to put to a test Northrop Frye's claim: ... when we find sharp barking accents, long cumulative rhythms sweeping lines into paragraphs, crabbed and obscure language, mouthfuls of consonants, the spluttering rumble of long words, and the bite and grip of heavily stressed monosyllables, we are most likely to be reading a poet who is being influenced by music. Influenced, that is, by the music that we know, with its dance rhythm, discordant texture, and stress accent. The same principle suggests that the other use of the term "musical" to mean a careful balancing of vowels and a dreamy sensuous flow of sound actually applies to poetry that is unmusical, that is, which shows no influence from the art of music. 17 In his autobiographical works, Safe Conduct (1931) and An Autobiographical Sketch (1957), Pasternak has told of his passionate devotion t o music, under the spell of Scrjabin, between the ages of fourteen and twenty. The plausibility of a direct influence of Pasternak the composer 14 16

"

17

Pasternak, B. L., Doktor Zivago (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1958), p. 448. See the bibliography (p. 119ff.) for a list of Pasternak's works. Adamoviö, G., op. cit., p. 222. Frye, N., "Lexis and Melos", Sound and Poetry (New York, 1957), p. xiii.

14

INTRODUCTION

on Pasternak the poet is reduced by the finality of his break with music: "... I decided to take stronger measures to enforce my abstinence. I stopped touching the piano, gave up going to concerts, and avoided meetings with musicians". 18 He disavowed an interest in "musical" effects in his poetry: I was not trying to achieve the clear-cut rhythms of a song or a dance, under whose influence almost without the participation of words hands and feet begin to move by themselves... Later on, as a result of quite unnecessary attempts to find some sort of affinity between Mayakovsky and myself, people discovered oratorical and melodic tendencies in my poems. This is not correct. They are there no more than in the speech of any ordinary person. 1 · Considering his renunciation of his poetry written before 1940, one may suspect that here Pasternak is telling us more about what that poetry should have been than what it was. Behind all this is an inner struggle between the uses of art, between music, elemental and non-cognitive, and a conception of art as a responsibility to history and descriptive truth, between poetry in some improbably ideal sense and prose. The conflict appears quite early: for example in these unexpected lines from a poem in Themes and Variations: I'll say goodbye to poetry, my mania, I've set a date to meet you in a novel. As always, far from the parodies, We'll turn up side by side in nature. Weidle, in a later essay, writes: The descriptive intention ... is almost always before Pasternak from the very beginning. It has a direction that is rather less changeable, stronger than in many other poets; it is aimed at capturing not only the movements of the soul, but also the visible, audible, tangible images of the external world. It strives to describe, in the fullest sense of that word, even when the object of description is unnamed and escapes identification outside the poetry. The very lyrical emotion, or, what is the same thing, the rhythm itself, which engenders the verse, with him arises in a close connection with the external felt impressions; it is the impressions which suggest the words - but [word-sounds and images] alternate and vie with each other, so that the sound contends with the sense ... [the poet] is not always able to overcome the very richness [of sounds] which he has not yet learned to sacrifice .... The whole course of his creative work, 16

Pasternak, I Remember. Translation of A vtobiografiieskij Magarshack (New York, 1959), p. 42. " Ibid., p.m.

oierk,

by David

INTRODUCTION

15

over a period of decades, is determined by this unceasing struggle with himself. 20

Our approach to the question of the music of verbal sounds will be, unlike that of Konstantin Xalafov,21 indirect. We will look first for an autonomous use of sounds, irrespective of any principles of composition in music; then we employ a criterion suggested by, among others, Rene Wellek: With such romantic poets as Tieck and, later, Verlaine, the attempts to achieve musical effects are largely attempts to suppress the meaning structure of verse, to avoid logical constructions, to stress connotations rather than denotations. 22

In our investigation of the "meaning structure" of Pasternak's poems, we will find reasons for doubting the autonomy of his sounds: they are rather an integral part of the figurative order. To say this is to link the use of sounds in his verse to the descriptive, denotative purposes of language: but only on the condition that our poet's metaphorism is of the sort usually described as metaphysical. This is to accept Pasternak's own argument that the metaphor is not an emotional filter, but is discovered in nature. As he puts it at another place in Safe Conduct: "In art the man falls silent, and the image begins to speak".23 He here uses verbs which describe not a condition but a change of state: as if there had to be a pretext, some innocent motion to get the poem started. But when it is completed, the meaning is new; we can say now that it is not premeditated but determined in its own process, which is uncontrollable and unwilled.

20 21 22 22

"Boris Pasternak i modernizm", in Pasternak, Soiinenija, I, p. XLI. Xalafov, K., "O muzike stixov Pasternaka", Mosty, No. 8 (1961). Wellek, R. and Warren, Α., Theory of Literature (New York, 1956), p. 115. Pasternak, Soiinenija, II, p. 235.

II. SOUND DESIGNS

The knowledge imposes a pattern and falsifies, For the pattern is new in every moment. (T. S. Eliot, "East Coker")

Sometimes it seems that Pasternak's line is to be built with anagrams: Byl zov, byl zvon. Ne novogodnij li? Gljadja napole lepnoe ... ... Usoxatovo Xaos vekov... Na trotuarax istolku S steklom i solncem... I sad slepit, kak

pies...

... glaza mne rjumit Tjuremnoj ljudskoj dremoj. Uzas stuii ui i ν nix...

One would like to classify the types. Of great interest, for example, are repetitions in which a cluster is "amplified": the repeated form is expanded, twisted, broken up, but it is still a clear echo: Rodndja,

gromddnaja...

Κόν$ duievnoj

glübi...

Usäd'ba i Mas...

Yet more challenging is the way in which the repetitions occur in relation to rhythmical features of the verse. If the word "musical" has any meaning for poetics, it ought to be applicable to the following stanza from the first poem in Themes and Variations: Po zaböram begüt ambrazüry, Obrazujutsja breSi ν steni, Kogda nöc' oglaSaetsja fiiroj Povestej neizvestnyx vesne.

SOUND DESIGNS

17

(Embrasures run along the fences, Breaches are made in the wall, When night is announced by a wagon Of stories that Spring doesn't know.) In his "On the Music of Pasternak's Verse", Konstantin Xalafov lists eight sound devices supposed to be present in Pasternak's poetry. Most of these are the traditional ones: alliteration, vowel harmony, and internal rhyme. In addition, he speaks of "especially full rhymes and assonances, in which not only the rhyming syllables but also other, preceding syllables are identical", and of "a device known in music as 'inversion of the interval'". 1 An English example of the latter device would be night-tune. Finally, arguing that in Pasternak "thematic development arises out of combinations of sounds", Xalafov asserts that Pasternak's art is neither poetry nor music, but a hybrid art, half one and half the other. It is an ingratiating thesis if only for its novelty. There is no objection, I think, to poetry's being enriched by the other arts; but there is the danger that we are being told to read Pasternak "for the sound, not for the sense". Following such instructions, we may miss whatever peculiar advantages a verbal art might have in the development of what I would like to call an essentially cognitive order. To listen to Milton or some of the Symbolists is to relax, to reduce the demands for making sense (and being economical about it) which we make on other poets. Xalafov is not supporting Adamoviö's "If a poet's verse is not wholly intelligible, he is said to be following in the footsteps of Pasternak". He is, I think, saying that pre-semantic verbal sounds are somehow compositionally precedent to "sense", or the meaning structure of Pasternak's verse. This is like another point made by AdamoviC: "that, in Pasternak, sounds give birth to emotions".2 The object of our search might be an ordering principle for verbal sounds which is just as clear as, for example, the principles of syntax. Such principles are available from the visual arts in the theory of design, based on the disposition of similar, abstracted, elements in the space of the picture. The question of repetition of sounds is, after all, based first on the recognition of similarity. It seems sensible to go from there to the question of how the similar forms are disposed within the metrical arrangement of the verse, and only then to the problem of emotional expectation and resolution, at which point the musical analogy would 1

Xalafov, K., op. cit., p. 121. * Adamovii, op. cit., p. 222.

18

SOUND DESIGNS

be expected to hold. It is the notion of design, common in some way to all the arts, that should give us our bridge from one art form to the other. Osip Brik's "Zvukovye povtory" ("Sound Repetitions") is the pioneer study directed at the discernment of patterns of sounds in poetry and their classification. The povtor, in Brik's usage, is a repetition of consonants and groups of consonants. Alliteration is distinguished as a special case of the povtor, that is repetition of consonants adjacent to stressed vowels.3 It is unfortunate that the reticent Brik did not extend his study to include assonance as well as consonantal repetition. Although, as Victor Erlich remarks, "... the methodological importance of the article lies not so much in the ingenious typology of alliterative 'figures' as in the author's insistence upon the 'integral' character of poetic speech",4 Brik does not attempt to bolster his conception of integralness with a theory about the relation of the povtor to the meaning structure of poetry. The article consists of types of povtory illustrated by numerous examples from Puskin and Lermontov. The typology is based on two principles: (1) the order of consonants in an alliterative group, and (2) the position of povtory in relation to one another and to line and distich boundaries. The weakness of Brik's analysis lies primarily in the first category. Given a group of form ABC, there are six permutations, hence six povtory. Is there any sense in distinguishing all six, or are some permutations more important than others? In Lermontov's line Lezal odin ja na peske doliny (one of Brik's examples), the symmetrical structure is due as much to the internal rhyme in the second and final feet as to the repetition of the formula l-d-n with the first two sounds permuted. And it seems that the permutation itself may be of no importance at all (compare: Lezal odin ja na peske kak Vdinok). What we need, I believe, is an extension of Brik's theory that will include a hierarchy of phonetic significance. Without rejecting the consonant cluster, we may take the syllable as a good unit and in that way at least partly incorporate the problem of assonance and internal rhyme in the scheme. Anticipating some future troubles, I will register my qualified disagreement with Brik's claim that "unstressed vowels, in view of their weakness in acoustical coloring, are hardly capable of forming definite sound combinations; and it follows that they should be regarded as 3

Brik, O., "Zvukovye povtory", Sborniki po teorii poetiieskogo jazyka (Petrograd, 1916-1917), p. 62. * Erlich, V., Russian Formalism (The Hague, 1955), p. 55.

SOUND DESIGNS

19

giving in their totality a general phonetic background". 5 A similar view of this problem in Russian poetics is taken by Henry Lanz, who supports his position with acoustic studies.® Aside from a possible tendency in Russian poetry to depart from conversational treatment of unaccented vowels, the "phonetic background" imparted by these vowels can be considered as part of the overall sound design if only in terms of one or more distinctive features. Brik, as a matter of fact, hints that a complete theory of sound repetitions in poetry will have distinctive features rather than phonemes as its material. He observes, for example, that in the Russian poetic tradition the feature of voicedness/unvoicedness is significant, while that of softness/hardness is not. He says that some consonants group themselves naturally in such a way that the povtor may be extended to non-identical consonants. He only hints at how the grouping could be made, and his purview is narrowed by the tradition of the euphonious: Remembering that poetic speech is musical speech, one may a priori expect a preference for voiced consonants as the more "singable" sounds ...' The most imaginative part of Brik's article is his classification of povtory according to position in the line or distich. He distinguishes four sound patterns: 1. The Ring. The base [i.e., the sound group that is to be repeated] is at the beginning of the line, the povtor at the end of the same or the following line. 2. The Junction. The base is at the end of the line, the povtor at the beginning of the next line. 3. The Tie. The base is at the beginning of the line, the povtor at the beginning of the next. 4. The Tail. The base is at the end of the line, the povtor at the end of the next. A common example ... is ... rhyme.8 Although Brik does not go on to describe the function of these types in verse (he merely gives examples), his names are highly suggestive. Since in my analysis I consider not only povtory but also assonance, I will use, for example, the term "anaphora" instead of "tie" (skrep); and in other cases standard terms will be used when possible. The rest of my terminology, drawn from the art of ornamentation, is as suggestive as, and perhaps more orderly than, Brik's, which seems to be based on a mechanical analogy. The central terms are from Hermann Weyl's 6

' 7 8

Brik, op. cit., p. 62. Lanz, H., The Physical Basis of Rime (Stanford, 1931), p. 97. Brik, op. cit., p. 28. Ibid., p. 49.

20

SOUND DESIGNS

study of symmetry, and it is only fair that a warning put forth by him be included here: A common principle in music and prosody seems to be the configuration aab which is often called a bar: a theme a that is repeated and then followed by the "envoy" b; strophe, antistrophe, and epode in Greek choric lyrics. But such schemes fall hardly under the heading of symmetry." W e hope that the schemes which we will be teasing out of our poems, which have to do with phonetic rather than strophic patterns, will fall more docilely under that heading. Y e t the method is powerful enough to tempt us to extend it to thematics and syntax. Let us look at the first stanza of the title poem of My Sister

Life:

Cecipa mo a hch3hb η ceroAHH β pa3jraee PacnmGjiacb BeceHHHM jiosyieM 060 Bcex, H o jiioflH β 6penoKax bbicoko Gpkotjihbh H BeauiHBO acajiHT KaK 3Men β OBce. 10 (Sesträ moja iizrC i sevödnja ν razlive

RasiiMw' ves6nnim doidjöm obo vs£x, No ljiWi ν brelokax vyiöko brjixz^livy I νέίΐίνο i&ljat kak zmei ν ovse.) The meter is amphibrachic tetrameter with alternating feminine-masculine rhymes. The syllable se (reduced in unstressed positions to si, speaking roughly) appears five times in the quatrain; the first four occurrences are in the first distich, where it appears with distinct regularity: in the first line it is in pre-accentual position in the first and third feet; in the second line it is the accented syllable of the second and fourth feet. Since it is unstressed in the first line and stressed in the second, we ought to distinguish such forms as belonging to a special type of repetition. shall call this type echoic repetition,11

We

There are two types o f echoic

repetition: modulated (stressed precedes unstressed) and amplified (unstressed precedes stressed, as in this example). The second and fourth stresses of the first line are on the vowel i. Weyl, H., "Symmetry", The World of Mathematics (New York, 1956), p. 703. My sister is life and today in the downpour She has tumbled in spring rain over everyone, But people in their trinkets haughtily grumble And sting politely like snakes in the oats. 11 Elizabeth Sewell speaks of a similar device, a "shadow" relation between voiced and unvoiced consonants (in The Structure of Poetry, London, 1951, p. 149). We would want to include her observation in any complete theory of sound designs. 9

10

SOUND DESIGNS

21

Letting α stand for the syllable se and b for /, we obtain the pattern abab for the first line. The boundary between the repetitive forms ab is at the middle of the line in the conjunction i ("and"), and so the balance exhibited in the sound pattern is parallel to a deceptive syntactic balance. "And" here denotes succession: "then", rather than conjunction proper. It could be replaced by a full stop. There is a tension of ambiguity between the "musical" inertia of the verse, what Eixenbaum calls "reflected melody",12 and the sense of the line as deduced from what follows. This ambiguity can be tested by inserting a full stop at the end of the line. Now if we represent stressed syllables with upper-case letters and unstressed with lower-case letters, and considering only the two repetitions discussed so far, we get as our scheme for the first distich aBaB/BADA, in which D designates the syllable om in the third foot of the second line. Since se (a), with its amplified variant A, runs through the entire formula, I will use the term translatory symmetry to describe this type of repetition: that is the recurrence of a sound in the pattern abacada..., where b, c, and dare different and perhaps further restricted. What is important about this type is that it establishes a pattern which wants to keep going. There is another type of symmetry operating through the boundary between these two lines; that is, aBjBa. Following Weyl, we shall call this reflective symmetry. Reflection in a mirror (the boundary) presents symmetry such that objects closer to the mirror retain in their image (repetition) greater size in relation to objects farther away. That is, distance relations are preserved in reflection, but in opposite order with respect to the boundary.13 Now, allowing c to stand for the repeated syllable raz-jras-, the first distich presents the overall pattern aBacB/cBADA. Although the oddnumbered stressed syllables of the first line have been ignored, each foot of the lines is represented by at least one repetition, a fact which is sufficiently impressive as a display of regularity in a verbal utterance. Other, weaker, symmetries are present in this distich. A common type, which is a generalization of anaphora, occurs in the repetition of unstressed i in the sixth syllable of each line. I shall call this vertical symmetry: repetitions which occur at about the same position in succeeding lines: abed/efeg... 18

Eixenbaum, B., Melodika russkogo liriieskogo stixa (Peterburg, 1922), p. 95. This is what David I. Masson calls a "returning or cyclical" form in a confusingly involved attempt to classify sound patterns ("Sound-Repetition Terms", Poetics, The Hague-Warszawa, 1961, p. 189 f.). 13

22

SOUND DESIGNS

The syllable ve is repeated at the end of the first line and in the second foot of the second line. A repetition such as this of unstressed syllables would ordinarily be unimportant unless it is echoic with some later repetition of the same syllable in stressed position. Such is the case here: we have a stressed ve in the fourth line; but now one wonders what might be the maximum permissible distance between repetitions. Position would seem to be the deciding factor: repetitions at the beginning or end of a line, or next to a caesura, might be felt at a distance of several lines, or even across stanzaic boundaries, while those in a less conspicuous location might be unnoticeable at a remove of more than one line. We might ignore an echoic repetition of form aA if a and A are more than two lines apart, moreover, but a form like aaA would demand attention even at such a distance. The syllable ve becomes significant also because it is linked through the translatory symmetry in its vowel to what is probably the keynote se. We need some more terminological machinery to deal with the co-occurrence of these forms in vese-vse. We call repetitions of form ab-acb dilative symmetries and of form acb-ab contractive symmetries. In either case a formula is repeated, but with an intervening sound, the different terms being used only to distinguish the order of their appearance. The repetition vesi-vse is contractive, while in the fourth line veilivo isAjat is a dilative symmetry. At a hypersyllabic level, ν raz/ive/RasiiWas've- has the pattern abc/abdc, again a dilative type. The third line of our quatrain offers a remarkable contrast to the predominantly translatory symmetry observed up to its beginning. Most striking is the repetition of ok in the stressed syllables of adjacent feet central to the line. One finds on either side of the apex a repetition of br, and radiating from that are repetitions in ju and /, which present echoic symmetries. The formula is AbcDDcaB. There is thus strong reflective symmetry about the center of the line. The fourth line has no particular interest for its sound designs other than those mentioned: the echoic symmetry in ve and the dilative symmetry zl-zal. The final rhyme, however, in the syllable se, is in echoic relation to the first syllable of the quatrain, and this gives the whole stanza a peculiar "locked" effect. Punctuation and sense (symbolized by the conjunction no - "but" - at the beginning of line two) combine to divide the quatrain into two opposed distichs. The appearance of se at the beginning and end of the quatrain, with the irregular clustering of o's about the center of the stanza, gives a vaguely reflective symmetry to the stanza as a whole, Brik's "ring".

SOUND DESIGNS

23

The second quatrain of the poem seems to be in another key: y crapuiHx Ha 3το cboh ecn. pe30Hw. EeccnopHO, 6eccnopHO CMemoH t b o h pe30H, Η τ ο β rpo3y jihjiobh rjia3a η ra3om>i Η naxHeT cwpoö pe3e,n;oö ropH30HT.14

(U starSix na ito svoi esf rezony. Besspömo, besspömo smeiön tvoj reζόη, Cto ν groz« lilövy glaza i gazony

I pdxnet syro'j rezedö] gorizonf.) A single repetition would appear to be insufficient to provide a distinction between the main types of symmetry, translatory and reflective. The determining condition will be the strength of the boundary between the forms aa. But also, as can be seen in this quatrain, irregularity in the spacing of the repetitions will promote the translatory effect. Here it is the driving repetitions in on and its dilation orn that first catch our attention. Then we get repetitions in r and z, which come together in the formula groz/glaz·, and finally all of these "notes" are combined in a single "chord", the final word of the stanza gorizont. Something seems to have been achieved in testing Xalafov's thesis: the first two stanzas of "My Sister Life" are evidently densely orchestrated in their sounds. Having ignored the meaning structure of the verse, we cannot yet assert that the sound structure provides the dominant principle of organization; nor could we assert this unless we were to find that the language is nonsense, which it is not in this case. While the question as to whether the lines are "half music, half poetry" is, and probably will remain, unanswered, the musical metaphor seems about as appropriate as one could ever wish. But everything breaks down in the third stanza: Μτο β Mae, Kor^a noe3flOB pacnncaHbe KaMbiiiiHHCKOH ΒβτκοΗ HHTaenn> β Kyne,

Oho rpaanH03Heii CeaToro ÜHcaHb«, Η Hepm»ix οτ omjih η 6ypi> KaHane.16 14

15

The adults have their reasons for this. No doubt, no doubt your reason is silly, That eyes and lawns are lilac in the storm And the horizon smells of damp mignonette. That in May, when you read the schedule In your compartment on the Kamyä branch, It is more grandiose than Holy Scripture, Than the cushions black from the storms and dust.

24

SOUND DESIGNS (Cto v mae, kogda poezdov raspisarie KamySinskoj vetkoj iitaeS ν kupe, Ono grandioznej Svjatovo Pisan'ja, I iornyx ot pyli i buf kattape.)

Except for some vowel harmony in ο and a and some sporadic repetitions of p, there is nothing here, certainly nothing that can be compared to the dense patterns of the earlier stanzas. And so it is with the remaining stanzas of the poem. Repetitions are there, but they are unsustained and apparently independent of a larger symmetric ordering principle. A reading of My Sister Life with special attention to its sound designs reveals that many of the poems have this same general structure: the first lines, sometimes stanzas, exhibit highly developed patterns, which will usually mean strong reflective, echoic, dilative, and contractive symmetries in addition to those of the translatory type, which is present in all rhymed verse. The question is whether or not a single pattern extends over the whole stanza, over a distich, or over the line or a yet smaller unit. Another poem from My Sister Life begins: Τμ β BeTpe, Ββτκοϊί npoöyiomeM, He BpeMH nTimaM nen., HaMOKmaa βορο6μιπκομ CapeHeBaa BeTBb!1® (Ty ν vetre, vitkoj pröbujuiiem, Ne vremja V pticam ρέί\ NamökSajä voröbyikom Sireneväja vetv' /) The reflective symmetry is set up by the repetition of vet at each end of the quatrain and enhanced by the clustering of stressed o's flanking alliteration in p. Also prominent are the several dilations and reflections of the formula vr. The second and third stanzas illustrate the degeneration of orchestration in favor of sporadic sound plays that are more closely allied to the pun and root figures: our attention is thus turned away from the presemantic verbal sound to the meaning structure of the verse: y Kanejib - TjDKecTb 3an0H0K, Η cafl cjiennT, KaK njiec, le

You're in the wind, which tests with a branch: Isn't it time for the birds to sing, Bough of the lilacbush All soaked like a sparrow!

SOUND DESIGNS

25

06pti3raHHtm, 3aKanaHHMH MHJIbOHOM CHHHX CJie3.

Moeö TOCKOK) ΒΒΙΗΗΗΗΒΗ H OT Teöa Β raanax, O H OXCELJI ΗΟΏ>Κ) HbmeniHeH,

3a6opMOTan, 3anax.17 (U käpeV — tjäZesf zäponok, I säd slepit, kak pljös, Obryzgannyj, zakäpannyj Mil'önom sinix sljöz. Moij tosköju vynjanien I ot tebja ν Sipäx, Ott öiil rtöCju nyneSnej, Zabormotäl, zapdx.) The repetitions of a in the first of these lines represent a metaphoric gesture of a pantomimic type that will be discussed at length later in this study. The povtor of the second line, sl-p - pl-s is indeed a reflection across the palindrome kak (Xalafov's inversion of the interval), but I doubt that the reader is going to respond to it as a reflection: that is, where the order of repetitions will be strongly felt when the elements are syllables or clusters, this is not the case when the elements are only consonants. This repetition seems to be first of all a word play and not a musical device. In Chapter V of this study, we will read a poem from My Sister Life in which sound structure becomes an object of thematic attention. The pattern is consciously disrupted to give the illusion of two disputing voices. We will look now at the first stanza of this poem, "Oars at Rest", for the sake only of the intricate reflective patterns of the part that precedes the disturbing entrance of the second voice: JIOflKa KOJIOTHTCH

Β COHHOH rpyflH, HBLI HABHCJIH, uejiyiOT Β ΙΟΠΟΊΗΙΠ,Ι,

17

The drops are heavy as collar-studs, And the garden blinding like a pond, Spattered all over and spotted With a million blue tears. Nursed by my loneliness And in thorns because of you, It came to life this night, Began to mumble and smell.

