Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd replies – and offers a pretty good sales pitch

Sold!

Yesterday, we wrote about the new edition of Vladimir Nabokov‘s  “Pale Fire” poem, liberated from the pages of the the Pale Fire book and published as a stand-alone work.  We also mentioned Stephen Gertz’s reservation about the Gingko Press’ effort – principally that this book is not the first time “Pale Fire” was published all by its lonesome; Arion Press published the poem in 1994.

We received a charming reply today from the eminent Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd, who edited the small volume and wrote a commentary (in another letter below, R.S. Gwynn writes that Boyd’s “close reading of the poem is masterly”). It’s so much fun we thought we would publish the note as a separate post. Boyd writes:

999-line poem on file cards, as the author intended.

“I was also an adviser on the 1994 Arion Press edition of “Pale Fire,” which is an exquisite thing, with a moiré cloth box and cover that manage to capture the interplay of sun and moon in the passage of “Timon of Athens” from which Nabokov and Shade pick the phrase “pale fire.” But that was a limited fine edition of the whole novel (at $600 on release), including the poem of course, but also with a separate booklet for the poem (also in a moiré cloth cover), as part of the same boxed set, typeset as if typed on index cards and bound into booklet form.

What makes the Gingko edition so unprecedented–and here the credit belongs, if first to Vladimir Nabokov, then next to artist Jean Holabird, who proposed the project, is:

a) that it is of the poem alone;

A poet as well as novelist, and perhaps a pugilist, too

b) that the poem appears as if handwritten on index cards (just as Kinbote describes it), with the last 50 lines as if in first draft rather than fair copy (and with the twelve cards of legitimate variants kept by Shade also downloadable from Ginkgo), as if the reader has direct access to what Shade wrote, without the intervention of Kinbote;

c) that the poem is also presented as a booklet, for easier reading, almost as if it might have been published had Shade been real, and Kinbote had not intervened (with a brief note About the Author and a page listing Other Books by the Author), and with Jean Holabird’s delicate art work, as it were, belatedly launching Shade’s last poetry volume;

d) that there is also a booklet with two essays, by R.S. Gwynn and myself, that focus only on the poem. The focus on the poem, in design and detail, the play throughout with the fiction that readers are for the first time allowed immediate access to a major American poem of 1959, is unique to the Gingko edition, and the result of an admiration for the poem, and a sense of regret that it has been overshadowed by the novel as a whole, however much we might like it (it’s my favorite novel in the world), that is shared by Jean Holabird, Mo Cohen of Gingko Press (and those at the press who became entranced by the project), and Sam Gwynn and myself.

And the Gingko “Pale Fire” pack is not a fine limited edition, but both a literary intervention–very successful, indeed, in inviting people to read and discuss the poem as poem–and “an almost ridiculously lovely package” selling for only $35!

Tags: Brian Boyd, Jean Holabird, Mo Cohen, R.S. Gwynn, Stephen Gertz, Vladimir Nabokov

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2012 at 6:59 pm by Cynthia Haven and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.