I am the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure of the window pane run the opening lines of one of the most joyously funny and bizarrely complex novels in English, though experts insist that Pale Fire is an enormously complicated multilayered and multilingual sponge cake, in which the entire plot is subverted within by clues in numerous languages.
Even taken at the straightforward outward level for monoglot readers, Vladimir Nabokov's tale of the deposed prince struggling within American academia is one of the richest novels written this century. I forget the prince's name he is, I recall, the prey of lascivious appetites for young men through every waking moment when, that is, he is not preoccupied by bowels as inconstant as a cow's.
Second Language
No doubt there are many the ses unread and gathering dust, on novelists whose primary work is in their second language Beckett, say, and Conrad, Nabokov. No doubt my friend Joe McMinn in Belfast, who has published on Nabokov, would have an opinion on how writing in a language one was not raised to speak affects style and choice of vocabulary. Only a native French speaker really notices the linguistic idiosyncrasies of Beckett but the not quite rightness of Conrad and Nabokov certainly enriched their written prose.
They saw English words with a fresh and invigorating outsider's viewpoint. Conrad, writing within the conservative milieu of England, seems nol to have been conscious of his imperfect use of words though imperfect is an inadequate word, for the result was a subtle vigour which he almost certainly did not intend in all its richness.
I have no Conrad texts beside me Conrad being a particularly popular victim of the curiously discriminating book thieves who creep into my home and remove nothing but precious volumes. So I have no ready to hand examples of what I mean though Conradians will understand. He breaks the unwritten barely understood rules which infest English the rules which say, for example that you can say, Poor little boy, but not poor small boy that you can say, a great big man, but not big great man so you can say a winsome smile, but to say a winsome gait is, well, odd.
Nabokov seems to have had no inhibitions about the odd conjunctions such as "winsome gait". Vladimir too has been a victim of that deplorable instinct to borrow in silence but forget at leisure whose book this actually is as Conrad was. Just about all of my Nabokovs are gone and I know I have bought Pale Fire on at least four occasions, thereby unintentionally enriching the libraries off four house guests, the whores.
Nabokov revelled in harnessding odd words in odd improbable ways and he did so especially when writing in English. His Russian works, even when translated by him self, lack that wondrous linguistic inventiveness, the crazy conjunctivitis which dazzles with its ceaseless verbal unpredictability.
Multilingual Clues
Yet this is on the surface polyglot scholars derive the most pleasure from the crossword puzzles he constructs out of multilingual clues through the text. The chances are that with Nabokov, what you are sure is in fact is almost certainly not. In fact, just about the only thing you can be sure of in Pale Fire is that it begins with the words, I am the shadow of a waxwing slain/ By the false azure of the windowpane.
The ghost of Vladimir Nabokov came to haunt the centre of Dublin all the way from Russia the other day I saw a flight of 40 to 50 waxwings perched in the trees outside my garden. This is a bird which is seldom seen in Dublin the ornithologist Killian Mullarney thought the last large scale invasion of Ireland occurred 25 years ago.
Cold winters in northern and eastern Europe drive the bird westward, from the steppes and Scandinavia, until they have nowhere else to go but here. And so there they were, a mob of maybe four dozen birds, twittering and chuckling in the London Plane outside my Phibsboro front door. There are few such sights to cause a bird watcher break out in a cold sweat of joy than the gregarious chatter of waxwings few such assurances that birds have souls and personalities.
Inquiring Mob
They were not feeding where they perched and chirped, though sometimes they prospected in an inquiring mob, calling to one another as they flocked to another tree, stayed there for a while, and then circled chatteringly again, before returning to the London Plane.
No wonder people adore the waxwing. It is enchanting in numbers, like a flock of parrots nattering and gossiping but each bird too is a delight. No doubt Nabokov in his childhood estates in Russia would gaze in awe at their beauty, they are almost jungle exotic. Their tails are flecked with brilliant gold and red, their breasts are pink, their rumps red and they bear a fine brown tuff above slightly curved beak which they use to gorge on cotoneaster and viburnum. There was no food near when I saw them they appeared merely to be touring my part of Dublin. Killian reports that a large gang has been seen in the grounds of Trinity no doubt it is the same crowd, quite as fearless and inquisitive there as they were in Phibsboro.
Soon they will be leaving these shores to return to the Arctic and the east, to the conifers where some time in June they will raise their young in nests of moss and twigs. We might not see them again for another quarter of a century and during that time, will we blunder from folly to atrocity, from blind optimism to insensate gloom, in the way that we have since last they were here? For the last time they were here was 1971, the year the IRA began its war in the North and like the shadow of the waxwing slain, that war is with us yet.