26

SOUND DESIGNS Β JIOKTH, Β yKJUOHHHBI - Ο, ΠΟΓΟΑΗ, 3 τ ο Beat MoxceT co bchkhm cJiyHHTbca!18 {Lödka kolötitsja ν sonnoj grudi, Ivy navisli, celiijut ν kljuöicy, V lökti, ν ukljüiiny — ο, pogodi, Eto ved' moiet so vsjakim sluiit'sja!)

The first four syllables form a perfect reflective symmetry Abb A. There is an anaphoric dilation lot-lokt in lines one and three. Reflective symmetry appears also in the repetition iv-vi in the first two feet of the second line and also in the second phrase, which is embedded in the reflective pattern of the whole line by the flanking repetitions in i. The form klju£ is echoically amplified in line three. This reader is particularly conscious of the locking ("ring", reflective) effect of the forms ivy-na at the beginning of the second line and the unstressed -iny at the end of the "musical" utterance in the middle of the third line. This effect arises partly out of the complete absence of nasal consonants between the two «'s. If it is true that these poems are more densely, more consciously (judging by "Oars at Rest"), organized in their sounds at first, less so as the poem progresses, we may assume that the poem's composition proceeded according to the plan described as follows by Vatery: Κ I am questioned; if anyone wonders (as happens sometimes quite peremptorily) what I "wanted to say" in a certain poem, I reply that I did not want to say but wanted to make, and that it was the intention of making which wanted what I said... As for the Cimetiire marin, this intention was at first no more than a rhythmic figure, empty, or filled with meaningless syllables, which obsessed me for some time...1® The claim of this chapter that a predominance of reflective, as opposed to translatory, symmetries is a useful indicator of the degree of orchestration in poetry remains very hypothetical indeed. A tertium quid may be lurking somewhere, and there is subjectivity in the choice of units and boundaries of reflection. The theory recommends itself, first, because reflective patterns are more difficult to concoct. As a generalization of Brik's theory, it may have a place in the overall theory of rhythm. Are we overly sanguine in proposing that such a theory can give 18

"

A boat throbs in the sleeping breast. Willows overhung and kiss collarbones, Elbows and rowlocks - o, wait, For this could happen to anyone! Valery, P., The Art of Poetry (New York, 1958), p. 147-148.

SOUND DESIGNS

27

precision to all those vague but metaphorically descriptive pronouncements about the music of poetry? Such talk is often just a way of saying that a poem is beautiful, but it can be meaningful criticism. For example, A. R. Chisholm, speaking of Mallarme, another poet thought to have been influenced directly by the art of musical composition: This legitimate musicalisation is at its best in V Apres-midi d'un Faune. There are passages in this beautiful poem where the words become almost pure music. This, for example: Que non! par Fimmobile et lasse pämoison Suffoquant de chaleurs le matin frais s'il lutte, Ne murmure point d'eau que ne verse ma flöte Au bosquet arrose d'accords; ...20 Is it merely accidental that the lines chosen by Chisholm to illustrate his point offer (1) a reflection in the first: pa-li-il-la-pa and (2) a magnificent contraction: matin frais s'il lutte - ma flütel Rhythm in poetry derives not only from the struggle between syntax and the conventional organization of meter, but also from the texture of specific sound patterns. But after a certain point of moderation in the use of such patterns, we come to parody, as in "Oars at Rest". The pun and the repetition of entire words and phrases (epanalepsis) are devices that are sooner rhetorical than musical; but the idea of symmetry is useful here as well. DerZavin's favorite device of repeating a verb (usually a pure iamb) at the beginning of a line or strophe is quite different in rhythmical effect, depending on whether the first occurrence is anaphoric with or abuts on the repetition: Η ßjieÄHa cMepTb Ha Bcex πμαητ. Γληλητ Ha Bcex - η Ha uapeß, KoMy β aepxcaey TecHbi Mnpi>i; Γληλητ Ha ΠΒΠΠΗΜΧ 6oraneH, Ητο β 3JiaTe η cpeöpe icyMapu; TjiaaHT Ha npejiecTb η Kpacw, Γ λ η λ η τ Ha pa3yM B03BtimeiiHiiH, rjMAHT Ha CHJIM flep3HOBeHHH Η ΤΟΗΗΤ Jie3BHe KOCBI.

The first repetition, being adjacent to its image, necessitates a syntactic inversion, creating what we would like to call a reflection. The other 10

Chisholm, A. R., Mailar mi's Grand Oeuvre (Manchester, 1962), p. 35.

28

SOUND DESIGNS

repetitions of gljadit are simply parallel: as translations, they set into motion · something that could continue indefinitely. The reflectivity of a pattern would seem to depend considerably on the strength of the reflecting surface, the prosodic or syntactic boundary. It also depends on the degree of syntactic parallelism. If, in the lines Tfle TepeK mpaeT β cBHpenoM Becejibe; HrpaeT η βοετ, icax 3eepi> mojioaoö, ...

Pu§kin, echoing Deriavin's rhythm, had placed the verb on its first occurrence in the first foot and not the second, we would have anaphora. Even so, we would probably feel the vertical symmetry if the two lines were parallel syntactically. As it is, the lines seem to be trying to avoid a pattern that is lurking behind them in the alliteration in r. Word repetition is not really our subject, but it does offer a contrast to help us deal with borderline cases, such as Pasternak's lines quoted at the beginning of the chapter: Po zaboram begut ambrazury, Obrazujutsja breii ν stene, ... a simulacrum of the Deriavin rhythm, in which sound repetitions gang up to produce a playful pun. It is from such instances that we begin to suspect that Pasternak's sounds may be too closely tied up with the semantics of his verse for either the musical or design metaphor to be completely descriptive. It makes quite a difference whether we speak of a conceit such as sad slepit, kak pies as an inversion of the interval, as a reflective symmetry, or as a sort of primitive pun.

III. SOUND AND IMAGERY

Η y ABcpeö noKa3biBajmcb Bbixo,mp>i1 H3 nepßbix Hrp Η nepBbix öyKBapeii. Design, understood as in the foregoing chapter, is, I think, one of those characteristics of poetry of which R. P. Blackmur is speaking when he says: "it is in such matters that there must be a substantial unity in all art; there are not two, or three, much less seven, fundamental modes of imagination, but only one".2 But it happens that what we call modernism in art is usually, or ideally, the development of one formal aspect of the art to the exclusion of others. The principles of sound design ought to be ubiquitous in poetry, but we may see them in the pre-modernist tradition as negative rules more often than not. The pre-Symbolist poet would be expected to reserve the more daring and contrived symmetries for special and unusual effects. Thus Puskin, noted for his restraint in such matters, gives Us a rich reflective-echoic pattern in these lines, which in the midst of a rather "objective" narration suddenly touch on a beloved subject, ladies' feet: Po ix pleniteVnym sledam Letajutplamennye vzory ... (Evgenij Onegin, I, xxviii)

(The translatory pattern in le, resumed after the assonance at the line boundary in a, gives a reflection, while the whole is contracted and echoed in the one word plamennye.) The story of modernism is not ended with the completion of the chapter on experimentation, the denudation of the device. There is a sequel whose subject is self-consciousness, art becoming aware of its own ingenuity. Here arises a new pathos to which people who want to be 1

s

And at the door appeared the natives come From the first games and the first ABC's. Blackmur, R. P., Language as Gesture (New York, 1952), p. 6.

30

SOUND AND IMAGERY

fooled will be indifferent. Citing Hegel, Ivan Fonagy tells us about the source of this pathos: it comes from "a contradiction in language" which "lies in the fact that whereas it should express individual experience it can only express the universal".3 Pasternak's poem "Our Storm", from My Sister Life, which exhibits a somewhat more sustained sound design than is the case with most of the poems of this book, makes this pathos thematic. Even the rhyme scheme is more involved than the alternating forms which he generally employs: it is abcc abdd, a scheme which reflects a stanza in its predecessor and adds a couplet as a coda. Tpo3a, KaK acpeu, coacrjia cnpeHb ΗflbiMOMacepTBeHHMM 3acTjiajia rjiasa Η TYIH. PacnpaBJiaä TyöaMH BbiBHx MypaBbH. 3BOH Beflep cuiHÖJieH HaßeicpeHb.

Ο, Ητο 3a aca^HOCTb: Heöa Majio?! Β KaHaee öteTca CTO cepaexi. Tpo3a coacrjia cupein», KaK »cpeu. Β 3MaJiH - jiyr. Ero Jia3ypb, Korfla 6bl 3HÖJIH, - COCKOÖJIHJIH. Ho Aaxce 3»6ΛΗΚ He cneuiHT CTpaxHyTb ajiMa3HBiii xMejn» c flyiiiH. y KaflOK nbioT eme rpo3y H 3 cjiaflKHx rnanoK h3O6hjh>h,

Η KJieBep 6ypeH Η ßarpoB Β 6opaoBhix 6pH3rax MajiapoB. Κ MaJIHHe JIHIIHyT KOMapbl.

OflHaKO 3K XOÖOT MaJMpHHHblH KaK pa3 do,na BOT, H3yBep, Tfle pocKoiin» JieTa p030Befi?! CKB03b 6jiy3y 3apOHHTb HapblB Η CHSTbCH KpaCHOH ÖajiepHHOH? Bca^HTb cTpeKano 030pcTBa, TAe KpoBb, KaK MOKpaa JiHCTBa?! O, Bepb nrpe Moeä, η Bepb rpeMameö BCJiea Te6e MHrpemi! TaK nießy AH» cyflböa ropeTb , Ζ ^ Η Η Κ Ο Μ Β HepeuieHHOö κορβ. 8

Fönagy, I., "Communication in Poetry", Word, Vol. 17, No. 2 (1961), p. 207.

SOUND AND IMAGERY

üoBepHJia? T e n e p b , Tenepb

IlpH6jiH3b j i h u o , η β o3apein>e C B S T o r o jieTa T B o e r o Pa3flyio Ά β noxcap ero! Ά OT T e 6 a He y r a i o : Tbi npflHciiit ryöti β CHer xcacMHHa, Ά nyK) Ha r y ß a x t o t CHer, O h TaeT Ha m o h x b o CHe.

Kyaa MHe p a , a o c T b a e T b mok»? Β c t h x h , β rpaiKOB, BblBOflHJI. 7

Pasternak, I Remember, p. 121.

SOUND AND IMAGERY

37

(Like wet salt from the clouds And from horses' bits, the snow removed Pain, as spots from hoods.) the mixing of the categories which our language has seen fit to name seems egregious. The simile may be tolerable, but the transfer of "from the clouds" is hardly so: possibly justified only by the dilative sound pattern (sol'ju s οblakov). Behind the simile is the domestic image of salt used as a cleaning compound, and a closer reading may reveal the need for the transfer as a sort of localizing agent to place the reader's eye lower, creating a covert metaphor: nature-mother. There are similar abuses of chemistry in "Our Storm". Blood, implicit in the imagery of sacrifice that begins the poem, is still implicit only in the beating-hearts image; but it is just here that Pasternak overcomes the precieuse quality of the figures. He accepts the obligation of developing the blood imagery, and thus it keeps appearing in more and more explicit forms, metaphorically, until finally it attracts a mosquito. The appearance, finally, in the sixth quatrain, of the word itself, "blood", is in what again at first glance seems to be an unmotivated simile - unless we take the mosquito's viewpoint. We have been asking for a reading that must be called literal, even if that means first to pass through a figurative process and only then to find a new literality. When Tynjanov said that Pasternak wanted to make peace with "the Tradition", he could have gone on to say that the new poetics, for which the tradition supplies the material, is a step beyond expression, beyond the metaphor as a means. An elementary case in point is Pasternak's treatment of the word emal' ("enamel") in the third quatrain. Like its English counterpart, this word in not a member of the colloquial vocabulary. It is, on the one hand, a technical term for certain kinds of paint. On the other, it is an archaic poeticism meaning "adorned with bright and variegated colors". For example, Milton in "Lycidas" calls upon the flowers to "Throw hither all your quaint enamell'd eyes", and Lermontov uses the word also in reference to eyes: KaK He6eca TBOH B3op 6jmcTaeT SMajitio rojiyßofi.

(Like the skies thy gaze shines In blue enamel.) Pasternak evokes the tradition, using two poetic cliches (lazur\ "azure",

38

SOUND AND IMAGERY

in the same line, is the other one) to give the metaphor meadow-sky. But in the next line the azure is said to be "scraped off". This is something that may be more conveniently done to paint, and thus emaV reverts to literality. A poeticism is a term that can hardly be used at all unless metaphorically, a word which has so lost touch with the real world that it has only an extended meaning. It takes a special trope to give it back its proper sense, to make the enamel back into paint. Jakobson calls it "negative parallelism": "... negative parallelism overthrows the metaphorical order in the name of the realistic order ...". 8 We notice that in the present case the enamel, which is said to be on the field, is Milton's: it is so also later in the wine-colored splotches of clover. Then, strangely, it is "its", the meadow's, sky which has its azure scraped off. But no: we will no longer accept the old metonymy ("azure" for "sky") so easily; the azure is the meadow's. The visual imagination may balk at having the sky as a coating over the earth: there is hardly room for the eye in between; but suppose we were to take Milton literally. Suppose his flowers were to stop throwing their eyes about and were to start seeing with them: we might have the point of view that Pasternak gives us here. There is a remarkable formal parallel to the thematic manipulation of the "point of view" that deserves special discussion. I have already mentioned the change in sound symmetry which occurs in the sixth quatrain, a shift of the vertical symmetry of stressed a in the left hemistichs to the right. This shift is brought out most dramatically in the occurrence of the first really close rhyme in this critical vowel at the end of the sixth stanza (ozorstvd — listvä). It is accompanied by a thematic shift. Suppose the poem to have an imaginary origin, a sort of Cartesian reference point, from which the images are "seen", in respect to which their "size" may be judged. The first visual image, that of smoke covering "eyes and clouds", is (alternatively to the "subjective" reading of "eyes" given earlier) a juxtaposition of distant and disparate objects, which suggests great distance from our origin. The verbs, we note, are in the past tense here, which may suggest remoteness in time as well as space. With the transition to present tense verbs in the second quatrain, the eye is brought nearer to the scene also in a spatial sense: one has to be pretty close to a gutter to see the metaphor that Pasternak gives us, the water throbbing, pulsating along. The return to the past tense in stanza three is, as in the tenth stanza, descriptive of a state; otherwise, the 8

Jakobson, R., Noveßaja

russkaja poezija (Prague, 1921).

SOUND AND IMAGERY

39

present tense is sustained through the rest of the poem. The flowers of stanza three are at first merely spots of color, but then a specific flower, clover, is mentioned, and - as we have said - the spots of color become paint. The eye is moving closer, close enough to see a mosquito. We are now prepared for a sensory image which is not visual at all but tactile, even painful, as the mosquito bites us in the sixth stanza. The little zealot does this by way of a reification of meaning similar to that effected on emaV. The translation of Skvoz' bluzu zaronif naryv, "To spark a welt through the blouse", does not preserve this. Zaronif is a bookish verb meaning "to drop". As an archaism, its use is normally limited to certain fixed expressions, such as zaronif podozrenie ("to excite suspicion") and especially zaronif iskru, "to drop a spark", that is, to start something that cannot be controlled. It is the latter expression that is evoked by Pasternak's use of the verb in this poem. The result is a peculiar sort of metaphor whereby lexical properties of a word are the vehicle of the actual semantic terms of the metaphor: a mosquito's bite is like a hot spark dropped on the skin. The seemingly pointless exaggeration naryv, "welt", for "mosquito bite", may be an echo of the motif of sickness and curing which appears in the first and seventh quatrains and toward the end of the poem, but simply as semantic imprecision it further marks the phrase in which it occurs and calls added attention to the verb's burden. The odd phrase "stinger of mischief' (strekalo ozorstva) is also marked lexically. The word strekalo is an obsolete literary word, used here apparently partly for the sake of the povtor, sir, which with the o's of the following word may invoke, graphically and phonetically, the adjective ostryj ("sharp") as a sort of contracted anagram. But also the phrase develops the motif of childishness, which first appeared in the childishly fanciful evocation of painters in the fourth quatrain. The motif is further developed in stanza seven, when the poet becomes self-conscious and calls the poetry a game. He speaks out here in a passionate imperative. We have remarked on the abrupt change in sound design in this stanza: the grating repetitions in er, g, and the nasals. The pounding metallic sounds of this quatrain seem peculiarly appropriate to the thematic headache. In the poet's sudden emergence as a critic of his own "game", the game itself is played the more avidly in another demonstration of what Tynjanov called the union of word and thing in Pasternak: Childhood, not the "childhood" of the chrestomathy, but childhood as an alteration of vision, confuses the object and the verse, and the object enters

40

SOUND AND IMAGERY

our own order of things, the verse may be felt with our hands. Childhood justifies and makes obligatory those images which bind together the most incommensurable and various of things.* The sound play that is too close, too obvious (e.g., zjabli, "chilled", and zjablik, "finch", in the fourth quatrain), becomes the fanciful collocation of the child's word play. But Pasternak does not play child: he rather turns the stance to the uses of poetry, the pathos of self-consciousness: after all, children are not afflicted with migraine headaches, as a rule anyway. The last line of the seventh quatrain has another strange simile: "The rage of day burning as a wilding in cherrybark". The figure follows the first reference to a second person addressee in the poem, and in the poem's final line it merges with the image of the addressee. Here, it ties together the motifs of blood and burning by way of the dead metaphor "her face burned with embarrassment". The motif of childhood is developed again, if inconspicuously, in the image of the dicok in the cherry bark. This word refers ambiguously to a young, ungrafted tree, that is a wild stock, and to a shy, childishly farouche person. The stylization of jasmine blossoms as snow looks like a more conventional borrowing from the Tradition, the snow being needed only because it is cold and therefore symbolic of the girl's resistance. But even this "usual" imagery is now given an unusual tone by the selfconsciousness of the poetic stance as now established, brought out by the too close syntactic parallelism and almost mawkishly awkward rhythm of the couplet of stanza nine, and then, in the following stanza, in another obsolescence os'mina, "octet". This usage is a realization of the archaisms and poeticisms that occur earlier: The rigidity (graflenyj, "ruled") of poetry, words, as symbolized by the Tradition. We will make one more observation about how Pasternak's words break free from the confining category of signification. The verb rastreskat'sja, in the tenth quatrain means not only "to become cracked, chapped", as of lips, but also "to become over-excited through greed". Both meanings are to be taken at once, the first referring us to the lips in the first stanza and the imagery of sickness and pain and also of the red, peeling bark of the cherry. The second meaning makes explicit the thematic involution which identifies the poetry with its own subject: sacrifice and fanaticism are now the attributes of the poem as well as of the stylized nature of the poem's beginning. To describe all this is a laborious procedure, and one wonders what ' Tynjanov, op. cit., p. 565.

SOUND AND IMAGERY

41

has been accomplished. We do not have to endorse this particular poem in order to find its poetics interesting, and I think that it is by now fairly clear that we are talking about a poetics not at all of suggestion, but one which goes to extremes to realize its intentions and themes in the actual, if sometimes fugitive, attributes of words: words taken not only in their capacity as tokens of significance, but as things having a history and a character. This poem, mannered and full of exclamations and precious conceits, turns out to be very tightly organized, obviously the product of a fastidious and closely reasoned poetics. But now we may want to agree with Adamoviö: Here there is no deliberate break with logic, as there is in the case of many Western poets; here logic, in terms of the cohesion of concepts, is evidently observed, but how it must suffer!10

"

Adamovii, op. cit., p. 223.

IV. DICTATION FROM NATURE

OTpOCTKH JTHBHH rpH3HyT Β ΓΡ03ΛΜΧ Η «ojito, flojiro λο 3apn KponawT c KpoBenb cboö aKpocTHx,

üycKaH Β ρκφΜγ nysbipn.1

Valery says: "... the perfection of that discourse whose sole aim is comprehension obviously consists in the ease with which it is transmuted into something quite different, into nonlanguage".2 The poet meanwhile creates an obligation of the sense of an utterance to its form. Another sort of transmutation occurs. The language precipitates out and leaves an ineradicable stain. We thus come to speak of necessity and of the irreplaceability of images and words; but this is something observed after the fact, a shock to the poet as to the reader. There is the serendipity of art. We smell the cooking in a Breughel or hear the wind among Van Gogh's stars because the art has, in passing, blundered across the categories of the senses. But the object of search is a purity that does not want such accidents. We might consider what an art that did not surpass its intentions would be like, the mortified art of absolute purity. Mallarme's poetry has been called "a system ... organized upon the principles of similarity and succession as they appear in Number and Logic" ; 3 and Pasternak's poetry has been called a hybrid with music. The notion of sound design can be taken as one "poetics of purity". It too is founded on the principles of similarity (repetition) and succession (order). Miss Sewell points out that the success of such a poetics 1

2 8

Sprouts of the shower wallow in clusters And long, long before dawn They scribble their acrostic, Releasing bubbles into rhyme. Valery, op. cit., p. 208. Sewell, E., The Structure of Poetry (London, 1951), p. 152.

DICTATION FROM NATURE

43

depends on some prior destructive acts: "total disorganization of the reference".4 There is, of course, the music of eloquence, the flow of a graceful rhetoric through time; but what we are calling purity is rather a Pythagorean harmony that is to be contemplated, not heard, an "order beyond speech", as Wallace Stevens puts it in a poem which begins: The truth is that there comes a time When we can mourn no more over music That is so much motionless sound. Madame de Stael applies the same metaphor to an architectural monument, and indeed our language of symmetry refers us to the visual arts as the abode of purity. Jakobson and Tynjanov descry in the poetics of Russian Futurism the destructive tendencies which we are supposed to find in the author of Un Coup de Dis. Both Xlebnikov and Majakovskij are said to begin with the disruption of the semantics of language, Xlebnikov through the disturbance of syntax and Majakovskij through "illogical" figures: hyperbole, oxymoron. Tynjanov, we recall, clearly opposes the poetics of Pasternak to these heroic programs: the word, purified, was ready to be reunited, perhaps in an unprecedented way, with the object. We have now a rather shaky dichotomy between the poetics of "motionless music", if there is such a thing, and that of natural language used metrically and memorably. I take this distinction to correspond approximately to Susanne Langer's "presentational" versus "discursive" semantics, the latter of which is assigned to language in its "proper" use.6 Obviously, no poetic theory, much less a body of poetry, is going to be committed wholly to one or the other mode. We, moreover, do not care to press this opposition in order to test our poet's intentions (his own disavowal ought to be acceptable), but rather to use the polarity to attract the elusive particles of meaning that make up a full-blooded impure poem. We want to find out how the accidents happen in which art blunders outside the limits of its means. It is Tynjanov's insight that I want to develop here. How is it that, in Pasternak, language and reality come together, not in the hierarchy of discursive semantics, but in the sodality of equals? Pasternak provides our text (in "A Few Propositions", published in 1922): "Modern schools imagined that art is like a fountain, whereas 1 6

Ibid., p. 155. Langer, S., Philosophy in a New Key, p. 79.

44

DICTATION FROM NATURE

it is a sponge. They decided that art should gush, whereas it should suck in and saturate itself'. 6 A little later in this curious essay, art becomes a bit more active, perhaps a live rather than a dead sponge, or yet a surf-rider: By its inborn sense of hearing, poetry seeks out the melody of nature amidst the noise of the lexicon and, picking out that melody as one picks out a motif, it then surrenders itself to improvisation on that theme... Fantasticating, poetry stumbles onto nature.' It is easy to call poetry a natural force. This is one of the Romantic stylizations, and it is the basis of the bow-wow poetics (Lautgebärden) of the Positivists. Pasternak, however, gives us at least the illusion of things speaking for themselves. Marina Cvetaeva, having (as she tells us) only the poems of My Sister Life and not the gnomic similes of Pasternak's prose to go on, gives us, among the "helpless splashes" of her essay, images of Pasternak as "a shower of light", a cliff, an explosion, a draft of air, a horse.8 The poet, of course, tells us as much: Ά - CBeT. Ά τ ε Μ η 3HaMeHHT, H t o caM 6 p o c a i o Tern».

(I am light. I'm known by the fact That I can cast a shadow.) But we learn from the justifications that this is not the hyperbole of Majakovskij (a colossal fountain), for whom the poetic act was a war with the law of gravity. In Pasternak, the theme absorbs the lyrical hero; or, put another way, his existence is generated in the language; the language determines his character, not the other way around. In the above lines - from a later revision of a poem in Over the Barriers the image arises from a hyper-literal reading of the verb brosaf ("cast, throw"). It is chosen, not by the poet's will, but by the sensitivity of the context. Here there emerges a pathos in the exposure of the verbal device, in the discovery of its comic ineffectuality; it is the Majakovskian pathos of overstatement. But where Majakovskij's self-image strives toward the one figure of the Colossus, Pasternak's disperses itself in Creation. Majakovskij would straddle the narrow world; Pasternak is awed by its inexhaustibility. Poetry is not a voice, but an ear. It is characteristic of Pasternak to • ' 8

Pasternak, B. L., Soiinenija, Vol. I l l (Ann Arbor, 1961), p. 152. Ibid., p. 155. Cvetaeva, M., op. cit.

DICTATION FROM NATURE

45

leave the poet out of his "Definition of Poetry", a short poem from My Sister Life, which will do quite well to demonstrate the poetics of the sponge: 3 τ ο - K p y r o HajiHBinHHca cbhct. 3 t o - mejncaHBe onaBjieHHHx jh>ähhok. 3 τ ο - noHb, jieaeHHmaa jihct. 3 t o - AByx conoBbeB noeAHHOK. 3 T O - CJiaflKHH 3arjioxuiHH r o p o x . 3 τ ο - CJTC3H BceneHHOH Β jionaTKax. 3 τ ο - c nyjn>TOB η φ π ε ϋ τ -

4>urapo

HH3BepraeTCH rpaflOM Ha rpaaiey.

Bee, hto hohh TaK BaacHO cbicKaTb Ha rjiyöoKHx KynajieHUWx aoHbax, H 3Be3ayflOHecTHAO ca^Ka Ha Tpenemymnx ΜοκρΒίχ jiaflom>ax. Iljiome .aocoK β Boae - ayxoTa. HeGocBoa 3aBajmjica ολβχοιο, 3 t h m 3Be3flaM κ jimiy 6 xoxoTait, A h BcejieHHaa - Mecro rjiyxoe.

(That is a steeply suffused whistle. That is the crackle of squeezed ice-chunks. That is night chilling a leaf. That is a duel of two nightingales. That is the sweet smothered peas. That is the tears of all creation in blades. That is Figaro, from the wings and flutes, Rushes down like hail into the flower-bed. Everything that night must find On the deep swimming bottoms, And bring a star to the fish-pond On its trembling watery palms. Closeness flatter than boards in water. The sky collapsed like an alder, It would become these stars to guffaw, But the universe is a deaf place.) A n intimidating definition indeed: the long string of eto's seems to give us something technical - like a set of simultaneous equations. This is a capricious place to start, but the questions bob up: are there enough for a solution? are they consistent?

46

DICTATION FROM NATURE

On our first trip through this poem, we will probably take it as a responsible definition, whose terms are better defined than the definiendum, "poetry". We will be allowing latitude to the poet's allegorical habits and so will assume that the demonstrative pronouns, eto, will all refer to the definiendum, "poetry", and that the right hand side of the "equations" are metaphors. Then doubts will arise. We will remember that this syntax is usually reserved for cataloging different objects and distinguishing between them, and that the poet might after all have used the unambiguous personal pronoun ona ("it") instead of eto. We begin to suspect a definition by negation, a list of things poetry is not. Because the first two quatrains form a thematic and syntactic unit, I shall, in what follows, speak of them as the octet. Until the end of this octet, at which time a dramatic climax is reached in Figaro's unseemly descent into the flower-bed, the poem is made up of a list of heavily qualified nouns, few of which are very clear in their reference. Furthermore, there is hardly a word that is free of ambiguity. Definitions, after all, have no point whatever unless we are all willing to make certain lexical agreements. One might accept an easy reading here, though, and say that the former student of Hermann Cohen is, as poets are wont to do, pulling philosophy's beard. I intend to take the poem more seriously than that. Our object is to find out how poetry competes with philosophy, how it thinks, or rather how language itself - with the poet only improvising - generates what we would like to call, contra mundum, a cognitive construction. I will first list the outstanding lexical ambiguities by line: (1) rtalMijsja, from the verb nalit'sja: (a) passive of nalit\ "to fill up (as a cup)", but especially also as an intransitive in idioms like glaza nalilis' slezami ("eyes filled with tears"); (b) by extension, "to swell, ripen", of fruit; (c) a "root" meaning: "to be poured onto". This possibility is pressed upon us by the presence of the adverb kruto, itself somewhat ambiguous: "steeply", but also "peremptorily". The translation "abruptly" might best preserve the ambiguity. (2) söelkarie: not only "crackling" as of ice underfoot or nut-shells, but also "trilling", of birds, sdavlennyj: "squeezed", but also "subdued, weak" in govorit' sdavlennym golosom, "to speak in a weak voice", said of an ill person. (3) ledenjascij: "turning into ice", a bookish meaning, which is apt here; but the leaf is anthropomorphized by the more usual extended meaning, "to chill" with terror. (5) zagloxsij: of vegetation "overgrown, neglected", but like the

DICTATION FROM NATURE

47

English "smothered" easily restored to the non-extended sense. This ambiguity becomes even more explicit in the final line of the poem in the phrase mesto gluxoe, "a deaf place". (6) lopatki: "shoulder-blades" normally, but the author footnotes it: "Lopatki - pods of the pea", a regional usage. My translation is a weak effort to retain the equivocal reference which the poet's note cannot eliminate. Finally, the verb in the last quatrain zavalilsja suggests "falling" in several senses (especially that of falling behind something, thereby getting lost), but it also suggests "smothered (as with work), overburdened". Lastly, "about to fall, leaning". The reading that I will offer for this poem depends on the notion that the particular sort of polysemia that we have here is not a weakness of the "definition", but an essential feature of the poem's intent. There is, I believe, a correct reading: it is not, as we might expect if we feel impelled to choose among meanings, a case of equivocal definition. The ambiguities are forced upon us by their dubious contexts and, moreover, a peculiar consistency is precipitated out by the simple process of listing them. Because we will need the machinery later for other purposes, we will try to see the technique of this poem in the light of a general theory of the trope, particularly metaphor. I am saying that what we need is the permission to take all the meanings at the same time: the poem is not a riddle. When Figaro takes his plunge at the end of the octet, it is both the notes of the opera and a corporal barber that are compared to hail. When Mallarme refers to sounds as une pluie aride,9 we want to know that the "tenor" of the metaphor is "sounds", but we are not going to surrender the oxymoron because we have that knowledge. The figure is valuable first for its being a figure. But what really leads us to investigate the polysemic construction of this poem as a part of the metaphorical order of things is the effect of abstraction which we observe here to be carried along by highly concrete images. The poem seems to speak of a few "concepts": sounds, vegetation, stifiedness, falling, liquids, frozen things, all recurring in various concrete forms, yet none entering into a sequential statement to form an argument or coherent theme, at least in the lyrico-dramatic

• Pasternak, in the poem "Lilies-of-the-Valley" (1927), gives us the same figure as a simile for that flower, using the semantic antagonism to combine the droplike abundance of the racemes with the papery texture of the flowers themselves.

48

DICTATION FROM NATURE

sense of the word. We will pause later on the way the syntax of this poem also works to give this effect. It is a still-life, which deceives: a glistening goblet becomes a pendant eye dripping on the clustered fruit, and the tears are opaque and still, frozen. Roman Jakobson has remarked that "anything sequent is a simile". He is speaking, I believe, of the weakest kind of sequence, that of words following one another, but on the canvas and in this poem it is merely contiguity. The painter lets a lifeless rabbit dangle over the edge of the linen. It belongs in the kitchen, but he needs the dark grape of its eye in his composition. The metaphor is in the pigments which the rabbit shares with something in the bowl beside it. Jakobson makes the point clearer: "In poetry, where similarity is superinduced upon contiguity, any metonymy is slightly metaphorical and any metaphor has a metonymical tint". 10 The metonymy is in the abstraction of something, call it a property, from the terms of the metaphor; the metaphor is in the embodiment of the abstractions in concrete things. Ambiguity, like metaphor, gives, as the phrase goes, "two ideas for one". Commenting on Shakespeare's style, Pasternak puts it in ominous terms: "Metaphorism is the natural consequence of the brevity of man's life and of the immensity - which took so long to plan - of his tasks". 11 The ambiguities which I have listed above become metaphors in the sense that they bear a burden which their immediate context rejects, but which is picked up by another context and accepted as its own. It is as if the words were so saturated with meaning that the context spills a surplus: super-saturation. We would like to take seriously what Wittgenstein seems to intend as mockery: "Als wäre die Bedeutung ein Dunstkreis, den das Wort mitbringt und in jederlei Verwendung hinübernimmt". 12 The ambiguities are, none of them, equivocations because each meaning settles to rest in an explicit form somewhere in the poem. In the first line, a whistle is said to be "suffused" (nalivsijsja svist). It would be wrong simply to call this a synaesthetic metaphor (which it is) and think no more about it. What makes it difficult is not only the polysemy of the participle but also the generality of the noun. We are sent scurrying for familiar contexts. It will be no trouble finding some containing 10 Jakobson, R., in Style in Language, ed. T. A. Sebeok (New York-London, 1960), p. 370. 11 Pasternak, Soiinenija, III, p. 194. 12 Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations (Oxford, 1953), p. 48.

DICTATION FROM NATURE

49

"eyes" and "tears", and we will pick up a few well-ripened fruits and vegetables along the way; it will be possible to see water or wine pouring "steeply" from a vessel and the same time gurgling up around our feet, as in the bottom of a boat. Later on, we will find the tears themselves in an explicitly vegetable context, providing we accept what seems at first merely a precious note about lopatki. While we cannot rule out the pathetic picture of an anthropomorphic "creation" weeping silently into some unresponsive back, we can be sure that these are the real lacrimae rerum, the tears not of human affairs but of a voiceless universe. I would not like, however, to lose that human back: there is personification throughout the poem, and there are echoes of Majakovskij's backbone-flute in the next line. That ought to be enough justification for comparing the ripe pea (especially wild varieties) with the lumpy curve of the human spine. It is the image of ripeness, which was so inconspicuously presented to us by nalivsijsja in the first line, that completes the multiple metaphor. But, one objects, the participle referred originally to a whistle. Aren't we scrambling the words into another poem? Shouldn't we listen to that "suffused whistle"? I first took this line to be a very accurate description of the Doppler Effect. I would still insist on that reading: the adverb kruto helps, suggesting as it does falling and ascending. My gloss would be: "A sound rapidly but gradually filling a container". But it is a sound that we can associate with a bird, and this is where the ambiguity of Söelkarie in the second line picks up one motif, again and still obliquely. The motif of birdsounds is accompanied by that of suppressed human sounds, and the two merge dramatically at the end of the octet. Although there is nothing to prevent us from thinking of the whistle as that of a balloon or a rifle-bullet, such contexts are gradually stifled as the ambiguities converge. The resolution in Figaro's fall is certainly inconclusive. The images of the octet remain "sunken", in Wells' terminology, that is, "Both terms of the figure are cryptic".13 The vehicular terms are the materials of the improvisation and become more specific, but the tenor remains in doubt. Meanwhile, the dramatic structure of the octet results not only from the interplay and convergence of imagic motifs, but also from the sound patterns. Alliteration in / in the first quatrain merges with that in s in the second, at the beginning of which emerges a new sound motif in the formula glo/gorö-, which is briefly suppressed, then devel13

Wells, Henry W., Poetic Imagery (New York, 1924), p. 77.

50

DICTATION FROM NATURE

oped exclusively at the end: Figaro/ Nizvergäetsja grädom na grjädku. I have already remarked on the equivocal quality of the pronoun eto. In its last occurrence (line seven) it becomes distinctly amphibolous: the reader will want to put a full stop after Figaro to make the construction consistent with the preceding predicate nominative forms. There is no punctuation, but an enjambment: we are hurled into a finite construction. The verb of which Figaro becomes the subject is, by the way, the first finite verb in the poem. The Russian sentence is not clearly a solecism, since one may take this last eto to be no longer the demonstrative pronoun but now an emphatic particle. The translation does not show this, but I think that the lines should be read as an anacoluthon anyway. The change in construction signals other amphibolies to come. Thus vse, at the beginning of the third quatrain, will be taken as a summation of the predicates of the octet (eto-vse, "that is all, everything"). Meanwhile, it begins a new construction which is itself puzzling. The second infinitive, donesti ("bring"), seems properly to be, like the first, a complement of tak vazno ("so important", "must "in the translation); but the appearance of a new object, zvezdu ("star") destroys the grammatical parallelism of the sentence, makes the second verb sequential rather than parallel to the first (this also from the logic of reference: retrieval as a consequence of finding), and thus creates the illusion of a finite, narrative construction. We will note also the false parallelism between the second and fourth lines (na glubokix kupalennyx dorCjax and na trepescuscix mokryx ladon'jax). Finally, in the fourth stanza, we have a statement whose antecedent is again in doubt: it is a certain "closeness" that seems again to stand, like vie and eto for "poetry" or for its antonyms, or yet for its rivals. There follows an odd lapse into a true narrative, but now in the past tense. This line (nebosvod zavalilsja oVxojii) is the one really equivocal line in the poem. "The vault of the sky collapsed like an alder" may be best in view of Pasternak's penchant for literalizing poeticisms {nebosvod is the "canopy of heaven") and the association of the verb with demolition. This reading also supports the motif of Figaro's fall. But the instrumental noun is amphibolous and may suggest not only the comparison but also agency: "The sky was blocked up, obscured by an alder". Such a reading, which is hardly respectful of grammar (it substitutes nebosvod zavaleri), seems nevertheless to be preferred by Russian speakers on whom I have tested this poem. It acquires some justification from the motif of suffocation and from the reference to stars in the next

DICTATION FROM NATURE

51

line; but this is to miss the metaphor stars-hail and to be more condescending to Pasternak's grammar than is necessary. The penultimate line says that the stars should laugh, and, we are insisting: at themselves. The final line is the one grammatically straightforward statement of the poem. It seems to be introduced in opposition to all that has gone before by the plebeian conjunction an, "but, in fact". Now the object of this chapter has been to test a poem for its justifications with respect to the question of logical coherence, to find out whether it says anything that is not negated by carelessness or design. Ambiguity is usually regarded as at least imprecision, perhaps as illogic. Empson says: "My seven types, so far as they are not merely a convenient framework, are intended as stages of advancing logical disorder".14 If this poem is disorderly, it goes no further than his second stage: "There are alternatives, even in the mind of the author, not only different emphases as in the first type; but an ordinary good reading can extract one resultant from them".15 Double reference, as we find it throughout this poem, has the peculiar effect of making a comparison between the possible designata. It can do this only by keeping us from choosing an exclusive referent, from resolving the meanings into a single reading which is not metaphorical, that is which is not a suspension of both. It is the context which tells us that no single meaning will do. By its very strangeness, the context sustains our uncertainty. Instead of a linear metaleptic chain,16 we get a pair of figures which come together, in the form of a caret, in the abstraction which is the real motif. However we interpret the sixth line, as "tears of creation in shoulder-blades" or "... in peapods", the motif of confinement/ frustration is still a resultant. The recognition of a commonplace in mesto gluxoe at the very end of the poem comes as a shock. We are now prepared to take it as a nullification of the idiomatic figure "an isolated, remote place", "deaf" only in the sense that it is out of earshot. As with the stock poeticism nebosvod, the metaphorical order is overthrown by the literal. But the opposite is the case in stanza three, where the inertia of a banal narrative, at first seeming redolent with pathetic fallacies, on being disturbed by amphibolous syntax becomes the vehicle of a brilliantly observant metaphor: palms of the hands are compared to clouds.17 14

Empson, W., Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd ed. (London, 1956), p. 48. Ibid. Cf. Brooke-Rose, C., A Grammar of Metaphor (London, 1958), p. 56. 17 There are echoes of the Apollonic cult here, of sacrifice, of Pushkin's famous "Poet", the bridge to which might be Shishkov's lines, "And he upraised his trembling "

18

52

DICTATION FROM NATURE

Although we have implied that this is an abstract poem, at least that the verbal process has been one of metonymic abstraction, manifest on several occasions in the reification of root-associations, the latest observation is an insistence on the sensory importance of the images. Here we find another reason for wanting that sky in the final quatrain to collapse. It may be that the reader will want to go out and fell an alder to see whether it sounds like hail falling into a flower-bed. Let him do so. I think that we will then agree on the presence of the metaphor stars-hail. Then this frozen rain becomes more than a casual simile. It is now a metaphor for the whole poem. The words, like air choked by the dew-point, are saturated with meanings that their own context cannot contain, and they spill out as precipitation over the rest of the poem. It is a meteorological demonstration, an allegory of a physical process. Finally, in answer to a question raised long ago: the pronouns eto do not refer to "poetry", but to nature. The definition is a negative one: the predicates refer to what poetry is not. Poetry is not opposed to all this; itself a form of precipitation, it is nature's rival.

palms unto the gods": A oh Bi/jCBa.! K 6oraM mpeneufyufue d.wnu («K MeTejuimo»). There is a similar image in Pasternak's "Blank Verses": "From under the palms of the wet clouds": H3-noa jiaaoHeft mokpmx oöjkikob, ...

V. SOUND AS THEME

HtoflejiaTbcTpanmoit KpacoTe, npHceemeä Ha CKaMwo CHpeHH, Korea η BnpaML· He xpacTb flerefi? TaK B03HHKSIOT Π0Λ03ρβΗΜ.1 Poetry and nature are the two terms of a metaphor, the ground of which is creativity. It is more than a simile: they can take each other's place in any construction. Cvetaeva has the grammar of the verb "to write" arguing this point: Many have been writing, and well (Axmatova first), about the self in nature ... eclipsing nature; they have written about nature in the self (likening, being likened to); they have written about events in nature, her separate images and hours; but however strikingly they have written, it is always about her; no one has written nature herself... But lo: Pasternak ...2 "Nature" is the direct object: one writes it as one writes poetry. "Definition of Poetry" demonstrates this metaphor perhaps too well to qualify as a workable poetics: the poet's hand becomes a stylus and the poem a graph of a meteorological process. The old lyric yawp is absent here. There is no banal Angst seeking the right page in the anthology. But the poet's inveterate anthropomorphism can be deceptive: MHpo3flaio>e - jimin. crpacTH pa3p$mi»i,

HejioeeiecKHM cepzweM HaKonjieHHoit. (Creation is but the categories of passion Stored up by the human heart.) 1

2

What can it do, this terrible beauty Of a lilac that takes a seat on the parkbench, When you can't come right out and steal children? Thus suspicions arise. Cvetaeva, op. eit., p. 365.

54

SOUND AS THEME

This is a creation that is, in the preceding line, "Boiling in white cries". One of Pasternak's translators, typically, misses the whole point when he personalizes the "white cries" and makes the lines Romantic rather than Metaphysical: Gardens, ponds and palings, the creation Foam-flecked with the whiteness of our weeping, Are nothing but categories of passion That the human heart has had in keeping.® Russian poets are used to this kind of abuse, and it gives us critics a mission, but it also makes one wonder about the success of the poetics which could make it possible. The poem for which the above lines are a conclusion is called "Definition of Creativity" and is a study of the microcosm. The first vehicle of the metaphor is the game of chess animated by a conceit involving Beethoven and his bust as a knight (horse, in Russian chess terminology) riding roughshod over the pawns. The foam which Bowra finds is probably from the horse. Meanwhile, Wagner picks up the motif in the characters of Tristan and Isolde, whose entrance cue is probably nothing more than the opposition between black and white shared by the chess game and the sails of Tristan's tragic fall. This leads us to a cue provided by the author in Safe Conduct·. When we imagine that in Tristan, Romeo and Juliet, and other monuments a powerful passion is being described, we underestimate the content. Their theme is wider than this powerful theme. Their theme is the theme of power.4 The final conclusion develops out of the exuberant hunger for power of the images themselves. The overstatement is not the eruption of some mushy sincerity, but a real porridge of verbs and nouns that overflows the pot. The chessboard is a world projected from the dimensions of the grand passion of those greatest emblems, Tristan and Isolde; the poet is simply drawing some conclusions about the relative power of the men on the game's diagram, their moves. This is not to say that the poet's language does not reach into more general areas of human experience. We do insist that the reader understand first that the word razrjady ("categories, ranks, rows-and-columns") bears the resumption of the microcosmic chessboard, that it is not whatever we want to make of it, but a "bound" term sensitive to the poem's overall metaphor. One may generalize about the poet's emotions only after he has pondered the context in which they are generated. Indeed, 3 4

Bowra, M., The Creative Experiment (London, 1949), p. 134. Pasternak, B. L., Soöinenija, II (Ann Arbor, 1961), p. 243.

SOUND AS THEME

55

we will probably find that the emotions are not new, even if they are susceptible to misunderstanding. Victor Erlich observes that what seems at first to be the old stance of the lyricist becomes in Pasternak's love poetry something else: "It is something much less tangible or personal something akin to cosmic ecstasy, to an 'oceanic feeling', as a Freudian would put it, ..." 5 It is the pathos of Faust's "Wo fass' ich dich, unendliche Natur?" It is a meta-theme that displaces the apparent theme, the whole of creation replacing its landscapes. But it is most of all the poetic act displacing its own result, the poetic impulse becoming thematic, that demonstrates the power of the single theme of creativity. The poem "Oars at Rest" is a splendidly sustained and completed illustration: CJI05KA

BECJIA

JIOAKa KOJIOTHTCH Β COHHOii rpyflH, HBM HABHCJM, uejiyior Β KJHOHHUM, Β JIOKTH, Β yKJnOHHHBI - Ο, ΠΟΓΟΛΗ, 3 Τ Ο BE^B MOXCET c o BCHKHM CJIYNHTBCA! 3 T H M Bejn> Β n e c H e TemaTCH Bee.

3 τ ο Be/it 3Hawr - neneji cnpeHeBbiö, PocKoun. KpomeHOH poManncn Β poce, ryßbi Η ry6w Ha 3ΒΒ3,ζρ>Ι BHMeHHBaTb! 3 τ θ BCflb 3 H a i H T - oGlWTb HeÖOCBOfl,

PyKH cnjiecTH B K p y r TepaKjia rpoMa^noro, 3 τ ο Beflb 3HaiHT - BeKa HanpojieT HOHH Ha mejncaHbe cjiaBOK n p o M a T b i e a T b ! (A boat throbs in the sleeping breast. Willows overhung, kiss collarbones, Elbows and rowlocks - O, wait, After all, this could happen to anyone! For everyone is amused by this in a song. For this implies - the ash of a lilac, Largess of chopped camomile in dew, Lips and lips got in trade for stars. For this implies - embracing the sky, Entwining huge Hercules in your arms, For this implies - for ages on end Squandering nights on the trilling of warblers!) 6

Erlich, V., The Double Image (Baltimore, 1964), p. 138.

SOUND AS THEME

56

This little gem has undergone several revisions: a sign that it is one of the poems for which Pasternak retained his respect. The version given above appeared in My Sister Life and the published collections. An earlier version was printed in the almanac Vesennij salon poetov in 1918.® The first version differs from the second in the following lines: Line one: ozernoj instead of sonnoj; Line five: pesnja set off in commas instead of ν pesne; Line six: sorox instead of pepel; Line seven: öeremux instead of romaSki; Line eight: prjadi instead of the second guby; The final line is: Noci na zvezdy, kak carstva promatyvaf, "Squandering your nights, like kingdoms, on the stars". The third version, that of 1957 for the projected Collected Works, differs from the second only in the second quatrain and the final line. The second quatrain is as follows: 3 t o Be,m> Tax ... 3το Bee nycTaicH ... 3TO Beat 3HaHHT - pyicoio HecMejioio Eejioii poMauiKH nyuiHTL· jienecTKH, TporaTb ryöaMH cupeiib noMepTBejiyio. (For this is ... this is all so silly ... For this means - with hesitant hand Fluffing the petals of white camomile, Touching the numb lilac with your lips.) The last line becomes: Ha cojioBbeB cocToaiiba npoMaTHBan.! (To squander your substance on nightingales!) The change from sorox ("rustle") to pepel ("ash") is a shift from auditory to visual imagery and, though there is a certain synaesthetic suggestiveness in the use of the attributive form "lilac rustle" rather than "rustle of lilac" (ignored in our translation so as not to mislead with the sense of "lilac" as a color), it is a change from literal to metaphorical imagery. Sorox figures in the sound design, while pepel represents a sacrifice of most of the consonantal (here onomatopoeic) texture for the sake perhaps of the translatory design in e. Comparing the three versions of the third line of the second quatrain, we observe that the first change (ceremuxa, "bird-cherry", Prunus padus, to romaski, "camomile") is radical enough botanically to suggest that 6

Pasternak, Soiinenija, I, p. 442.

SOUND AS THEME

57

it was done entirely for the sake of the fricative $ to replace the affricate 6. On the other hand, the third version changes the whole image while retaining the flower of the second version. The third version evidently sacrifices the sound pattern for the sake of greater verbal precision, eliminating the vague roskos', "luxury", and the irrelevant culinary associations (as well as the incorrect accent) of kroSenij, "chopped". The change in the final line of the poem between the first and second versions needs little comment, since the earlier line was so obviously repetitious of the last line of the preceding stanza. But one feels that this line is still a problem, a weak line. The replacement in the final version of noci, "nights", with sostojan'ja ("substance" in the sense of the father-son economics lesson, "fortune"), a distinctly prosaic introduction, is consistent with a tendency in Pasternak's later style. But in contrast is the substitution of "nightingale" for the humbler "warbler". These two changes are enlightening for the theme of the poem, which is brought out more explicitly in the later version: "Squandering your substance on nightingales" opposes the prosaic world of money and getting on to the world of the poetic imagination, which is symbolized in a traditional manner by the stock poeticism "nightingale". Concerning this theme a curious problem arises. This poem reminded one writer, Tynjanov, of Fet,7 whose music is certainly audible in the first two lines. Moreover, as Tynjanov observed, the poems of My Sister Life have one aspect that looks like "an intimate conversation": It is no accident that My Sister Life is in essence a diary containing conscientious designations of places ... and necessary (first for the author and then for the reader as well) notes at the end of sections: "These diversions were cut short when, on leaving, she surrendered her mission to a substitute" or "It was during that summer that we left from Paveletskij Station".8 The sections are titled - giving the illusion of the diarylike narrative, as if the poems were the fragments of a unified experience, a record of the hours of a love affair. The section containing "Oars at Rest" is entitled "Diversions for My Beloved". The book has frequent references to a feminine "thou", but, strangely, the six poems in this section lack any such mention: the pronoun ty does not appear once (though it is implied in the imperative of the third line of this poem). One critic was bold enough to make this generalization about "Oars at Rest": One summer night the poet and his beloved are out rowing. The oars are ' 8

Tynjanov, op. cit., p. 568. Ibid., p. 565.

58

SOUND AS THEME

drawn in and they let themselves drift along the banks ... The impelling, rhythmical slaps against the boat reverberate in their breasts, become as one with their heartbeats. Finally it is as if it were not the heart but the boat that was throbbing in the breast. ... His fondness of ellipse [sic] is also prominent here: certain parts of the situation are skipped over, and these the reader must fill in for himself. It is quite possible to imagine, then, that the poet's beloved, full of the harmony and roundness of the moment, speaks of no one ever before having experienced such a feeling, no one ever before having loved so. It is this that leads the poet to his grating reply...9 Up to a point, the reader may imagine whatever he wants. But the necessity of his interpolations is another question. The terse, multileveled poetic structure must not be confused with the truly elliptic utterance. Furthermore, there is such a thing as thematic ellipsis, the unspoken, the break with its three dots which we ought to leave alone. Then there is the question about how much scenery one needs to read a poem in. To make some insertions and even substitutions (I have to put Prunus pennsylvanica in place of P. padus) seems a necessity; but that necessity begins at a point beyond an obligatory reading, which ought to be the same for all of us. Thus when Nilsson says "... the reader must fill in for himself' certain supposed omissions, we wonder why. Is there a reading for which the poem is coherent? If so, isn't it preferable to the one given? The scene may be as described by Nilsson, but what he infers from the scene is hardly the poem at hand. If one reads the poem, he discovers that it is first of all about itself. A single metaphor arising from an "accident", a fortuitous coincidence of sounds, leads to another, which develops the first and leads to further associations. This might, in a different poem, have remained the means of expression: the expression, perhaps, of emotions for which we would need to supply a rowboat with a pair of lovers; but in this poem the means become the subject of the poem. The first image is embodied in a reflective symmetry: lötka kalöt(abba) and this leads to a second: ivy navisli. The metaphor of the first phrase is based on the idiom serdce kolotitsja ("the heart throbs") with a substitution of "boat" for "heart". If we observe the order of the images as it exists in the poem, we must admit that the strongest justification for this substitution is the sound design. But there are other reasons for insisting on this. • Nilsson, Nils Ake, "Life as Ecstasy and Sacrifice: Two Poems by Boris Pasternak", reprint from Scando-Slavica, Tomus V (Copenhagen [no date]), pp. 180-181.

SOUND AS THEME

59

The overhanging willows come to us in the past tense, navisli, while all other verbs in the poem are in the present tense or are infinitives. This is strange. These willows, moreover, behave in an almost embarrassingly affected way: "touching" becomes "kissing", a typical Romantic conceit. But the past tense is a little obvious: perhaps it is a signal. If we look more closely at the sound pattern of this line (ivy navisli, celüjut ν kljucicy), we see that there is hardly a sound that does not figure in a repetition. The repetition of i at each end of the line and of ljut (contracted from lujut) in adjacent syllables in the middle of the line creates strong reflective symmetry. The second half of the line is also a reflection {ice plus lujut, then again but in opposite order). As a result, the line as a whole consists of two reflective symmetries embedded in one larger reflection: abba-acca. In the third line, the sounds of the first and second lines are compressed in ν lokti, ν ukljitciny. Then the sound design disintegrates in the second half of the line. The first sign of the suspicion which invokes the second voice with its prosy disclaimer is the impertinent past tense verb navisli, which has no reason to be there except for its sounds. It is, by its very presence, a sign that sense is being sacrificed to the sound design. Even after the aposiopesis, there are instances of formal inconsistency which serve to develop the theme: one is the adoption of dactylic rhymes in the second stanza. We note that the rhymes of the first stanza are masculine-feminine alternating, while those of the rest of the poem are masculine-dactylic alternating. There is another inconsistency in the rhythmic disturbance of the first two lines of the second quatrain by the dropping of a syllable in the second foot of each line (Etlm ved' ν pesne tesätsjä vse.\ ttö ved' zndclt - pepel sirinevyj, ...). In no other lines is the dactylic meter so altered; however, modulation of metrical stresses occurs in lines four, possibly five, six, nine, and eleven, that is in those lines beginning with eto or etim. Except in the first instance, in line four, whether there is modulation or not would seem to depend on how the reader wants to allocate his emphasis. Modulation is a very restricted operation in trisyllabic measures because it produces normally intolerable strings of unaccented syllables. Line four, however, has at least one, and probably two, modulations: obligatorily on the second foot and probably - under pressure from the masculine rhyme of the preceding line and the possible weak emphasis on eto - on the first foot as well. However we scan the line, it is quite prosaic. One might even prefer

60

SOUND AS THEME

a reading which gives it only one stress: Eto ved' moiet so vsjdkim slucifsja. Returning to the poem's sound patterns, we find that the prosaic interruption is followed by new symmetries, which become gradually richer up to the second foot of the last line in quatrain two. In the first line of this stanza, it is as if the poet were resisting the hypnotic music, but finds himself unable to overcome the simplest symmetry, the translatory repetition in stressed e: ... ν pesne teiatsja vsi. There is even a little reflection here in the inversion -es- -si at each end of the phrase, and one might suppose that the dropped syllable represents an attempt to disrupt the metrical balance between the feet. The second line is another try at prose, then a fresh start, but again the repeating e's (pepel sirenevyj). Then the poet gives up for a moment to give us a densely repetitive pattern in line three: Röskof kroSinoj romäski ν rose. Here, the syllable ro- is repeated at about equal intervals through the line, at each end in the form ros-. (We ignore the qualitative reduction of the vowel o-as does the poet in practice, it seems.) In the middle of the line is a dilative-reflective symmetry, kroS-romaSk-, which is preceded by the contraction koS. The result is a highly reflective pattern like those of the first quatrain. Here too, the patterns are so dense that they tend toward identity of their parts: toward the pun. (Compare, in the first stanza: lodka j lokti, kljucicy j ukljuciny.) It is then natural for the symmetries to spill into the last line of the quatrain as simply the repetition of the same word, guby. The symmetries of the final stanza are not extensive, but they are clustered: obnjai' nebosvod is a dilative-reflective type, as is GeraWa gromadnogo in the second line, and Ruki splesti vkrug ... is of echoicreflective form. The clustering of patterns brings them into relative prominence and, like the repetition of the word guby, points toward the intense self-consciousness of the poet in relation to his sounds. Before turning to a direct consideration of the poem's theme, we ought to question why the poet changes his rhyme scheme after the first stanza. The fact that Pasternak, in many other poems, may marry the masculine with the feminine or the feminine with the dactyl in a single rhyme is irrelevant here simply because no such mixing occurs in this poem. Here there is a very obvious shift from a masculine-feminine to a masculinedactylic scheme. Mixtures of the three types of rhyme are very rare in Russian verse10 as it is, not to mention such radical formal changes as we have here. It is sufficient justification for Pasternak's usage to note 10

Tomasevskij, Β. V., Teorija literatury (Moscow-Leningrad, 1927), p. 108.

SOUND AS THEME

61

that the change of form, along with the dropped syllables in the second stanza, signals the emergence of the second, "anti-lyrical" voice. However, one may also observe that the dactylic rhyme, like the trisyllabic measure generally, is associated in the Russian poetic tradition with a drift toward conversational rhythms.11 The appearance of this rhyme coincides with the word vyminivät' ("swap, get in trade"), which stands out as a prosaism coming directly after the rich imagery and symmetry in the middle of stanza two. In summary, and simply on the basis of a heroically formal reading, "Oars at Rest" seems to be a sort of duel between two voices, one lulling and musical, the other disruptive and prosaic. Here again, as in "Definition of Poetry", a lot seems to depend on the reference of the word eto, forced so insistently on us by the practical voice - which tries three times to tell us what it means. Our formal analysis suggests what eto really refers to: the poem itself, or rather the first part of the first quatrain. Meanwhile, as in "Definition of Poetry", the language is not used solely for its formal demonstrativeness, as a gestic device. Images are built and speak through the patterns; the patterns are not opaque. And what we find in the imagery is not ellipsis at all. The poem is, on the contrary, complete and self-contained. The earliest version had ozernoj, "lake" (adj.), instead of sonnoj, "sleepy, sleeping": odd, by the way, because the extra syllable then gave the first line a paeon rather than a dactyl in its second foot. This first variant does suggest that the original metaphor was of a lake as a sleeping person. The change blurs the image, but does not lose it; nor does it lose the covert metaphor boat-heart, whose vehicle is the verb kolotitsja (see above). The blurring of the image, as a matter of fact, has the great virtue of making the poem's dominant anthropomorphic image a two-way, that is reflexive, comparison: the animation of the lake is now complemented by the deanimation of the poetic "I". This metaphor is extended further in the root-metaphor kljucicy-ukljuciny ("collarbones-rowlocks"). When one translator makes "shoulders" out of kljuiicy,12 he is not only sacrificing (to what?) the root-metaphor, he is losing the admittedly inaccurate visual image. (Inaccurate because the clavicle is brought in, for the sake of the sound of its Russian name, to replace the glenoid cavity of the scapula, where the humerus, or upper arm-bone, is actually articulated to the trunk.) 11 la

TomaSevskü, Β. V., Stix i jazyk (Moscow-Leningrad, 1959), pp. 113-114. The Poetry of Boris Pasternak. Trans, by George Reavey (New York, 1959), p. 108.

62

SOUND AS THEME

Now if the reader is supposed to supply a "scene", it seems that he ought to keep the author's props anyway. So far, we have one recumbent person. The translators and commentators seem to be unasinous in giving us two, apparently because the poet shouts "Wait!" at about the point where the anatomy lesson gets a little too precious. They evidently think that imperatives have to be directed at someone else, but of course they also want the love-scene because, for them, poetry is gelatin and not bones. Why "Wait!"? First of all, the whole metaphor got started from a mild little word-play in the title: sloza vesla is a rowing term, but the gerund sloia, from sloSit', "to fold", etc., is - according to Usakov's dictionary - reserved solely for the expression sloza ruki, which is used only in the extended sense, "doing nothing, taking it easy". The metaphor between arms and oars then comes originally from an "incorrect" grammatical form which has to be resolved by substituting ruki ("arms") for the actual noun, vesla ("oars"). After all this, we should be prepared to take the lips and stars, not as the shabby mise en scene of a sticky love poem, but as a further development of the "realistic" metaphorism of the cognitive imagination. The repetition "lips and lips" now comes to us as the lazy ripples of the lake savoring the shore, and the stars are their reflection in the water. The "Hercules" embraced in the third quatrain will be the constellation. Might there not be another "level"? My insistence has been on thematic precedence, not on the exclusiveness of a particular reading. We have already seen how Pasternak makes his words work, and there is no reason to exclude the mythical strongman from stanza three if he does not knock over the imagery. More specifically, "the theme is power", and it is not only the power of the imagery and music - embodied in the hyperbolic deanimating metaphor of the poem - but also the extraordinary power of the poet. So, if Hercules is going to be the poet, and if he is bound to be embraced, then maybe there is a young lady there after all. The question is, does she say anything?

VI. THE SOUND AS IMAGE

The word becomes thematic in the poetry of Pasternak. There is a turning inward: the poem becomes a Klein bottle: it has no inside or outside. One ought to be very cautious when trying to fill such a container. The dangerous power which is the subject of "Oars at Rest" is the power to perform miracles, to make words do things that they are not supposed to do, and to disrupt the orders and phyla of everyone's world. The possibility of metaphor is a miracle. The discovery of a single likeness leads to other discoveries and then to a new world that can't keep still: ILIHTHHK pacKajiHJica, Η yjmm>I JIO6 Bbiji CMyrji, η Ha Heöo rjiaaeji HcnoAJioÖM EyjibixcHHK, A EETEP, KaK JIOAOHHHK, rpe6 Πο jmnaM. Η Bee 3το ÖHJIH nofloöba. (The flagstone glowed, and the street's brow Was swart, and the cobblestone glowered At the sky, and the wind, like a boatman, rowed Over the lindens. And these were all likenesses.) ("Marburg") We have enough evidence now to assert that Pasternak's sounds, in becoming an object of attention, do not require the disintegration of reference. Though it may be brought into being by sound patterns, the image adapts immediately to its new surroundings. At this point, we are forced to consider our symmetries, as beguiling as they are, as accessory to an essentially non-musical intention. We will now recognize that in the above stanza from "Marburg" (1915), for example, though there may be patterns (e.g., reflective about the boundary between lines one and two), it is the alliteration, in / and the voiced stops, that is important. We are led beyond symmetries to the notion of sound "symbolism". What is interesting in this stanza is the way in which the rep-

64

THE SOUND AS IMAGE

etitions, particularly of b and I, promote the images. It is now the special qualities of individual sounds that are brought to our attention. The consonants b and / seem peculiarly appropriate to the representation of the orbicular objects here given. It is a matter of dispute among students of the subject as to whether the sounds themselves are somehow representational of the reference or the action of producing them is mimetic. Our object here is not to offer a theory, but to present more evidence and to relate the problem of sound symbolism to that of imagery in general. The problem seems to be more complex in poetry than it is in ordinary language because the poet creates his own correlations. The onomatopoeic term, for instance, becomes a lexical item, and how it might have come about is of only minor interest to the semanticist. Poets do not, except aberrantly, create new words on the basis of their sounds. It is rather a case of making existing words work in new contexts for the sake of their sounds; but their reference and their familiar contexts are not to be forgotten. Pasternak, in one poem from My Sister, induces a light rain {dozdik) to "mark time" at the door, but his verb, toptafsja, suggests not only marking time, but also trampling, stamping, associations which are hardly appropriate to his shy little guest. It is to be expected that Pasternak would employ onomatopoeia in a spirit of fun simply because he is so conscious of the word's old responsibilities. Here, as in "Oars at Rest", the sounds (the repetition of dentals to mimic the patter of rain) are the vehicle of a meta-poetic statement. But this is not always the case. A meta-poetry must have its poetry, and Pasternak provides his own instances of a less self-conscious use of sounds. The following poem was written quite early (1913) and is one of the few pieces of this period which Pasternak was later willing to see republished. eBpajiB. ^ocraTb nepmui η miaicaTb! ÜHcaTb ο (jieBpajie HaB3pi>m. IIoKa rpoxonymaa cjiKKOTb BecHoio nepHOK) ropHT. flocTaTb npojieTKy. 3a rnecTb rpuBeH, Hpe3 6jiaroBecT, npe3 KJIHK Kojiec MeHH 6 Be3JiH Tyzja, rpp jiHBeHb CJIHHHJI nepHHJia c ropeM cjie3, Ifle, KaK oöyrjieHHbie rpyniH C aepeBbeB TMCJIHH rpaneS,

THE SOUND AS IMAGE

65

T a e rpycTb 3a r p y c n n o o6pynrnT eBpajii> Β öeccoHHHiny ο Hen. KpHKH BCCHbl BOÄOH ΗβρΗβΙΟΤ H ΓΟρΟΛ - KpHKaMH H3pMT, floicojie necHb He 3acHHeeT TaM, Haa HepHHJiaMH - HaB3pbiÄ.

(February. To get some ink and weep! To write of February in tears. While the rumbling slush In black Spring burns. To get a cab. For six bits, Over the peal of bells, over the cry of wheels, They'll carry me there where a downpour Collated ink with the grief of tears. Where, like charred pears Thousands of daws from the trees, Where February rains grief upon grief Down into the insomnia of eyes.1 The cries of Spring turn black like the water And the town is pocked with cries, Until the song starts shining blue There, above the ink - in tears.) Over the years, this poem underwent several revisions. The one given here is the first printed version (in the journal Lirika, 1913) as reproduced (with variants) in the University of Michigan Press Socinenija.2 The second version was made before 1933 and was, apparently, the one which the author found acceptable in 1957, while he rejected a third 1

Innokentij Annenskij has a poem with the title "Black Spring" (1906). It is about a funeral procession and ends in the confrontation of "two deaths", one outside the coffin. Among other lines which suggest the dependence of Pasternak's poem on this one are these: fla Tyno HepHaa Becira rjwflejia Β CTyaem. rna3 And black Spring stupidly gazed Into the gelatin of eyes. Zinaida Gippius, during the twenties at a meeting of the "Green Lamp" in Paris, proposed a curious alternative: "... when I am offered Annenskij or Pasternak, I don't know whom to choose: I see two souls wrung dry. It is no accident that the embryo of Pasternak flashes from time to time in Annenskij" (quoted from Terapiano, Ju., Vstreii, New York, 1953, p. 73). 1 Op. cit., I, p. 177 and p. 469.

66

THE SOUND AS IMAGE

version, that of the Selected Poems of 1945, which was probably made in the early forties. Anticipating the publication of his collected poems in 1957, Pasternak subjected his entire poetic past to a merciless pruning. Of his early lyrical work, only about half of that which had survived up to the collections of 1933, 1935, and 1936 was saved. "February" is one of the 28 poems written before My Sister Life for the collection Over the Barriers (with one, "Dvor", "accompanied by a large question mark") 3 which escaped the knife. Ostensibly, the poem's theme is something like that of Verlaine's II pleure dans mott coeur Comme il pleut sur la ville. But whereas Verlaine's poem is a description of the poet's emotions, employing the words of feeling, "love", "hate", and so on, with nature a means, an objective correlative of the emotions, Pasternak's poem turns nature into an end. Beginning with outrageously affective language, Pasternak turns more and more attentively to the correlative itself and the metaphorical consequences of the initially expressive conceit. His language, as Jakobson puts it, "is transformed gradually into a language above affection...". 4 An embarrassingly Romantic poem becomes, in the growing autonomy of its devices, a metaphysical piece. Words which at first describe emotions themselves become sensorily external, objective and thereby objectify the emotions they stand for. The Romantic correlation of rain with grief is used by Pasternak many times, but almost always with a redeeming virtuosity and strangeness: B e c H a MOH, He ccTyH. nenajiH nac T B o e ö coßnaji C npeoöpaaceHbeM ceeTa.

(My Spring, do not complain. The hour of your unhappiness was that Of the transformation of the world.) The first lines of Pasternak's "February", like those of Verlaine's poem, offer a word play: "weep" is substituted for the expected "write" and then the reverse substitution is made in the second line: the idiomplakat' navzryd, "to weep sobbingly" (navzryd is an intensifying adverb from rydat', "to sob"), becomes "to write sobbingly". 8 4

Pasternak, Soiinenija, I, p. 494. Jakobson, R., "Randbemerkungen...", p. 362.

THE SOUND AS IMAGE

67

In these first two lines, the verbs are all infinitives: there are only bare nominalized actions. The expectancy thus created (for a subject) is resolved not by the introduction of the lyrical "I", but by the sudden development of metonymic "action at the side". The expectant rhythm of these lines result not only from their syntax, but also from the iambic phrasing with diaeresis. The thematic verb pisat\ "to write", is forced into prominence by the acceleration of the rhythm which follows its occurrence (by modulation of the second foot) and by the repetition of the vowel a. This rhythm is taken up again at the beginning of the third line, but it degenerates immediately into a mass of palatal sounds. The introduction of finite grammar in the second distich is reflected in the semantic plane by the appearance of a tangible object, slush, transformed by its metonymical epithet, "rumbling", into an auditory image. This figure is taken up again, after a line of "prose", that is a narrative break which finally introduces our subject, the poet, in the second line of the second quatrain, where again sounds are treated as if they were objects in space, with mass, as objects of the spatial preposition crez ("over, across"). We have before us now a job of synthesis. Jakobson observes: "No doubt, verse is primarily a recurrent 'figure of sound'. Primarily, always, but never uniquely".5 That is still the sounds of the verse, its words. But now we are to make the direct attack on the problem illustrated in Pasternak's poem by the fact that the adjective "rumbling" could, equally but not indifferently, modify "slush" or slush. The synaesthetic metonymy Crez klik koles, "over the cry of wheels", is in its figurative structure different from the syntactically and rhythmically parallel crez blagovest, "over the pealing (of church bells)", while it is similar to groxocusöaja sljakot', "rumbling slush", in more ways than may be immediately evident. The difference in these figures is in the presence of what we have been calling "sound symbolism" in the first and last and its absence in the middle figure. Crez blagovest is a metonymy, probably with some metaleptic complications and with a vague metaphoric tinge (c/. "a room filled with music", etc.). Crez klik holes is a metaphor, as is its partner of three lines before. We will recall from Chapter IV Jakobson's observation that "... any metonymy is slightly metaphorical, and any metaphor has a metonymical tint". Metonymy is the selective part of the metaphorical process, the abstractive stage. As one thinker puts it: "metaphor ... always involves a basic recognition of the common form that justifies the substitution of 6

Jakobson, R., in Style in Language, p. 367.

68

THE SOUND AS IMAGE

one image for another; and the principle of pars pro toto exemplifying the class-concept involved".® Another recent writer puts this originally Aristotelian formulation into modern garb: The designate of the expressions Ej [Richards' "vehicle" 7 in its non-metaphorical sense] and E 2 [Richards' "tenor"] share the property Ρ or the properties PL P 2 , ..., P n , which is (are) the basis of concomparison [sic] (tertium com-

parationis) "E2 is like E x ." 8

Other writers, apparently believing that analysis has the responsibility for re-synthesizing its object, take issue with this ancient view of metaphor as "contracted simile". The metaphor has the peculiar power to overrule its abstract justification and reinstate the concreteness of reality. And even in the abstracting process, one needs to remember that the vehicular term bears not free universals but properties that cannot really be taken away from it. As Hedwig Konrad expresses it, "En general, l'attribut possede dans tout objet sa note particuliere et individuelle"; 9 the rose's red is not precisely the red of anything else. It is just this that makes metaphor such a powerful, and at the same time inscrutable, device. The metaphor of "Oars at Rest" takes its vitality from the unique recumbency of a lake. We can remember this if we care to reconstitute any metaphors; but, if our object is to take them apart, the old methods are still useful. One writer, using this approach, seems to have the Venn diagram in mind when he says: If fancy is called "dream-footed as the shadow of a cloud", fancy and the cloud are recognized as generically distinct, but alike in ineffectual fleetingness. This is metaphor. The idea can be illustrated by the use of geometric circles which are neither congruent nor removed, but at some points intersect. By means of these circles the exclusion of non-metaphorical terms as too nearly congruent or too far removed may be graphically expressed. 10

In this view, due to Aristotle (Analytica Posterior a, II, 13), the object is regarded as the sum of its attributes. The justification of the metaphor is in the logical intersection of its terms so regarded, that is, in the existence of common attributes. One problem with this view is the apparent arbitrariness of the selec• Langer, S. K., "Abstraction in Science and in Art", Structure, Method, and Meaning (New York, 1951), p. 177. ' Richards, I. Α., The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York-London, 1936), p. 100. ' Pelc, Jerzy, "Semantic Functions as Applied to the Analysis of the Concept of Metaphor", Poetics (The Hague-Warszawa, 1961), p. 312. * Konrad, Hedwig, La Metaphore (Paris, 1939), p. 56. 10 Wells, Henry W., Poetic Imagery, p. 21.

THE SOUND AS IMAGE

69

tion of attributes. Furthermore, are they to be objective properties of the referent or are they simply putative, connotative? The latter point of view is taken by Max Black, who thinks of a term as a bearer of "associated commonplaces". 11 This notion seems close to Konrad's concept of "signification": "Nous definissons la signification comme l'ensemble des representations evoquees par le mot dans son rapport avec des objetsparticulars".12 This seems to be at least almost what we mean by the connotation or intension of a term. Meanwhile, Pelc tries to restore the objectivity of the assignment of properties by linking them again with the extension: ... the connotative properties of the expression Ex and the connotative properties of the expression E2 imply the same property Ρ (properties P1( P2, ..., Pn) shared by the designata of both ...18 This is a daring assumption, yet it seems to say little more than that all metaphors ought to be justifiable somehow. It is better than Black's notion, which is well-suited to the metaphors of ordinary speech but not to those of poetry. At least, it seems to be stretching the term to say that the poet's context creates its own "commonplaces". Meanwhile, Konrad is a little evasive when she speaks of the "rapport" between word and object. Here is the nub of the problem, and we must insist that, despite the stylistic peculiarities of the diverse grammatical forms and phonetic clothing in which metaphors appear before us, it is still - in what is usually called metaphor - the object that is evoked, and the properties are those that we believe to belong to the object. I said "usually", and what we see in Pasternak is something else; but to rely on the concept of signification is to obfuscate an important distinction. What matters is that, whether we assign properties or they are somehow just there, in the object, we are talking about the object, not the word which stands for it. When something or other in Pasternak's "Definition of Poetry" dives into the pond to get a star and brings it up on trembling palms, we are jolly well obliged to see clouds, and the word for "palms" does nothing whatsoever for this metaphor other than t o draw what must here be a pretty accurate picture of the palms of a human hand. In a study of phonetic symbolism, Roger Brown recognizes that the word can, however, perform another service: "There are two ways in II 12 13

Black, Max, Models and Metaphors (Ithaca, Ν. Y., 1962), p. 40 f. Konrad, H., op. cit., p. 45. Pelc, J., op. cit., p. 314.

70

THE SOUND AS IMAGE

which a name can be appropriate to its referent. Both name and referent are categories and it is possible for them to have similar attributes. When this is the case in speech we have the basis for phonetic symbolism".14 This sounds exactly like our formulation of metaphor, or at least its justification, as the intersection of attributes of its terms, or rather of the objects named by the terms. For this reason, we would prefer to speak of phonetic metaphor, rather than phonetic symbolism, a concept which belongs to psychological linguistics. I want to strengthen this point: the question why "ongololo" is "... so appropriate a name for the centipede"15 is a question of phonetic, even graphic, metaphor, as is that of the appropriateness of the alliterations in the particular consonant b in the stanza from "Marburg" quoted at the beginning of this chapter. But when certain sounds are thought of as being dark or light, feminine or masculine, murky or clear, soft or hard; that is, as having intrinsic non-acoustical properties, as in a recent study by Ivan Fönagy,16 we are in the realm of symbolism. There can be no doubt that sound symbolism is a potent ingredient of poetry. It is also ubiquitous, and that is why we want to distinguish it from the rarer phonetic metaphor. But we will certainly expect that investigations of sound symbolism will be useful to the study of metaphor in general. Meanwhile, poetry, which can make up its associations on the spot, can be useful to the student of sound symbolism. This is the order of precedence that we will be observing here. Pasternak's figure, gröxöcüscaja sljaköt', "rumbling slush", is at first glance a metonymy of synecdochic form: "slush" stands as pars pro toto for a complex, the wheels which move through the slush, thence the carriages themselves, a metaleptic progression. But then we find that, by virtue of the modulation of the syllable -sea- in the adjective and the features of the particular sounds present, the third foot is an almost undifferentiated mass of palatal sibilants with, in the last foot, a sibilant and a palatalized liquid. The line, after the fourth syllable, is thus phonetically imitative of the sound of agitated slush. What we have, however, is not merely onomatopoeia: it is important that the verb (infinitive groxotaf) only becomes onomatopoeic in the way that it is here after its participle has been juxtaposed with sljakot"slush". It is apparent that the set of attributes of a word (in fact, here, of the participial suffix, which certainly does not normally carry with it any 14 16 18

Brown, Roger, Words and Things (Glencoe, 111., 1958), p. 154. Brown, R., ibid., p. 18. Fönagy, Ivan, Die Metaphern in der Phonetik (The Hague, 1963).

THE SOUND AS IMAGE

71

connotations of "slushiness") intersects the set of attributes of the referent of the word juxtaposed with it: sloppiness, undifferentiatedness are properties shared by a word, on the one hand, and a thing, on the other. We may call this trope the phonetic metaphor, but perhaps it would be better to say "onomatopoeic metaphor", in order to call attention to the fact that the tenor is an auditory image. In the phonetic metaphor generally, as we shall see, the tenor need not be auditory, while the vehicle - being the concrete sounds of the verse itself - always is. By using the word "metaphor", we imply duality of meaning, which is not present in the case of ordinary onomatopoeia. To put it another way: in the case of the onomatopoeic metaphor, we would expect a synaesthetic mixture, that at least one of the terms would not refer to an auditory image. The word sljakot'1 here "refers" to a sound only through the properties of its sounds, but not denotatively. We should also distinguish the onomatopoeic metaphor from the similar root and paronomastic (or pseudo-root) metaphors (e.g., kljucicyukljuciny in "Oars at Rest"), in which the vehicle is still a word-property, but there is no imitation of a sound in nature. There are, however, cases in which the distinction may be hard to make, where perhaps both types are operative in a single metaphor (e.g., lödka kolotitsja in "Oars at Rest"). It is tempting to employ a term like "sound gesture" to describe the onomatopoeic metaphor: to call attention to the dramatic interaction between the sound of the word and the action or motions of the things to which it refers. For example: Nesmetnyj mir semenit ν mezmerizme ("The innumerable world minces in mesmerism"), a line from Pasternak's "The Mirror" in My Sister Life, is a description of action taking place in a swaying mirror. We would like to call what is happening here metaphorical, first of all, because the verb semenit', meaning "to mince", that is, "to take small mincing steps", is forced to adopt for this context a second meaning: by calling attention through alliteration to the sound of the verb, the poet reminds us of its root sense: "to cut up into small seed\\kt pieces". Here the repetition of a particular sound is not so important as the action of the lips, which come together at regular intervals to mimic scissors or some other slicing apparatus, in producing the necessary sounds. Onomatopoeic and related types of metaphor need not be dependent on juxtaposition of their terms. In the first stanza of "Ills of the Earth" {My Sister Life) Ο e m e ! P a 3 f l a c T c a jh> T 0 J i t K 0 χ ο χ ο τ I l e p j i a M y T p o M , H M a T p o f i öauHJiJi,

72

THE SOUND AS IMAGE M o K p b I M ryjIOM, TbMOH ΟΤαφΗΛΟΚΟΚΚΟΒ, Η ÖJiecHyT π ρ υ m o j i h h h x pe3m>i,

(Ο yet! Would only a guffaw burst forth Like mother-of-pearl, an Imatra 17 of bacilli, A wet rumble, hordes of staphylococci, And incisors shine in the lightning.) the inexactness of the rhyme xoxot-stafilokokkov calls special attention to each member, and the properties of one rub off on the other. The tenor "coughing" is a meaning that comes solely from the unvoiced velars of the rhyme and is not explicit in the reference at all. Meanwhile, the second stanza offers an example of the metaphor of mimed action: T a K - m a S a r n ! H e m a T K n e THTaHM

3axjie6HyTca β nepHtix ceoflax ληη. T e H H cTHHeT TpeneTOM t e t a n u s , Η MeaaHOK 3am>uiHT c t o j i 6 h h k .

(All right - enough! Unstaggering titans Gulp in the black vaults of day. Tetanus tautens shadows in trembling, And stupor covers the grass-snakes with dust.) The repetition of the form tjan and its variants causes the mouth to make stretching motions, mimicking (presumably) the victim of lockjaw. The term "sound gesture" has been used by critics, especially the Russian Formalists, but not always in the way we would like to use it here. They were, it seems, methodologically opposed to the sort of thing we have been describing. Erlich observes: Generally speaking, the Formalists were distrustful of all theories predicated upon an "organic" kinship between the sign and the referent. To correlate sound and meaning meant to them to establish a correspondence not between the music of verse and "reality", but between different strata of poetic language. It is true, the Formalist theoreticians were not altogether averse to talking about "phonetic gestures" (zvukovye iesty) in verse. But this term, when used by Tynjanov or Eichenbaum, did not necessarily imply an intrinsic suggestiveness of certain acoustic effects. "Sound gesture" in Opojaz parlance connoted more often than not an approximate analogy between the articulatory activity underlying a given sound-repetition - the process involved in producing a speech-sound - and a physical gesture.18 Our examples from "The Mirror" and the second one from "Ills of the 17

A Finnish river with a falls, used to depict a multitude, "a Niagara". See Annenskij's "Dozdik": "for an Imatra of years". 18 Erlich, Russian Formalism, p. 193.

73

THE SOUND AS IMAGE

Earth" seem to correspond with the Formalists' usage, while the ones f r o m " F e b r u a r y " and " M a r b u r g " (at the beginning of the chapter) do not. The point o f view that we would like to avoid, while admitting to the generality o f the notion of metaphor, is described by Erlich as follows: A procedure much more frequent in Formalist writings was referring to a "sound-repetition" - whether rime or some non-metrical alliterative device as a sui generis "rhythmical metaphor" or "auditory simile". Again, it must be said that these concepts as interpreted by Jakobson or Tynjanov did not indicate any affinity between the sound-pattern and the aspect of reality allegedly evoked by it .... What was emphasized here was the similarity between two sets of devices, two levels of literary craft - poetic euphony and poetic imagery.1® T y n j a n o v could at least testify to the effort made by Pasternak to blur the distinction between these levels.

W e should like to speak of an

objective "affinity" between verbal sounds and imagery, and we ought t o reserve the term "metaphor" for those cases in which such an affinity is created ad hoc. Thus we will be looking for change of meaning through onomatopoeic devices.

Consider the line from " R a i n " : Sniij selkoprjädom

tütovym

("Scurry like a silkworm"), an imperative addressed to the rain.

Silk-

w o r m s do not under normal circumstances scurry, I believe; but they d o so here not only because the poet says that they do, but also because the sound o f the adjective tütovyj ("mulberry") mimics with its dentals a n d dactylic rhythm the rapid scratching and patter of tiny feet scurrying. O f even greater interest for the purpose of drawing distinctions are those cases in which words possess properties contradictory t o those o f their referent. A n English poet would find it easy to integrate "river" into a flowing line by avoiding stops and including liquids, but he would find "creek" a problem. O n e solution w o u l d be t o exploit the unvoiced velars of the word in order to give it entirely new connotations in its poetic context, not of "flowing", but of, say, "scurrying". Pasternak does something very much like this to the Russian verb tec\ "to flow", which in some o f its forms has the velar stop k as well as the initial dental stop. In the poem "In the W o o d s " in Themes and Variations, we find this stanza: TemiH jiyHH. TemiH »cyKH c o t j i h b o m , C r e m i o CTpeK03 CHOBajio no meKaM. E b i j i nojiOH jiec Mepuam>eM KponoTJiHBMM,

Kaie πόα maimaMH y nacoBiuHKa. "

Ibid., p. 194.

74

THE SOUND AS IMAGE

(Sunbeams flowed. Beetles flowed with the ebb, The dragonflies' lens scurried over cheeks. The woods were filled with meticulous flickering As under a watchmaker's tweezers.) Images of flowing and gentle movement are transformed gradually into those of sharp, tiny action. The repetitions of k in the first line (Tekll luöi. Tekli zuki s otlivom) are pushed into the background by a steady iambic rhythm and the repetition of the high front vowel i and of the liquid I. The second line (Steklö strekoz snovälo po Scekäm) seems transitional to the degeneration of the iambic, flowing rhythm which occurs at the end of the third line (Byl ρόΐοη lis mercärfem kröpotlivym) and continues into the fourth. If in this example teö' is made to act onomatopoeically, the metaphorical aspect of its activity is not obvious. That tekli iuki ("the beetles flowed") is a metaphor is clear, but that it is an onomatopoeic metaphor is not made certain until the second line in the agrammatical pun on steklo. This word, taken by itself, is a homonym meaning "glass" and also "(it) flowed down". This second meaning has no grammatical justification in this context, but it is forced on us by anaphoric parallelism. It is an example, perhaps, of Empson's third type of ambiguity, in which "two ideas, which are connected only by being both relevant in the context", are brought in with a single word. 20 The metaphor of the second line involves a comparison of the wings of the dragonflies with a glass burning-lens. Thus "flowing" is connected with "insect" by a paronomastic metaphor. At the same time, the image of finical, delicate action is implicit in the first line in the alliteration in k (not by phonetic symbolism, but by actual imitation of the sounds of some insects and of watches ticking), and thus it is no accident that this sound appears in adjacent feet in tekli zuki. The onomatopoeic metaphor arises from the intersection of the attributes of the sound ki, when repeated, and the attributes of beetles clicking their elytra as they fly. The verb tec' receives similar treatment in the following lines: OHa co mhoh. HaHrptiBaft, J l e ä , cMeüca, cyMpaic pen! ΤθΠΗ, ΤβΚΗ 3IIHrpa6bh!

(She is with me. Strum, Pour, laugh, tear the twilight! 20

Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 102.

THE SOUND AS IMAGE

75

Drown, flow like an epigraph To such a love as you!) This is the first stanza of "Rain" in My Sister Life, and it is followed by the line with the silkworm, quoted above, in which "scurrying" was mentioned, as in the stanza from "In the Woods". In the stanza from "Rain", the metaphor derives from a comparison between rain and ink. Though it will stand without onomatopoeic effects, it is in this instance enriched by the repetitions in t and k (... teki epigrafom/ Κ taköj kak ty ljubv0, which evoke the "scurrying" action of the pen and therefore bring in the insect metaphor long before the appearance of the little spinner. We will note that here, as in "In the Woods", the real vehicle seems to be "needle". But why the sound k should evoke the quick hand of the seamstress is for the students of sound symbolism to decide. We will remark, however, that the image from "February", crez klik koles, which involves the same sound, determines not any cry, but a "sharp" cry, a piercing one. We find similar unity in the connotation (if we may now abuse that term in this way) of the combination si, which is often used by Pasternak to produce images like our "rumbling slush": ... pleskdnija ν SlSpancax ("... splashings in slippers") in My Sister, where the splashes are a little more splashy thanks to the sloppy footwear; or Po rväm i Sljdpam slipajuscij dozdik ("Rain splattering along the ditches and hats"),21 for which the hats are needed, at least at first, only because their Russian name has the right sounds.

81

From "Spektorskij", in the section entitled "Foreword".

VII. THE VOICE O F THE IMAGE

We have been anything but fastidious in our use of the term "theme". Prepared to be deceived, the reader of lyric poetry will nevertheless begin with the poem's title; that, he assumes, is what the poem is about. It is fashionable now to say that the lyric poem is not "about" anything, thereby calling attention to its independence as an object in its own right, as a concrete thing which can therefore be talked about. But lacking the disintegration of reference, the poem is still a use of language and is thus hard to silence even with the strongest intentions of purity. It is probably characteristic of the lyric poet to discover his title only after the poem is written. A number of the poems of My Sister Life had their titles changed or acquired their titles only years after their composition. Some lost their titles. The poem "Svetaet" ("Dawn", "It's Getting Light") got its title only in 1945. It is evidently given to help the reader. In the first stanza, we recall (the poem was discussed briefly in Chapter II), a lilac bush is "testing" to see whether it is time yet for the birds to sing. Although there are hints about the time of day throughout the poem, and the garden is said to be awakened in the final quatrain, one feels that it helps to be told at the very beginning that the subject is the coming of dawn after a night of rain. But one could also say that, by providing a temporal locale, the title weakens the poem imaginatively by vaguely introducing the poet as writer, that is in his capacity as annotator, with the privilege of particularizing the experience of the poem within his own biography. We have rather tried to go out into the poem to see what its theme might be. This is not a difficult task - simply because Pasternak is not one of those poets in search of a theme: his is the single theme of poetry itself, the processes of the poetic imagination. We have tried to demonstrate what Tynjanov calls "the unusual obligatoriness" of Pasternak's theme: "His theme does not assert itself at all; it is so strong-

THE VOICE OF THE IMAGE

77

ly motivated that people somehow d o n ' t bother to talk a b o u t it". 1 T h e obligatoriness of t h e theme arises f r o m the a u t o n o m y of the language itself, f r o m the effacement of the poet as a speaker addressing himself to that theme. This poetics p u t s the p o e m as distant as possible f r o m the utterance of opinion. But this very fact m a k e s the p o e m the m o r e sensitive to the intrusion of the poet as a m a n talking t o us. T h e lyrical " I " becomes not the n a t u r a l expression of a p o i n t of view b u t a n alternative o n a level with the a d o p t i o n of any other lyrical hero. As Victor Erlich puts it: The "I" in Pasternak's poetry, or artistic prose for that matter, is not the pivot of a lyrical narrative, the principle point of reference. The self exists here, as it were, on a par with all other elements of the heterogeneous universe natural phenomena, inanimate objects, indeed with its own objectified sensations and states of mind. A n integral part of his physical environment, of "nature", he is treated as "object" also in that he is no more likely to act than to be acted upon, looked at, appraised by, the things around him. 2 Jakobson, in his article of 1935 on Pasternak's prose, m a d e the same observation: " T h e agens is excluded f r o m [Pasternak's] thematics". 3 J a k o b s o n associates the lyrical m o d e itself with the g r a m m a r of t h e pronoun: If we bring the question down to the level of the simple grammatical formula, we can say that in the case of the lyric the point of departure of the main theme is always the first person of the present, and for the epic the third person of the past. Whatever the lyrical story may have as (additional) objects, they are always only dependencies and by-products, acting as a background for the first person, but if it concerns the past, then the lyrical past introduces itself as a remembered subject. Opposing this in the epic, the present is an afterthought of the past, and if the "I" of the narrator is expressed it is really only as one of the persons concerned: this objectivized "I" appears as a form dependent on the third person... 4 W e might draw the conclusion that P a s t e r n a k ' s poetry is n o t "essentially" lyrical, but J a k o b s o n sees it as a tertium quid: When the lyrical "I" in Pasternak's work is a patiens, is an active third person permitted to be the real hero? No, the real agent remains outside Pasternak's poetic mythology... The third person which appears in Pasternak does not designate an agent, but an instrument.® 1

Tynjanov, op. cit., p. 563. Erlich, V., "The Concept of the Poet in Pasternak", The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. XXXVII, No. 89 (1959), p. 327. 8 Jakobson, "Randbemerkungen...", p. 370. 1 Ibid., p. 360. 4 Ibid., p. 370. 2

78

THE VOICE OF THE IMAGE

In Safe Conduct, Pasternak distinguishes the man as a speaker addressing himself to a theme from the poet as an instrument of the purposes of art: What does an honest man do when he speaks only the truth? Behind the utterance of truth time passes, and in that time life moves on, away from him. His truth lags behind, it deceives. Then must one be everywhere and always talking? But in art, you see, he is gagged. In art the man falls silent, and the image starts talking. And it turns out that only the image can keep up with the successes of nature.6 The "image" may be itself a poetic figure, but we may take it literally on the analogy with optics. It is a thing seen, distorted, given in only one aspect, even squashed into bidimensionality. Pasternak's answer to the old problem of appearance and reality, or what he says is art's answer, is that it is hard enough to keep abreast of the world of appearance. There is something in Pasternak's art that keeps reminding one of photography. I do not mean attention to detail. It is rather a profound interest in the process by which the world can be mapped on the consciousness and on the page as on a sensitive plate and in a moment. J. M. Cohen describes this as follows: ... detail is visualized with a painter's eye, with an eye trained in the impressionist school to see not objects, but the space before the eye in which objects and their surroundings mingle in light, shape and colour, before separating into their individual forms.7 It is on the basis of this interest in the mechanics of impression that we are first led to propose that poetry itself is Pasternak's main theme. But such an art will be drawn naturally toward a more direct confrontation with itself. Cezanne again and again returns to self-portraiture. In the poem "Our Storm", the abrupt turn toward self-consciousness became a major compositional device, revealing a motif found to be hidden in the poem from the beginning: the motif of poetry itself, the act of writing, displacing the original theme. In "Our Storm", the distinctive sign of the appearance of the new motif was the first person pronoun (which appeared for the first time in the seventh quatrain), but at least as significant was the simultaneous introduction of the second person pronoun, which signalized an addressee. And it may happen that the presence of the first person pronoun is to be taken for granted and that its explicit mention makes no difference, as 8 Pasternak, Soiinenija, II, pp. 234-235. '

Cohen, J. M„ "The Poetry of Boris Pasternak", Horizon, X, No. 55 (1944), pp. 23-24.

THE VOICE OF THE IMAGE

79

in the poem "February"; and that the lyrical "I" really does intrude, as in the final two lines of this poem, simply because we are now told something that we are not expected to know, something that we are not required to extract from the poem's internal logic: "... the song shines blue, there above the ink ...". In "Oars at Rest", there is no first or second person pronoun, but there is an imperative to implicate the poet as a man speaking by implying an addressee. One may imagine that in the "pure" lyric the poem's first person merges with that of the reader; its words become our words. But, as Robert Penn Warren puts it, "Poetry wants to be pure, but poems do not". 8 ... a poem, to be good, must earn itself. It is a motion toward a point of rest, but if it is not a resisted motion, it is motion of no consequence ... the good poem must, in some way, involve the resistance; it must carry something of the context of its own creation ..." The movement of pure poetry will meet resistance when we are aware of the poet's sensibility as something separate from our own. In Pasternak, this transition often has the character of a specific literary device. Several theories have been advanced to account for this device, most of them, however, being oriented toward the question of genre. Eichenbaum distinguished three types of lyric: the song, the conversational lyric, and the declamatory lyric.10 His typology corresponds closely with T. S. Eliot's notion of the "three voices" of poetry, but Eliot's theory is not so committed to the idea that the three modes must be mutually exclusive. In Eliot's typology: "The first voice is the voice of the poet talking to himself - or to nobody. The second is the voice of the poet addressing an audience, whether large or small".11 The third voice, that of the poet talking through the mouths of others, is of little interest to us here. When Pasternak talks about an image speaking, he must have in mind the first voice: In a poem which is neither didactic nor narrative, and not animated by any other social purpose, the poet may be concerned solely with expressing in verse - using all his resources of words, with their history, their connotations, their music - this obscure impulse. He does not know what he has to say until he has said it, and in the effort to say it he is not concerned with making other people understand anything. He is not concerned, at this stage, with 8

Warren, R. P., Selected Essays (New York, 1951), p. 4. » Ibid., p. 27. 10 Ejxenbaum, B., Melodika russkogo lirileskogo stixa (Peterburg, 1922). 11 Eliot, T. S., On Poetry and Poets (New York, 1957), p. 96.

80

THE VOICE OF THE IMAGE

other people at all: only with finding the right words, or, anyhow, the least wrong words. 12 I assume that this is the voice of the image because of the similarity between the notion of not knowing what one has to say until one has said it and Pasternak's own idea that metaphors are found in nature, not made up in language. O n the other hand, it seems possible that the first voice is really a medley. Perhaps the voice o f the image and the voice o f the poet talking to himself are sometimes in a duel, each struggling to overcome the other; the man tears off his gag.

Is there any difference between the

poet speaking in images and the image speaking? T h o u g h some might find it useful to have a statistical survey at hand of the number of uses of the pronoun " I " , it is more interesting to see just how the pronoun gets into the poem. T h e following early lyric was written at about the same time as " F e b r u a r y " : KaK 6p0H30B0ii 30J10H acapoBeHb, 5KyicaMH CMiuieT c o h h h h ca^· C o MHOH, C Moeö CBeHOK) BpOBeHb M n p t i pacuBeTiime bhcht. H , KaK Β H e c j i H x a H H y i o B e p y ,

Ά Β 3Ty HOHB nepexoxcy, T a e Tonojib oÖBeTiuajio-cepbiH 3 a B e c i u i j i y H H y i o Mexcy,

Tfle npy/i, KaK ABjieHHaa Tairaa, Γ/ie inenieT h6jiohh πρκβοΗ, Tfle c a a b h c h t ποοτροήκοΜ CBaHHofi H aepacHT H e 6 o npea c o 6 o f i . (Like brass ashes from a brazier, Beetles are sprayed by the sleepy garden. With me, with my candle on a level, Flowering worlds are suspended. And, as into an unheard-of faith, I cross over into that night, Where the decrepit gray poplar Drew a curtain over the moon's edge. Where there's a pond, like a revealed mystery, Where the surf of the apple-tree whispers, Where the garden hangs like a house on stilts And holds the sky before itself.) II

Ibid., p . 1 0 7 .

THE VOICE OF THE IMAGE

81

The theme, like that of "February", is transport, the ecstasy of art's vision. The "poet" is introduced on a par with (vroven') his candle. His identity is threatened by his grammar, which puts him in apposition with the candle, and when he "crosses over into that night", he is gone: the first person pronoun disappears from the poem. From the rhetorical "as into an unheard-of faith", the poem rapidly becomes a study of levitation. The "I" here seems first to be the "I" of the autobiographical lyricist, but it becomes, through a grammatical appositive, an image in its own right, an image which is seen to disappear. Even when the lyrical hero is the subjective sensibility of the lyrical "I", it is less likely to feel, and inform us of its feelings, than to be the object of investigation by its surroundings: 3a hhmh β 6ercTBe cjieiuiH cjieflOM Kocwe KanjiH. Υ nJieTHH Meat ΜΟΙφΗΧ ΒβΤΟΚ C BCTpOM ÖJieflHblM nieji cnop. Ά 3aMep. Προ μθηη! (Behind them, blinded in their tracks in flight, Came the slant drops. And by the fence, An argument raged between the wet boughs And the pale wind. I was mortified. About me!) For all its intimacy (as if it were a diary whispered onto the paper in the night), My Sister Life gives us a far from heroic image of the poet, who yields to his vehicle more than it asks: Tpex jyMaTb - tm He H3 BecTajioK: Bouijia co cryjiOM, KaK C HOJIKH, XCH3HB ΜΟΚ) aocrajia H ntuib oöayjia. (It's a sin to think it: you are no vestal. You came in with a chair And took my life as from a shelf, And blew the dust off.) In the poem "Our Storm", the pronoun "I" occurs first in the seventh stanza, and constantly thereafter. Through the fifth quatrain the mood is indicative (with the exception of the one imperative in the first stanza); the images are doing things without any help from the first person. The sixth stanza consists of interrogative statements in the infinitive mood;

82

THE VOICE OF THE IMAGE

then the poet says, " O , believe my game, and believe / The migraine thundering after you!" As we have shown, the structure of the imagery was such in the first six stanzas as to bring the reader's eye gradually f r o m f a r objects to close ones, until, at the critical point (the lines quoted above), the eye can move closer only in the sense that it must turn inward. At the same time that the first person pronoun (in the presence of an addressee) signals the intrusion of the second voice, the imagery serves to make this a first-voice utterance by dramatizing the words and making them an inevitable exclamation from the reader. In the poem "In the W o o d s " there is a similar intensification of the imagery (also involving a transition, in space but becoming qualitative, from the visual world at a distance to the immediate tactile world), and it is resolved in the self-conscious generalization of a single metaphor. In the often-quoted first poem of the cycle "Spring" in Themes and Variations, the first person pronoun appears in the nominative case in the first line, and it is not mentioned at all thereafter: BecHa, a c yjimiH, rfle Tonojn. yAHBJieH, r^e ;iajii> nyraeTca, r#e aom ynacn. Gohtcji, r ^ e B03ayx CHHb, KaK y3eji0K c 6ejn>eM y BtmHcaBiueroca H3 6ο.μ>ηηιη>ι. I a e Benep nycT, KaK npepBaHHbifi paccKa3, OcraBjieHHwii 3Be3AOö 6e3 npoflOjiaceHta Κ HeAoyMeHbio tmchh iiiyMHbix rjia3, Ee3AOHHLIX Η JIHIIieHHHX BMpaaceHbH. (Spring, I've come from the street, where the poplar is surprised, Where the horizon is afraid, where the house is scared it will fall, Where the air is blue, like a bundle of linen Under the arm of a man just out of the hospital. Where the evening is empty, like an interrupted tale Left by a star without continuation To the consternation of a thousand noisy eyes, Fathomless and devoid of expression.) The poem consists of a laconic prose statement (telling us where the poet has been) followed by five subordinate clauses introduced by the adverb "where". The first three clauses require a hemistich each, the fourth two lines, and the last a whole quatrain: a sort of metrico-syntactical hierarchy is thus established. This structure is in rough corres-

THE VOICE OF THE IMAGE

83

pondence with the five subjects of the subordinate clauses. They are: a poplar tree, the horizon (literally, the far-away, the hazy expanse of the plain), a house, the air, and the evening. The transition is, very roughly, from particular to general, perhaps only because the first image is of a particular variety of tree, and the rest could be put into any evening whatsoever. Noting that the hemistichs of line two are thematically parallel (the theme is "fear"), we see that the progression moves quite regularly according to the formal verse units: hemistich, line, distich, quatrain: i ; 1; 2; 4. From this structure one might deduce the predicates : first "surprise", then "fear", but then ...? Ostensibly, the predicate of the distich unit is "blue", but this quality is expanded by the notorious simile: "like a bundle of linen Under the arm of a man just out of the hospital".13 It is, in other words, a special blue, a correlative to an emotion yet unnamed. So too for the predicate of the second quatrain, which is not merely "empty", and required twice as much poem to explain. The progression is thus from known, or at least named, emotions to emotions which are, prior to the poem, unnamed. These emotions are all attributed to things, not to the author or the "I" of the first line. The eye moves from image to image, each of which belongs to the attributes of the street which expelled that "I" into the poem in the first place. We will now observe that the rhythmical structure of this poem is quite unusual. The first two lines are hexameters broken into hemistichs by the caesura after the third foot of each line. But for the lack of appropriate rhymes, these two lines could be read as four trimeters. The rest of the poem is written in pentameters. When a change such as this occurs, we would naturally look first to the point at which the change took place. In this case, we observe that there is a weak enjambment between the third and fourth lines. Also, due to the presence of the long (sixsyllable) word in the fourth line, three metrical accents are suppressed. This is a characteristic Pasternakian use of the polysyllabic participle: 18

The notion of "blue air" appears several times in Derzavin, notably in "The Waterfall", stanza 42: "Whose couch is the earth; whose roof the blue air ...?" The image as a whole invites comparison not only with Eliot's patient etherized upon a table, but also with Annenskij's: CojiHue 3a rapbto TyMaHa JKejiTo, KaK BCTaemHfl öojibHoä. (The sun beyond the scorched fog Is yellow like one arising from the sick-bed.)

84

THE VOICE OF THE IMAGE

compression of meaning is achieved by offering both verbal and nominal meanings in a single word. Participles and verbal nouns play a major role in the second quatrain too. Metrical accents are modulated at the end of the first line, throughout the second line (which has only three rhythmical accents), in the first foot of the third, and throughout the fourth. The tendency is to unify the whole stanza into one long line, that is to link everything the more closely to the grammatical predicate "empty". Parenthetically, I want to call attention to an ambiguity in this stanza which is not given by the translation: the phrase "left by a star" carries yet another idea. In the first, the story is, as it were, told by a star and then broken off. In the second meaning, we are to read "star" (zvezda) as the diminutive zvezdocka ("little star", but also "asterisk"), which refers to the typographical mark used sometimes to indicate the interruption of a narrative. The simile of an interrupted tale provides the correlative of the most complex of the emotions given here, and it also offers an answer to what might be for the attentive reader a rather puzzling problem. All of the poem's images are descriptive of events taking place in the street, that is, outside. But the "I" of the first line has just come inside. If the object here were to "describe" the street, then either the past tense would have been used throughout to represent a street remembered, or else the phrase ja s ulicy ("I am from the street, I've just come inside") could have been replaced by, say, esf ulica ("there is a street") or something that would keep us out there on the sidewalk at least. As it is, this initial phrase confronts us not with a street, but with an entirely different scene, a room, perhaps, darkness, the poet's life, which is never developed. The simile of the second quatrain provides a solution to this problem by suggesting yet another simile, that between the closing of a door, shutting off suddenly the night and noise and stars of the street, and the interruption of a story. We can conclude that the other images of the poem are not to be taken as in a linear relation to this last one, but as telescoped into it. Our numerical symbolism for the syntacticoformal structure of the poem 1; 2; 4) acquires greater interest. The second stanza does not just add to the impressions of the first: it resolves them; it satisfies us as to why the point of departure was this "I" of the first line. It is a point of reference, an origin, from which all the lines of imagery radiate. The "I" is all-important for the poem's theme, even though it is mentioned only once. While the images contain much action, it remains

85

THE VOICE OF THE IMAGE

transfixed in a moment of time. The very fact that it does occur but once signifies the momentary nature of the emotion which is described by means of successively more complex images. "I" is the first word in the poem "Zamestitel'nica" ("The Substitute"), and it does not appear there again in any form. In "Spring", general actions were deployed about a landscape to capture the momentary existence of the "I" in an evanescent state. In "The Substitute", the momentary, captured falsely and grotesquely in a photograph, is generalized into life subject to the flow of time: Ά »cHBy c TBoeft KapToiKoii, c TOH, HTO XOXOHCT, Υ κοτοροΗ cycraBbi Β 3anacTbHx xpycTHT,

Toii,

HTO NAJIBIIBI JIOMAET Η

6pocim>

HE XOIET,

y κοτοροΗ rOCTHT Η TOCTHT Η rpyCTHT. (I live with your photograph, with that which laughs, Whose joints crackle in its wrists, That which wrings its fingers and will not stop, With whom they visit and visit and yearn.)

The metaphorical possibilities of photography are toyed with elsewhere: . . . CHABUIH i u a m c y , C T O c j i e n a m n x HH H o i b i o CHHJI HA NAMHTB r p o M .

(... Taking its hat off, The thunder took for remembrance A hundred blinding photographs with the night.)

In a recent study, Yves Berger noted that with Pasternak "II y a ... une veritable obsession du temps".14 And: "Pasternak, au contraire de Maiakovski, est le poete du microcosme".15 If we combine these two observations into one, we have a poet obsessed with the moment. Reading Pasternak, one becomes aware of this obsession in many different ways: the effort to overcome the temporal successiveness of the poem itself by squeezing in as much action as possible in the shortest possible space, the fascination for things caught in flight, the constant preoccupation with images of water, storm, the seasons, anything that represents change and evanescence. We would expect that such a poet would have his own view of historical time. In a poem, dated 1926 and addressed to Larisa Reisner, Pasternak writes: 14 15

Berger, Y., Boris Pasternak, une etude (Paris, 1958), p. 42. Ibid., p. 42.

86

THE VOICE OF THE IMAGE

JlapHca, bot icorfla nocoacajieio, Μ τ ο η He CMepTb η HOJib β cpaBHera>H c Hen. Ά 6 pa3y3Haji, tom aepacprrca 6e3 Kjieio 5KHBaa noBecTb Ha oöpbiBKax flHeö.

(Larisa, now is when I regret That I'm not death, and am zero compared to it, I'd find out how the living story is stuck Without glue to the scraps of days.) To the lyrical imagination chronology is chaos and is opposed to the order of the world's metaphorism. Pasternak's historical and biographical poems of the twenties, The Year 1905, Lieutenant Schmidt, and Spektorskij, as well as his prose, illustrate throughout the displacement of the narrative and sequential by the momentary; the scraps of days and hours that refuse to cohere. But the puzzle itself: how does a life, the meaningful whole of a story with a beginning and end, take shape out of this world of moments and likenesses, becomes an obsessive theme. To solve the puzzle, the lyrical imagination does not sacrifice its means, but follows the metaphor to a metaphysics. Aware of this preoccupation, we can see the aesthetic philosophy of Safe Conduct more clearly. The objectification of the metaphor is more than "a way of putting it": it would be wrong for us to say, "Let the poet think that he has found the metaphor out there in nature, it was his invention anyway". It is first of all the wonder at a world in which, for all its variety, likenesses can be found. It is also the lyrical imagination's need to tell its own story and to see its moments as the incidents of that story. We can now see a deeper reason for this poetry to have itself as its major theme. In the first (titled "Imitative") variation of the title poem of Themes and Variations, the hero is the third person in the past tense, namely Puskin, but a mythological Puskin eponymous for poetic creativity. The piece is imitative in its use of citations from Puskin's "Bronze Horseman" and in its rhyme scheme (predominantly abba, with variations aabccbc and couplets only), which comes also from Puäkin's poem and, through it, from the Russian heroic ode of the eighteenth century. 16 There is an echo, moreover, of Deriavin's "The Waterfall" in the image of a man descending a bank to sit, immersed in thought, beside a body of water. The poem begins as a clearly second-voice production on a heroic, le

See: Vickery, W. N., "'Mednyj vsadnik' and the Eighteenth Century Heroic Ode", Indiana Slavic Studies, III.

THE VOICE OF THE IMAGE

87

dedicatory note; the citations from Puskin's poem are used to identify Puskin with his own hero, Peter I; Puskin's art with Peter's city: ... Ero poMaH BcTaeaji H3 ΜΓΛΜ, κοτοροή He Β cHJiax aaTb ...

KJIHM3T

(... His novel Was rising from a haze which no climate Could have the power to give ...) The image is at first that typically heroic one of a man versus a landscape, with the man given the foreground to increase his size. Then comes a passage in which the lyrical imagination moves into the landscape, almost forgetting about its subject and catching itself only with another citation to correlate the landscape with the hero's emotions. The figure of the hero is then made to descend toward the water's edge. Having considerable difficulty threading through the unkempt vegetation and avoiding a metaphorical fisherman, who threatens to steal the next scene as the landscape did the first, Puskin sits on a rock: OH ceji Ha KaMeHb. Ha oflHa HepTa He Bbwajia BOJiHeHbH, C KaKHM OH norpy3H;icH β HTeHbe EßaHrejiba MOpcKoro jiHa. IIocjieflHeH paKOBHHe flopor CepfleiHbiii mejiecT, Kanjia CHa, ΚοτοροΗ Myica cojiOHa, Ee CKOBaBinaa. H3 CTBOPOK He Bbi3BaTb Η KJIHHKOM Hoxca Toro, "km 6OJIB JIIO6BH cBeaca. Toro cHacTJiHBeHinero Bcxjinna, Hto xjibiHyji BOH Η co3flaji ρκφ, KopajuioM ryöbi oöarpHB, Η 3aMep Ha ycTax nojiraia. (He sat on a rock. Not one Lineament betrayed the emotion With which he was absorbed in reading The gospel of the sea's bottom. Dear to the last seashell Is the heart's rustle, the drop of sleep, With which the torment that chained it Is salt. From the folds That with which the pain of love is fresh Will not be summoned even by the blade

88

THE VOICE OF THE IMAGE

Of a knife. That happiest sob That gushed out and formed a reef, Bloodstaining lips with coral, And expired on a polyp's tongue.) He is left sitting there, and the poem is resolved in a series of metaphors from marine life. These lines, like the poem as a whole, display a thematic dualism between the narrative and lyrical modes which is reflected in the degree to which the inner properties of words arrogate the property that normally belongs to reference. The main metaphor hinges upon a single word, stvorka, "fold", here of a bivalve mollusk's shell; but in an obsolete sense it refers to the clasp of a book, whence it sends us back to "the gospel of the sea's bottom" and, at the same time, symbolizes Puskin's writings. It's ambiguity is essential: it takes the innocent clam as a sexual image, but it is the word's polysemy that merges the writer with his own personal life. In these lines the lyrical mode gives another signal in the transition from past-tense to present-tense verbs. The displacement of the narrative time sequence by lyrical time - which is the time of the poem, of the words themselves - prepares the way for the final figure of the poem, in which Puskin, like Peter, finds his avatar in geography: he becomes the continental shelf, his lips an estuary. This final merging of the hero with the landscape is paralleled by the lyrical compression of the ages needed for the formation of a coral reef into a moment. Here again we observe the literalizing energy of the lyrical mode. The rhetorical na ustax ("on the lips"), which is used traditionally in the first part of the poem ("On his lips 'tomorrow' rang, As on the lips of others 'yesterday'"), and remains there an archaic poeticism, but at the end it must be read also in a renovated sense which suggests ust'e, "mouth of a river, estuary". The verb pogruzWsja is at first merely the figurative "to immerse oneself', but as the figure of the hero merges with the landscape, we are sent back to pick up the word again, now in its literal sense. Verbal tense, in the lyrical mode, becomes a specific device. We recall the correlation between tense and spatial distance in "Our Storm". To take the past unquestioningly and to present it as an objective past is to interpret, to speak in the second voice. The lyrical poet has many ways for actualizing this past. Not only a "remembered present", it can become thematically interesting as a past seen. Time itself becomes the lyrical subject. In the following quatrain, it is a result of pushing a spatio-temporal analogy in language back into literality:

THE VOICE OF THE IMAGE

89

Boaa pBajiacb H3 Tpy6, H3 JiyHoieic, Ü3 Jiyac, c 3a6opOB, c eeTpa c KpoBejn>, C inecToro naca nonojiyHonn, C neTBepToro η co ΒτοροΓο. (Water tore from pipes, from moonlets, From puddles, from fences, from wind, from rooves, From six o'clock in the morning, From four o'clock and from two.) Jakobson's "any sequence is a simile" prompts us to retain "from" in our translation of the preposition s even when it changes its reference from spatial to temporal "things", when it would normally be translated ΊI •

Μ

since . One of the most startlingly "immediate" poems in My Sister Life ("immediate" because the whole story cannot have taken more than a moment: the time for a ripe pear to fall from a tree), "Definition of the Soul", has no present tense forms in the first stanza, but uses rather the "potential" infinitive: CnejioH rpyuieio Β 6ypio cjieTeTb 0 6 ΟΛΗΟΜ 6e3pa3flejibHOM JiHCTe.

KaK OH npeaaH - paccrajica c cyKOM! CyMacöpoa - 3aaoxHeTca Β cyxoM! (To fly off like a ripe pear in the storm Round a lone inseparable leaf. What devotion - it parted from its branch! It is mad - it will choke in the dry!17) An infinitive, then a past, then a future: the pear is stopped in flight by a web of verbal tenses. But of course it is the exclamation and prediction, which must issue from an observer, the poet, that give us the event as immediacy. In the sequel, the poet continues to speak, but now in the second rather than the third person: Hamy poOTHy 6yps coacrjia. y3Haeun. JIH RHE3.NO cBoe, πτβΗΗΗΚ? Ο , ΜΟΗ JIHCT, ΤΗ n y r j i H B e ä m e r j i a !

Μτο Tbl 6beinbc«, ο, raejiK moh 3acTeHHHBbiö? 17

See 2ukovskij's poem "Friendship" (1805): CKaTHBirmcb c ropHofi BWCOTH, Jleacan Ha npaxe «y6, nepyHaMH pa36HTbiit; A C HHM Η ΓΗ6ΚΗΉ ruiiom, xpyroM ero OÖBHTMÖ ... Ο ApyiKÖa, 3το ΤΗ!

90

THE VOICE OF THE IMAGE

(The storm burnt up our homeland. Do you know your nest, little bird? Ο my leaf, you are more timid than a goldfinch! Why are you beating, Ο my shy silk?) So the poet is gradually identified with the pear, and the voice becomes not that of the poet, but that of the subject of the poem.

VIII. THE GRAMMATICAL METAPHOR

The lyrical concentration, the intensive focus of the lyrical eye, is opposed to the astigmatic rhetorical vision, for which the image is little more than the vehicle of a "system of commonplaces". When Puskin's Peter I stood on the shore "full of great thoughts", there was no necessity for identifying the monarch with the sea beyond a certain point. The stylization of Peter as a continent washed by that sea might be acceptable to the odist, but as a container (to justify "full") or as a clam, he would be indecorous. It is almost paradoxical that the lyricist, immersed as he is in his figures, should come up so often with the real coin of literality. Thus Pasternak's anthropomorphism is often the revocation of the figurative order. In a poem written from that cosmic, or at least intercontinental, stance, the "variation" which follows the "imitation" that we were discussing, Pasternak characteristically has the capes performing their toilet in the sea: Miajmcb 3Be3flj>i. Β Mope Mbumcb M H C H . Cjiemia COJIB. Η cjie3bi BticbixajiH. EWJIH ΤΒΜΗΜ cnajitHH. MNAJLHCB MBICJIH, Η NPHCJIYUUJBAJICA CHHJCC Κ Caxape. (The stars rushed. The capes were washing in the sea. The salt was blinded. And the tears dried. The sleeping-rooms were dark. Thoughts rushed, And the Spinx listened closely to the Sahara. Capes can be washed by the sea, as an ancient figure has it, but one needs a prefix for this operation if he wants to use the passive verb. Those readers who want the old figure will supply the "right" verb ( o m y v a f s j a ) and call Pasternak's usage incorrect. Similarly, his imagery seems "incorrect" to some. They want the blinding salt-spray and they get "blinded salt", a defiant defense of the visual order against the poetics of

92

THE GRAMMATICAL METAPHOR

"feeling": a film of salt is drying here, and no humans are necessary. Pasternak's anthropomorphism is said to be a result of the pervasively metonymical basis of his lyric: "It is ... characteristic of Pasternak to impute an activity instead of the actor, or conditions, an utterance, a quality, instead of the possessor of these things ..." 1 His "metonymical ways" do give his language a new and unique quality; and his world justifies the creation of an adjective from his name. Marina Cvetaeva notes that the policeman is "naturally absent" from the poem "Policeman's Whistle" in My Sister.2 Through these ways, the lyrical "I" is effaced, but so is the second or the third person protagonist. Similarly, the attributes of man or thing are severed from their owners and become free agents in the poem. Translators have persistently missed this feature and, with grotesque results, sewed the parts onto any characters that happen to be nearby in the context. All this begins in familiar territory; we have a metaphor, but the poet, instead of reinstating the tenor, is distracted by the vehicle, and he proceeds to tell its story. The metonymy arises from the incompleteness of the metaphorical process. The question, "In whose heart?" is characteristically left unanswered, and the adrenal gland becomes the real hero at a political rally: Β HbeM 3to cepAue bch KpoBb ero 6i>icTpo Xjibmyjia κ cjiaBe, cxjitmyB co meK? Boh oHa GbeTca: pyKH MHHHCTpa Ρτη η aopTH cacajiH β nynoK. (In whose heart was it that all his blood Rushed swiftly to glory, rushing from his cheeks? There it bursts: a minister's hands Squeezed mouths and aortas into a bunch.) Metonymy here works toward dehumanization; the anthropomorphism is reversed. If here the metonymy again subverts the order of feeling in favor of the visual moment, abstracted as in a photograph, the opposite may be expected where the real subject is an illusion, here action in a mirror: Η BOT, Β rffllHOTHHeCKOH 3TOH OTHH3He, MHe 30pK0CTH rjia3 He 3aflyn>. TaK nocjie floayyi nponoji3aioT cjih3hh rjia3aMH cTaTyü β ca^y. 1 8

Jakobson, R., "Randbemerkungen...", p. 363. Cvetaeva, M., Proza, p. 364.

THE GRAMMATICAL METAPHOR

93

(And there, in that hypnotic homeland I can't blow out the sharpness of eyes. Thus after the rain the slugs crawl out Like the eyes of statues in the garden.) The metaphor compares first sharpness of vision with a candle through the verb zadut' ("to blow out"), then the slugs with eyes. The shape and gleaming wetness of the slugs brings back the candle image, while their action as disembodied eyes captures what we feel when we look too sharply and too long at an object. The pretext for the metaphor is the verb, but it is justified by a visible resemblance, the shared property of oblanceolateness of form. The adhesion of human characteristics, including parts of the body, to nature often becomes a unifying compositional device. In the poem "Marburg", the city itself gradually acquires a physiognomy. The images become more and more intense, and the visible world takes form as when a fog lifts. The poem begins as autobiography in the second voice: the pronoun "I" occurs six times in the first quatrain. But then details "come alive": the street becomes a forehead and the cobblestones look up at the sky. The noon looks out "unblinkingly", and bushes become eyebrows. The theme of the poem is the struggle between passion, the self, and art, which transforms that passion. The city of Marburg, through art, comes to life, and the figure of the girl, whose rejection of the poet's proposal of marriage is the ostensible theme, gradually disappears, to be replaced by the city. At its best, the synaesthetic metonymy gives us the phenomenon of dija vu: PaccBeT 6mji cep, Kaie cnop β Kycrax, KaK roBop apecTaHTOB. (The dawn was gray, like a quarrel in the bushes, Like the talking of prisoners.) The moment wants more than remembrance; it wants flesh and bones. The poem "The Meeting" in Themes and Variations naturally begins with a parting: Β mecTOM nacy, KycKOM jiaimiiia4>Ta C BHe3anHO noACMpeBineö jiecTHmxbi, KaK pyxHeT β BO^y, KaK TpecHeTcs YcTajioe "HTaK, ao 3aBTpa!" (At six o'clock, like a piece of landscape From the suddenly wettened stairway,

94

THE GRAMMATICAL METAPHOR The weary "Well, see you tomorrow!" Plunges, banging, down into the water.)

Then the poet and the night appear as companions: Η MapTOBCKaa hohb η aBTop IIIjih pjmoM, η o6ohx cnopamux XonoaHaa pyKa jiaHfluia4)Ta Bejia aomoh, eejia co cGopnma. (And the March night and the author Walked together, and the cold hand, Of the landscape led both disputants home, Led them away from the mob.) And the meeting promised by the title? H MapTOBCKaa ηοή> η aBTop IIIJIH IIIHÖKO, BrjiswbiBaacb H3peflKa Β MejibKaBiuero KaK 6ti B3anpaB^y Η Bflpyr CKptiBaBiDeroca npH3paKa. To 6biji paccBeT. Η aMφHτeaτpoM, ^BHBIUHMCa Ha 30B npCJBeCTHHIDbl, HeCJIOCb Κ OÖOHM 3TO 3aBTpa, IIpoH3HeceHHoe Ha jiecTUHue. Oho c GareTOM πίλο, KaK paMouiHHK. flepeBbH, 3flaHHH Η XpaMbI He3aeiIIHHMH Ka3aJIHCb, τεμοιπηημη, Β npoßajie HeflocTynHofi paMbi. Ohh Tpexi>apycHbiM reK3aMeTpoM CMemajiHCb Bnpaeo no KBaApaTy. CMeiueHHbix bmhochjih 3aMepTBo, Hhkto He 3aMeiaji yipaxbi. (And the March night and the author Went right along, peering now and then At a spectre flashing as if in earnest And suddenly going into hiding. It was the dawn. And like an amphitheatre, Appearing at the herald's call, The tomorrow uttered on the stair Drifted toward them both. It came with a baguette, like a framer. Trees, buildings, and temples

THE GRAMMATICAL METAPHOR

95

Seemed not here, seemed there, In the pit of the impassable frame. Like a three-tiered hexameter, They shifted to the right along a square. They carried out the shifted ones good as dead, No one bothered to note the loss.)

What is taking place in the final stanzas of "The Meeting" is quite remarkable. Earlier, the word "landscape" is used twice: first, a chunk of it serves as a metaphor for the goodbye on the stairs, then it becomes a guide. A landscape is a portion of land, a scene, which the eye can encompass rapidly, without shifting, that is, a picture enclosed in a frame. At first, the "author" is seen as an element of that landscape. But then, in the third stanza from the last, the image of the stage appears: we still witness a picture, but it is more specifically a framed picture. The "tomorrow uttered on the stairway" then appears in the homely image of a stagehand carrying a baguette (that is, a molding, frame). Suddenly the city appears "in the pit of the impassable frame". (The word proval means the pit or trap lying just before the stage.) Then the city disappears. The poetic "I" has now stepped across the frame, through the looking-glass, and is on the stage. It is now in the landscape literally. We are made to see through the eyes of the lyrical "I" out into darkness over the edge of the stage. In this poem, the word "landscape" is used with great precision. It would be a mistake to suppose that it stands metonymically for "field", "city", "trees and houses", as it does often elsewhere. It stands for an enframed view. Similarly literal is the word marina ("marine, seascape") in a poem called "Steppe" in My Sister Life: "The boundless steppe, like a marine". Vladimir Weidle, in his article of 1928, objected to this use of marina: "... marina for him does not mean a seascape, but simply replaces the word for 'sea'". 3 But here again the word is used to dramatize the first person, to locate it inside a frame so that the image is viewed in a special way. An unwillingness to recognize the part played by metonymic manipulation of the visual structure of the poem lies behind Weidle's objection to the usage in the following quatrain from the poem "About These Verses": Β KamHe, JiaaoHBio 3acjioH«cb, CKBO3L· 4>opTKy K p H K H y fleTBope:

" Vejdle, V., "Stixi i proza Pasternaka", p. 462.

THE GRAMMATICAL METAPHOR

96

KaKoe, MHjitie, y Hac TbicHicjieTbe Ha flBope? (In a muffler, shielded with my palm, I'll shout through the window to the kids: What millenium is it, darlings, Out there in the yard?) Weidle objects: "However, at best, one can shield only his face with the palm of his hand". 4 Just so. With one word, the subjective " I " is sent out in the yard with the children. We see the poet as he appears in the window, a face shielded by a palm. The subjective grammar of the first person is revoked by the reflexive suffix. The metonymy, as soon as it is realized in the visual order, is no longer a figure: the world is literally transformed; parts of the whole gain autonomy; the effect no longer needs a cause, and the event as seen is all that there is to see. T o be effective, perhaps, this sort of metonymy must first appear to be incorrect grammar or imprecise usage. For example, the poem "In the Woods" from Themes and Variations offers some odd adjustments of verbal time as well as some strange lexical items, which - as we have seen before - represent an option as far as the needs of reference are concerned, but which are marked for other purposes in a poem: Jlyra MyTHJio xcapoM jmjioBaTbiM, Β Jiecy KJiyÖHJica Kacjje/ipajibHbiH Mpaie. M t o ocraBajioci» β jvmpe uejioBaTb hm? O h Becb 6 h j i h x , KaK b o c k Ha najibijax m h k . TaxoH, - He cnHHib, a t o j h > k o c h h t c h , M t o acaacfleuib cHa; hto apeMJieT nenoBeK, K o T O p O M y CKB03b c o h najiHT peCHHUbl Ecti> c o h

flBa

HCpHblX COJIHUa, 6bK)UIHX Η3-ΠΟΛ BCK.

TeKjiH jiyiH. TeKJiH acyKH c o t j i h b o m , CreKJio CTpeK03 cHoeajio no mexaM. Bbiji nojroH jiec MepuaiibeM κροποτιΐΗΒΗΜ, KaK πόα maimaMH y 4acoBiij,nKa. Ka3ajiocb, o h ycHyjr noa c t j t k ΗΗφκρΗ, Meat TeM KaK Bbiuie, β τερπκοΜ »HTape, HcnbiTaHHeftuiHe nacbi β 3φπρβ IlepecTaBJiHioT, CBepaB no »cape. Hx nepeBOAHT, coTpacaiOT nrjibi Η ceioT Tem>, η MaioT, η CBepJWT 1

Ibid., p. 462.

THE GRAMMATICAL METAPHOR

97

MaHTOBMH MpaK, KOTOpblH BBblCb B03flBHrJI0, Β HCTOMy flHH, Ha c h h h h iiH$γγ. CiacTJiHBbie n a c o e He H a ö J n o a a i o T , H o Τβ, BABOeM, Ka3ajIOCb, TOJIbKO c n » T .

(The meadows grew giddy in a lilac heat, In the woods a cathedral gloom swirled. What was left in the world for them to kiss? It was all theirs, as wax is, soft as flesh on the fingers. There is a sleep when you don't sleep, but dream That you long to sleep; that a man drowses, And through his sleep two black suns Singe his lashes, beating under his eyelids. Sunbeams flowed. Beetles flowed with the ebb, The dragonflies' lens scurried over cheeks. The woods were filled with meticulous flickering, As beneath a watchmaker's tweezers. It seemed he fell asleep to the tap of ciphers, And meanwhile, high above, in the pungent amber, They are resetting the most tested clocks In the ether, adjusting them to the heat. They put them back, set the needles in motion And sow a shadow, and fatigue, and drill The masted gloom, which it lifted up, high Into the day's languor, onto the blue clock dial. It seemed, the ancientness of bliss falls around. It seemed, the wood is embraced by a sunset of dreams. He who is happy minds not the time, But that couple over there, it seemed, only sleep.) The nouns of the first quatrain are of a very general type: "meadows", "a wood", unqualified by adjectives, and a peculiarly indefinite "they". But for this shadowy "they", we can take this as a pure first-voice utterance, dramatized by the alliteration in /. But the second quatrain is clearly a statement by the poet, the second voice, speaking in a rhetorical present. This makes the pure lyricism of the third quatrain all the more striking (see Chapter VI for a discussion of the sound pattern of this stanza). But it is, more than anything else, the resumption of the past tense in this stanza that gives us a remembered lyrical present. Before the fourth stanza, the only "non-Russian" word to appear in the poem is kafedraVnyj, the adjective "cathedral". In the fourth stanza there is the very obvious rhyme: Cifiri-v efire, the first member of which

98

THE GRAMMATICAL METAPHOR

is a very odd archaism and the second, in this usage, a poeticism. I say "in this usage", having in mind the ostensible meaning of efir ("ether") as a stock poetic cliche for "sky"; but here, in this blatant rhyme, the word demands special attention. Within the context of sleepiness, and in the neighborhood of the "pungent amber" of the preceding line, its ambiguity becomes apparent: it is also the ether of chemistry, the anaesthetic. This reading recalls the first stanza with its giddy meadows. My translation does not transmit a problem connected with Pasternak's use of the adjective kafedraVnyj, which has an oddly "English" manner about it in this context: the Russian word refers rather officially to the Greek noun kathedra, while the English counterpart refers to "cathedral church". Thus Weidle says: ... nor did he guard himself against the use of "kafedraVnyj mrak", an expression found in Themes and Variations which is as ignorant in its derivation as it is laughable in its unnecessariness.6 The critic may be right here, but the particular emphasis given to other foreignisms and archaic oddities in this poem does suggest, temptingly, the possibility that Pasternak was trying to canonize the English usage in Russian. The noun which it qualifies, mrak ("gloom"), appears again in the fifth stanza, again accompanied by an odd adjective, maitovyj ("mast" as an adjective). Special attention is called to the latter word by the fact that its accent, normally on the first syllable, falls here on the second. This word is rather specialized, so we may suppose that what has occurred here is a metonymical substitution: mrak from les ("forest, wood") in the idiomatic phrase mactovyj les ("mast forest", that is, a growth of tall, straight trees suitable for masts: an obsolete expression, by the way). The double occurrence of mrak, each time with an unusual adjective, should cause us to look closely at and compare the adjectives. On doing so, we find that Pasternak's "English" usage of "cathedral" finds at least partial justification in application to "masts", hence metaphorically to the buttresses and columns of the cathedral church. Pasternak has written of his envy of the English poet for some of the possibilities available to him: The small number of syllables in words in English opens up a rich expanse for English style. The conciseness of the English phrase is the guarantee of its having content, and its content is the guarantee of its musicality, because the music of the word consists not in its sonority, but in the mutual relation 6

Ibid., p. 462.

THE GRAMMATICAL METAPHOR

99

between sound and meaning. In this sense, English poetry is musical to an extreme degree.6 Ten years after this was written, Pasternak said: of Shakespeare's rhythms: It is a rhythm which reflects the enviably laconic quality of English, ... which makes it possible to compress a whole statement ... into a single line of iambic verse.7 All of which may remind us of statements from Pasternak's critics: ... but one thing is important to him: to join by whatever means are at hand within the least possible space the greatest possible number of heterogeneous, unrelated, disparate words. Poetry is for him before anything else the mixing of tongues, ..." The barbarism, the poetic archaism, and the lexical ambiguity are devices for gaining the terseness, associated with the metaphorical manner, which Pasternak elsewhere describes as the poet's answer to the brevity of man's existence. They are the vehicle of an extra-thematic, parallel statement. The oddness of usage sends us deeper into the word's history. The juxtaposition of words in their poetic space, like that of images in real space, when it is unfamiliar, demands articulation according to some principle declared in the poem. To discover that principle, we might consider another of those dicta of Safe Conduct: "Art is, as activity, realistic, and it is, as fact, symbolic". 9 The metonymy as abstraction, as dismemberment, gives in the completed product a new world, the Pasternakian landscape. Our concern, however, has been with the process of the poetry, its activity. We have wanted to be within that landscape, to read its signs and box its compass. I take it that the "realism" of art as activity is in the logic of its processes, the internal rules that are followed in its composition. Perhaps these rules are finally inaccessible to us. The fact of art may be all that we can know. If so, imperfections are tolerable; we will consider them the idiosyncrasies of a private world. In "In the Wood", we look in vain for the "it", or its antecedent, which "lifted up" (actually "raised", as a building) the gloom. Perhaps the best we can say is that the transitive verb vozdviglo, with its bookish, portentous qualities (see Puskin's famous Ja pamjatnik sebe vozdvig nerukotvornyj), was needed to further the architectural image that 6

' 8

'

Pasternak, Soiinenija, III, p. 184. Pasternak, I Remember, p. 128. Vejdle, "Stixi i proza Pasternaka", p. 463. Pasternak, B. L., Soiinenija, II, p. 243.

100

THE GRAMMATICAL METAPHOR

started with kafedraVnyj. But the poem is full of obscurities of this sort. In the third line of the poem, the im ("for them") is tacked on to the end of the sentence, while it would be far more comfortable next to the verb (ostavalos') which controls it. Then in the next line, what is the antecedent of on ("it")? Apparently mrak. Later on, in the fourth and fifth stanzas, we find verbs without an explicit subject yet suggesting some less general actor than that undefined "they". The verbal tenses are far from clear. In the fourth stanza, "it seemed" is followed by a past-tense clause, which with the perfective verb describes action anterior to the act of seeming. This clause is connected then with a clause in the present tense in which the clocks are being reset contemporaneously, with the act of seeming (the Russian present is, more correctly, a non-past; it is not an absolute present). But the second subordinate clause is joined to the first through the connective mei tem kak, that is, "meanwhile, at the same time that ...". The final stanza of the poem is murky, if not "incorrect", in its use of tenses, and there "ancientness" is seen to be a subject. Then comes the citation from Griboedov about happy lovers caring nothing for time. In the next to the last stanza we have been told that the macrocosmic clock has been set, but which way, up or back, we do not know. In the stanza before that, the present has been projected into the past through a grammatical device; so maybe we are justified in supposing that the clock has been set back. What we have said about ambiguities applies also to grammar. K. S. Aksakov put the matter admirably: "... apparent incorrectness of usage makes it possible for a word to take on a more abstract meaning, that of a property - a metaphorical meaning".10 Like "In the Woods", the third "variation" on the Puskin theme, the first quatrain of which was discussed at the beginning of this chapter, is an exercise in the manipulation of time within the very limited temporal space of the poem. Extraordinary means are needed here, where in the space of three quatrains continents are traversed and a momentous night is lived through. The first, and most obvious, device that the poet uses is that of saturating the lines with verbs. This is achieved through the use of intransitive verbs, which permit maximally short sentences; and which also, by the way, make each action seem independent: each object works its own territory. 10

Aksakov, K. S., Soiinenija filologiieskie, V. 2, Part I (Moscow, 1875), p. 479. Quoted in Cerkassova, Ε. T., "O metaforiccskom upotreblenii slov ...", Issledovanija po jazyku sovetskix pisatelej, AN SSSR (Moscow, 1959), p. 12.

THE GRAMMATICAL METAPHOR

101

All of the verbs (there are 18 of them in 12 lines) except one are in the past tense. This one is in the second quatrain: IljibuiH cBe*m. H, Ka3axtoci>, cTbraeT KpoBb Kojiocca. 3amibiBajiH ry6bi rojiy6oö yjn>i6Koio nycTbiHH. Β nac OTJiHBa ΗΟΉ, nonina Ha y6bun>. (Candles swam. And, it seemed, the blood Of the Colossus was congealing. The lips floated In the desert's blue smile. The night at ebb tide disappeared.) The "was congealing" of the translation is probably inaccurate for the non-past form stynet, the appearance of which coincides with the only "subjective" verb in the poem, kazalos', "it seemed". This word has lost much of its verbality to become a modal adverb, "seemingly", and where our first impulse is to regard the impersonal object of the "seeming" as the poetic "I", mne kazalos' ("it seemed to me"), we are inclined on consideration of the "actual" tense form of stynet to make the Sphinx the object. This reading leads to an ambiguity in the verb zaplyvali, or at least emphasizes one that is already present: on "floated" we can now superimpose "bloated". The verb has the extension "to thicken, become bloated", especially from edema and especially of the eyes. To sum up: the odd tense form of the first verb brings the poetic eye inside the subject (which seems to be a composite of two of the ancient wonders of the world) and thus "subjectivizes" the following images. We find again the characteristic Pasternakian justification of imagery, for it turns out now that the vast geographical sweep of the poem is more than a rhetorical stance. It is now the "realistic" vision: "He doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus". It is the final stanza in which the view is revealed: Mope TpoHyn Βετεροκ c MapoKKO. ΠΙεπ caMyM. Xpaneji Β cHerax ApxaHrejn>CK. rijibUiH CBeHH. HepHOBHK "IIpopoKa" ripocbixaji, η 6pe35KHji aeHb Ha Tame. (A breeze from Morocco touched the sea. The simoom blew. Arxangel'sk snored in the snows. Candles swam. The first draft of "The Prophet" Was drying, and day was dawning on the Ganges.) In the grammatical metaphor, the grammar makes its own, parallel, statement. To describe the phenomenon as "metaphor" is to call atten-

102

THE GRAMMATICAL METAPHOR

tion to the fact that grammatical attributes of the word intersect attributes of the tenor, which are properly in the domain of reference. A simple example of grammatical metaphor would be Annenskij's line Kogda sumerki xodjat po domu ("When twilight moves about the house"). Here there is neither solecism nor unusual usage, but the plurality of the Russian word for "twilight" serves as the vehicle of a vague anthropomorphism. A similar example of the use of plurality as the intersecting property could be the image from Slovo ο polku Igoreve: svivaja slavy oba poly sego vremene... ("Enwinding glories about this time..."). Though it is possible that slava has the lexical option slavoslovie, "paean", it is likely that it is a grammatical metaphor for which the vehicle, plurality, gives a reification of the abstract "glory", while keeping the original meaning. The category of plurality is one of the most promising vehicles for the grammatical metaphor, as is attested by the use of it in English jargon; e.g., "... the reasonings leading to the measurement of meaning in general grew out of interpretations of the findings in this earlier research".11 One more example to show the accuracy of Aksakov's observation about the relation of this type of metaphor to "incorrect" usage, from Eliot: There will be time to murder and to create ... And time for a hundred indecisions, ... These are all rather "natural" types. For the creative grammatical metaphor, we will be on the lookout for solecisms and amphibolies, as in the following lines from Pasternak's "Summer" (Second Birth): npOH3HTejn»HBIX HBOJIOr κρπκ Η ABJICHbC KHTaÜKOH η yrjieM xcenTHJio c t b o j i m .

(The cry and phenomenon of piercing orioles Painted the trunks yellow with parchment and charcoal.) The singular verb zeltilo ("painted yellow") can be used with the plural subject, according to the grammarians, only when that subject is abstract (when the verb follows the subject). In this case, the first subject is concrete. The second subject might have been translated "appearance", but I decided on "phenomenon" precisely because the singular verb seems to ask for the more philosophical subject. But the metaphor is in the power of the grammatical category of singularity to fuse the subjects into a single phenomenon, an effect which is supported by the metonymic transfer of the epithet "piercing" to the orioles. 11 Osgood, C. E., et ah, The Measurement of Meaning (Urbana, III., 1957), p. 20.

THE GRAMMATICAL METAPHOR

103

Syllepsis, as above, is closely related to anacoluthon and other types of amphiboly. We might add a few examples to the ones offered in Chapter IV. In our more recent discussion of the poem "Spring", we called attention to an ambiguity on zvezda ("star"), which in this context suggested also "asterisk" (zvezdoika). We did not mention the amphiboly of the Russian instrumental case, in which the word appears in the poem. As "star" we have agency, as "asterisk" - comparison or transformation. We call the usage amphibolous because it affects the verb (participle) as well. Something similar happens in the following lines from the cycle "Waves" in Second Birth: MHe xoneTca ,ζιομοη, β orpoMHoerb KBapTHpw, naBOAflmeft rpycTb. Boüny, CHHMy najibTO, onoMHiocb, OrHSMH yjrau o3apiocb.

ITeperopoaoK TOHKope6pocTb IIpoHfly HacKB03b, npoäfly, KaK CBeT. Ilpoitny, KaK o6pa3 b x o a h t β o6pa3 Η KaK npe^MeT ceneT npe^MeT.

(I want home, into the hugeness Of the room bringing on sadness. I'll enter, take off my coat, reflect, I'll be illumined by the streetlights. I'll pass right through the thinSlattedness of the partition, pass like light. I'll go through as image enters image And as an object cuts across an object.) The first quatrain seems innocent and straightforward; but when we have read the second we may look back and find that the metaphor, poetlight, has already been made in that first stanza. The translation shows our first reading: the streetlights are an illuminating agent, and the verb of the last line (ozarjus') is a passive. Our second reading gives us an instrumental of comparison, and the verb becomes intransitive: "I will light up like the lights of the street". The vehicle of the poet's incandescence is the grammatical category of intransitiveness, which appears first in the verb of the third line, opomnjus', "I'll think, reflect, come to my senses, take stock of myself."

IX. MELODY AND METAPHOR

Β K o i m e , n p e f l OT6e3HOM, C T y n a a n o

Kane

JIHCTBM OÖJIETEJIOÄ Β » c a p y ö p e f l O B O M ,

Ά c He6a, KaK c r y 6 , nepeTsmyTbix c t i n t i o , H a n e T HeaoMOJiBOK c o p e a j i p y x a B O M . 1

To say that the image can speak may be, first of all, simply to take at face value that most favored device of poets down through the centuries, the animating trope. The Pasternakian poetics is in this sense everywhere and throughout a poetics of literal meaning. Through the figure of speech, it comes to a new conception of "proper" meaning. But still, can the poet's animism ever be more than an expression, a way of saying things? The answer to this question is not to be found in an investigation of the poet's degree of belief, his sincerity. On the contrary, as we have seen, a major theme of the poetry is disbelief. Its pathos is the helplessness of a man trying to speak, but "only the image can keep up with the successes of nature". Language, the language of words, is an accomplishment of man. Therefore, how is it that an image comes to speak? Only, it seems, if we relinquish our control over the language and allow it to do the thinking. We have tried to show how this happens in Pasternak's poetry. To see the poet, as we now must, as a stenographer, however, is not yet to give the image a mouth, tongue, and vocal cords. Now we need the metaphor, but again we must ask whether it is not just a way of saying things, rather than a thing discovered in nature. Even though Pasternak's statements about his poetry are almost always presented in the form of observations about the whole of art, one still wants to inquire how Pasternak's metaphorism differs from that of other 1

At the end, before departure, stepping through a pile Of leaves tossing in a delirious fever, From the sky, as from hps stretched taut with rash, I tore the film of half-said things with my sleeve.

MELODY AND METAPHOR

105

poets. If we compare the image of our epigraph above with that of the first lines of Puskin's famous elegy "October 19th", we find a difference that should by this time be predictable: PoiiaeT jiec Sarpantm CBOH y6op, CpeöpHT Mopo3 yBHHyBinee none, ΠροΓϋΑΗοτ aeHb KaK 6γ;ιτο noHeeojie H CKpoeTCa 3a Kpaö OKpyacHbix rop.

(The forest sheds its crimson attire, The frost silvers the withering field, The day peers out as if against its will, Then hides behind the edge of the mountains round.) The outstanding difference is that, in Pasternak's lines, the lyrical "I" is a participant in the metaphorical action. Puskin's lines are, by the way, "musical" in a sense that we have been working hard to attach to that term. They present a reflective sound design in the first distich with the boundary at the line division reflecting the formulas in -jartand -br-, then a translatory pattern in -kr- in the fourth line. But the sound structure is subordinate to a larger musical principle which is inseparable from the lines' reference. They function above all to create the elegiac mood. Puskin in the lines which follow these leaves his metaphor; its purpose is served. The personification is a stylization and nothing more. The forest is not going to permit any prying, however disinterested, into her feminine characteristics. Furthermore, it would be pointless to read these lines in the "realistic" manner, to try to locate the subjective eye in that field and trace its wanderings. Pasternak, however, takes the metaphor as an obligation. His consistency is not one of mood so much as the sort of consistency that we expect of a surveyor: the first time through the woods he may not know where he is going, but once started his path is determined. But at what point does this more thorough-going metaphorism become a distinct poetics? When the metaphor is no longer ancillary to the theme, but becomes the theme, we are justified in speaking of a new departure. But finally it is one's understanding of the world that gives us a poetics, and the starting point for Pasternak is the sense of wonder. The poetics is the creation of the poetry, rather than the other way around. The poet's relinquishment of control to language is a transaction with the unknown, the purchase of a ticket: Η pH({)Ma He BTopeHbe οτροκ, Α rapaepoÖHtiH ΗΟΜβροκ,

106

MELODY AND METAPHOR TanoH Ha MecTO y kojiohh Β 3arpo6Hbm ryji κορΗβϊί η jioh. (And rhyme is not a seconding of lines, But a cloakroom check, A ticket for a place beside the columns To the rumble of roots and breasts beyond the grave.)

The result of poetry is unpredictable, hence a miracle: npomaö, pa3Max Kpbuia pacnpaBjieHHbiH, üojieTa BOJibHoe ynopcTßo, Η o6pa3 Mapa, β cjiobc HBJieHHbifl, H TBOpMeCTBO, Η HyAOTBOpCTBO. (Farewell, outstretched sweep of the wing, Free boldness of flight, Image of the world manifest in the word, Creativity and miracle-making.) The miracle is the possibility of metaphor, which by its very nature invokes the analogy with communication. The transferability of properties is indeed communication in the sense of that term as used in genetics: the transmission of information. The poetics, which develops out of the word-game, is paradoxically prelinguistic. Meaning becomes a property of things: Λ Bbmieji Ha ruioma/n·. 51 μογ 6brn> cohtch BTOpHHHO pOflHBIIIHMCH. KaHmaH MaJIOCTb 5K&Jia h, He ctebh mchh hh bo hto, Β npomajibHOM 3Ha«jeHbH ceoeM no^biMajiacb. (I went out on the square. I could be counted Born for a second time. Each small thing Lived and, putting my worth at zero, Rose up in farewell meaning.) It is the wonder of the child. The amazed poplar of "Spring" is first of all the child's drawing of the oral oval of surprise, and the fearful house the child's house with two square eyes and a mouth. It is from the world of childhood that the image gets its lineaments: Ά cjibixaji προ crapocTb. CrpaniHhi npopnuaHb«! PyK κ 3Be3flaM He bckhhct hh οληη 6ypyH. ΓοΒορΗτ - He Bepniiib. Ha Jiyrax jnma Ηβτ, Υ npyflOB Ηβτ cepflua, Bora Ηβτ β 6opy. (I've heard about old age. Terrible omens! Not one breaker will throw up its hands to the stars.

MELODY AND METAPHOR

107

They speak - you don't believe. No face in the meadows, The ponds without a heart, God is gone from the forest.) The image gets its eyes and mouth, but how about a voice? "The universe is a deaf place", we are told: we might suppose that it also suffers from aphasia. There seem at least to be obstructions to speech: Η τ ο Β TOM, HTO Ha BcejieHHOH - MacKa? Η τ ο Β TOM, HTO HeT T3KHX IlIHpOT, K O T O p b I M H a 3HMy 3aMa3KOÜ 3aacaTb He Bbi3BajiHCb 6 b i ροτ?

Ho Bemn p ß y T c c e 6 a jraHHHy, TepaioT B J i a c r b , POHHIOT n e c T b , K o r e a y HHX e c T b n e T b n p H H H H a , Koraa ana JIHBHH ΠΟΒΟΑ e c T b .

(What if the universe has a mask on? What if there are no expanses such That someone wouldn't volunteer To stuff their mouth with putty for the winter? But things tear off their mask, They lose control and drop their honor, When they have a reason to sing, When there's an occasion for a shower.) How could one have predicted that the word licina, "mask", would so cooperate with the metaphor of sealing up a house for winter by providing the homonymic ambiguity "lockplate", which it also denotes? The mouth of the image begins to speak when we understand that language is in nature. Like a gesture made by a branch in the breeze or the assent of a flower, the signs of language are unintended, are simply there. The image ought to have something to say. When Cvetaeva speaks of Pasternak's "writing nature", she makes nature into poetry, and she also implies that the image tells us about itself, since nature is the theme. In the above lines, and occasionally elsewhere, Pasternak adopts the old stylization of poetry as song, probably as birdsong, uninhibited by purpose and spontaneous. This sense of music is hardly presented at its best in the following lines, which are indisputably musical in respect to compositional design: Xramovöj ν malaxiti Ii xölen, Vozlelejan ν srebre /' kosogör — MnogodöVnuju geM BpeaceTca Β He6o HopBenm cKpeaceT KOHbica. (Rarer, rarer, ra-rer step, skater, Cutting your stride in flight from above, Turning, the scrape of your skate cuts Like a constellation into Norway's sky.) The word reze ("rarer, thinner") is wanted here first of all for its con' terkassova, Ε. T., op. cit., p. 12.

MELODY AND METAPHOR

115

sonants and its "sharp", "hard" 8 front vowel e. As a sound metaphor, it "means" "scraping" before its lexical cue is given. The sounds lead to a discovery, though, when we recognize how well the word gives us the slowing frequency of the skater's steps as he gains momentum. Though it may be possible, as suggested by Fonagy's study, to describe the sounds of a language as vectors in some sort of sensory space (we here recognize the similarity between Fonagy's methods and those of Osgood), it must be understood that the metaphorical possibilities of sounds in poetic combinations are as varied and numberless as the things of our world. Thus the sounds of the above quatrain from Over the Barriers appear in a different role in the following lines from the same book: Η HH ziymH. O^HH JIHUII> xpnn, ToCKJIHBblH JIH3r Η CTyK HOXCOBbffl, Η cTajiKHBaiomaxca ΓΛΗ6 CKpeacemymae nepeaceew. (And not a soul. Only the wheeze, The dreary chatter and pounding of knives, And the gnashing mastications Of the blocks grinding in collisions.)

The subject is the break-up of ice on a river during a spring thaw. This is the final stanza. Earlier, we have seen things metaphorized thematically into a toothy carnivore, but now in the final line the phonetic metaphor skreieScusöie perezovy ("gnashing mastications"), with its "chewing" consonants and its "grating" vowel e combining with the "cutting" velar, makes an additional statement. It is significant for our thesis about extra-thematic metaphors that the real vehicle "teeth" is absent from the poem's explicit reference. Although there is ice in both of these poems, similar sounds are used for quite different effects. The versatility of the speech sound is no different in this respect from that of anything else that enters into the metaphorical process. While a metaphor might be explained by isolating its ground, those particular properties which are transferable from one term to the other, there is no paraphrase that can give us back the metaphor itself. Probably the most traditional of the extra-semantic metaphors is the metrical metaphor. From a very limited number of verse patterns - and the actual properties of any syllabo-tonic meter could be listed very quickly - it is possible for a good poet to choose one that 8

In Safe Conduct, Pasternak speaks of Majakovskij's speech mannerism of saying e for a as "a chunk of sheet iron rocking his diction" (Soiinenija, II, p. 270).

116

MELODY AND METAPHOR

is not only "appropriate", but representative, that is metaphorical, of the countless motions and inflections of nature. A poem in Second Birth begins: H e BOJiHyficH, He i u i a i h , He T p y n n c e p i m a He M y i a S .

Chji hccskiuhx η

(Don't be worried, don't cry, and don't labor Forces now dried up, don't torture your heart.) The tenor of the metrical metaphor of the first line is the speaker, the poet. The anapaestic meter possesses a property of hesitation, the frustrated rise of the iambic. The image is of a man trying to get up from an armchair in alarm or trying to say the right thing while having to say something. We have now something quite opposed to the melodic principle, which in Ejxenbaum's usage is to be associated particularly with trisyllabic measures. He speaks of a "reflected melody", a "melody mechanically generated by the rhythm": The smoothness of the rhythmical movement ... becomes wedded with the smoothness of intonation and forms as it were an abstract melody [napev] independent of either meaning or syntax.® Pasternak, being sensitive to the metaphorical possibilities of meter, varies it radically, but without parting from the traditionally permissible: Bepoö β öyaymee He 6oiocb noKa3aTi»CH T e 6 e K p a c H o ö a e M .

(With faith in the future I am not afraid Of appearing to you as a loudmouth.) These lines are from the second stanza of the poem just cited. The last stanza of this poem gives us now meter, not sound, at once in the two different guises that we have sought to distinguish in this chapter: n y T b . floGptiit n y r b . Hama Haina necTb He nofl xpoBJieio a o M a . Kan poctok Ha CBeTy pacnpaMHCb, floöpLiH

cbh3L·,

T w nocMOTpHinb Ha Bee n o - f l p y r o M y .

(Good luck. Good luck as you go. Our tie, Our honor is not under the roof of a house. Like a sprout straightening up in the light, You will see everything differently now.) 9

Ejxenbaum, op. cit., p. 95.

MELODY AND METAPHOR

117

We have in the first line, without any loss of syllables or any other departure from traditionally legitimate manipulations of the anapaest, a rhythm that could be described as "sprung" trochaic. It gives the inflections of the second voice: the "melody" of a man speaking his goodby, resigned and final. This is a metaphor only in a hypostatic sense of that word, a sense that we think we have showed to be abusive. The third line, however, uses meter as a metaphorical vehicle, and it is necessarily absolutely regular (for how else would we know the properties of the meter itself?): Kak rostök\na sveturasprjamjas\ A sprout, brought out of the house into the sunlight, probably does not straighten up by conscientiously bobbing its head in anapaests; but it is precisely this rhythm, the hesitant iambic, and not the reference, which gives us the plant's jerky action. To press further a distinction that we have already made for the phonetic metaphor: the question here, as there, is not just that of the appropriateness of a given formal device to the poem's reference. This may be sooner a matter of what we have called, for want of a better term, sound (and here it would be "metrical") symbolism. Thus the iambic may be proper for the heroic ode because it is a "rising" meter, hence noble, dignified. But it has no metaphorism until it gives us the measured rhythm of the queen's steps in her ascent. Unless there is a rhythm outside the poem in the world of the poem's reference, there can be no metaphor in the poem's meter. To say this is to reemphasize he closeness of the metaphorical manner to a poetics of description, that is a poetics which wants to be objective and for which the author only supplies the instruments for observation. As Pasternak put it in his first version of the early poem "Venice": mohm n p o c r o p H e H CHOBaTb Β TyMaHax 6e3 Metro. O n a M Η CHaM

(My eyes and dreams will have more room Scurrying about in the fogs without me.) The beauty of the resulting poetry is in the surprise that it holds for the poet as well as the reader. Refracting the world in its search for properties to make its metaphors, the language pieces together a new world with new correspondences and family ties. One may suppose that the idea of "fragrance" got into the line Zvjozdy blagouxanno razaxalis1 ("The stars fragrantly gasped") in the first place because "its word" could supply the consonant χ needed for the onomatopoeic metaphor. But this enchanting image is hardly exhausted by referring the reader

118

MELODY AND METAPHOR

to the tricks which Pasternak plays with the dimensions of space in this poem ("Definition of Creativity", discussed briefly in Chapter V). To say that giving a fragrant breath to these stars brings them close to us is to say something, but the magic remains - a discovered felicity which lives beyond any analysis. It is thus that the poem may be said to have its own life: the poet is not a god whose creations are fully understood from the beginning, their every movement determined; he is rather an intermediary for a creature with its own will. One can now read the following lines from Second Birth not as an idle conceit, but as something earned: Ά BMecTO 5KH3HH Bapmemiciia IlOBeJI 6bl 3KH3HB CaMHX Π03Μ. (I would instead of a versewriter's life Lead the life of the poems themselves.)

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. BOOKS BY PASTERNAK1

A. Poetry Bliznec ν tuiax [A Twin in the Clouds] (Moscow, 1914). Poverx bar'erov [Over the Barriers] (Moscow, 1917). Sestra moja zizn' [My Sister Life] (Berlin-Peterburg-Moscow, 1922). Temy i variacii [Themes and Variations] (Berlin-Moscow, 1923). KaruseV [Carrousel] (Poems for children) (Leningrad, 1925). Izbrannye stixi [Selected Poems] (Moscow, 1926). Dve knigi [Two Books] (Moscow-Leningrad, 1927) (Sestra moja zizn' and Temy i variacii). Devjat'sot pjatyj god [The Year 1905] (Moscow-Leningrad, 1927). Zverinec [The Menagerie] (Poems for children), (Moscow, 1929). Poverx bar'erov [Over the Barriers] (Moscow-Leningrad, 1929). Izbrannye stixi [Selected Poems] (Moscow, 1929). Spektorskij (Moscow, 1931). Vtoroe rozdenie [Second Birth] (Moscow, 1932). Poemy [Poems] (Moscow, 1933). Stixotvorenija [Poems] (Leningrad, 1933; 2nd ed., 1935; 3rd ed., 1936). Izbrannye stixotvorenija [Selected Poems] (Moscow, 1933). Izbrannye stixi [Selected Poetry] (Moscow, 1933). Na rannix poezdax [On Early Trains] (Moscow, 1943). Zemnoj prostor [The Earth's Expanse] (Moscow, 1945). Izbrannye stixi i poemy [Selected poetry and poems] (Moscow, 1945). Izbrannoe [Selected Works] (Moscow, 1948). Kogda razguljaetsja [When the Weather Clears] (Paris, 1959, London, 1960). Soiinenija [Works] (Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1961). Vol. I: Stixi ipoemy, 1912-1931 [Verse and Poems 1912-1931]. Vol. II: Proza 1915-1958 [Prose 1915-1958], Vol. Ill: Stixi 1936-1959. Stixi dlja detej. Stixi 1912-1957, ne sobrannye ν knigi avtora. Stat'i i vystuplenija [Verse, 1936-1959, Verse for Children, Verse, 19121957, Not Collected in the Author's Books, Articles and Speeches],

B. Prose Rasskazy [Stories] (Moscow-Leningrad, 1925). 1 For a complete bibliography, including Pasternak's translations and publications in journals, see the Soiinenija (Ann Arbor, 1961), III, p. 269 if.

120

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Oxrannaja gramota [Safe Conduct] (Leningrad, 1931). VozduSnye puti [Aerial Ways] (Moscow, 1933). Povest' [A Tale] (Leningrad, 1934). Doktor Zivago (Milan, 1957; Ann Arbor, 1958; Glasgow, 1958; Paris, 1959).

Π. CRITICISM OF PASTERNAK'S POETRY (1912-1932) Adamovic, G., "Nesostojaväajasja progulka", Sovremennye zapiski, LIX (Paris, 1935), pp. 295 f. Aseev, N., "Organizacija re£i", Pecat' i revoljucija, 1923, No. 6, pp. 71-78. Bern, A. L., "Introduction to Pasternak, B.", Lyrika (Praha, 1935). Berger, Yves, Boris Pasternak, une etude (Paris, 1958). Berlin, Isaiah, "The Energy of Pasternak", Partisan Review, Vol. XVII, No. 7 (Sept.Oct. 1950), pp. 748 if. Bowra, Maurice, "Boris Pasternak", in The Creative Experiment (London, 1949). Brown, Alec, "On Translating Pasternak", in Pasternak, B., Safe Conduct (London, 1959). Cohen, J. M., "The Poetry of Boris Pasternak", Horizon, X, No. 55 (July 1944), pp. 23-36. Cvetaeva, M., Proza (New York, 1953). Eisberg, I., "Mirovosprijatie B. Pasternaka", Na literaturnom postu, 1930, No. 7, pp. 42-50. Erlich, Victor, "The Concept of the Poet in Pasternak", The Slavonic and East European Review, XXXVII, No. 89 (June 1959). Jakobson, R., Essay and Commentary in Pasternak, B., Glejt (Praha, 1935). Jakobson, R., "Randbemerkungen zur Prosa des Dichters Pasternak", Slavische Rundschau, VII (1935), pp. 357-374. Leznev, Α., "Boris Pasternak", Krasnaja nov', No. 8 (Aug. 1926), pp. 205-219. Leznev, Α., Sovremenniki: literaturno-kritiieskie oierki (Moscow, 1927), pp. 32-54. Markov, V., Priglusennye golosa (New York, 1952), pp. 21-23. Miller-Budnickaja, R., "O 'filosofii iskusstva' B. Pasternaka i R. M. Rilke", Zvezda, 1932, No. 5, pp. 160-168. Mirski, D. S., A History of Russian Literature, ed. F. Whitfield (New York, 1949), pp. 501-503. Nilsson, Ν. Α., "Life as Ecstacy and Sacrifice: Two Poems by Boris Pasternak", Scando-Slavica, Tomus V (Copenhagen, n. d.). Payne, Robert, The Three Worlds of Boris Pasternak (New York, 1961). Poggioli, R., "Boris Pasternak", Partisan Review, Fall, 1958. Poggioli, R., The Poets of Russia, 1890-1930 (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 321-342. Postupal'skij, I., "Boris Pasternak", Novyj mir, 1928, No. 2, pp. 229-237. Rannit, Aleksis, "The Rhythm of Pasternak", Bulletin of the New York Public Library, Vol. 63, No. 11 and Vol. 64, No. 8 (1959-1960). (Contains an extensive bibliography.) Reavey, George, "Introduction" to The Poetry of Boris Pasternak (New York, 1959). Ripellino, A. M., "Introduction" to Pasternak, B., Poesie 1915-1957 (Torino, 1957). Schimanski, Stefan, "Introduction" to Pasternak, B., The Collected Prose Works (London, 1945). Selivanovskij, Α., "Boris Pasternak", Krasnaja nov', 1933, No. 1, pp. 210-219. Selivanovskij, Α., "Boris Pasternak", Oierki po istorii russkoj sovetskoj poezii (Moscow, 1936), pp. 185-203.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

121

Selivanovskij, Α., "Poet i revoljucija. Ο tvoröestve B. Pasternaka", Literaturnaja gazeta, 1931, No. 44. Stepun, F., "Boris Leonidoviö Pasternak", Novyj Zurnal, LXI (1959), pp. 187-207. Struve, Gleb, "Iz zametok ο masterstve Borisa Pasternaka", Vozdusnye puti (New York, 1960), pp. 88-117. Struve, Gleb, Soviet Russian Literature 1917-1950 (Norman, The University of Oklah o m a Press, 1951), pp. 173-177. Tarasenkov, Α., "Boris Pasternak", Zvezda, 1931, N o . 5, pp. 228-235. Tarasenkov, Α., " Vtoroe rozdenie B. Pasternaka", Literaturnaja gazeta, 1932, No. 56. Tynjanov, Ju., Arxaisty i novatory (Leningrad, 1929), pp. 562-568. Vejdle, V., Introduction, "Boris Pasternak i modernizm", in Pasternak, B., Soöinenija, I, pp. xxxv-xliv. Vejdle, V., "Stixi i proza Pasternaka", Sovremennye zapiski, XXXVI (Paris, 1928), pp. 459-470. Wrenn, C. L., "Boris Pasternak", Oxford Slavonic Papers, II (1951). Xalafov, K., " O muzike stixov Pasternaka", Mosty, No. 8 (München, 1961).