Updates, Live: Parnassian Intermezzo

Yoko Shibata reading the Japanese version of a poem by Pierre Louÿs.

It happened that while thinking at the video and the poem within it I was attending an onLine discussion. It was about Nabokov and his Lolita: a masterpiece playing on the thin line of ambiguity. Was the Russian master condemning his hero? Or giving him a chance? We should not forget what Flaubert said once, Madame Bovary c'est moi! Are the personages of a book alter-egos of the author? Is it there talk about some deep obsessions (or deep fears) of the artist himself? Does each character just play a variation on the soul of the creator?

Another book by Nabokov, Ada: an impossible love between a brother and a sister, spanning over eighty years of life. Is it about love only? Or an attempt of Nabokov to have the control of time? Time marked only by ultimate experiences, the only way to give time a sense?

The characters from Ada speak sometimes about the poetry of Pierre Louÿs, trying to find there a way to explain themselves. Is it the erotism in literature a way of the artist to give sense to the spanning of time?

Here is the French original of L'Arbre, the poem that Yoko Shibata recites in Japanese:

Je me suis devetue pour monter a un arbre;
mes cuisses nues embrassaient l'ecorce lisse
et humide; mes sandales marchaient sur les
branches.

Tout en haut, mais encore sous les feuilles
et a l'ombre de la chaleur, je me suis mise a
cheval sur une fourche ecartee en balancant
mes pieds dans le vide.

Il avait plu. Des gouttes d'eau tombaient et
coulaient sur ma peau. Mes mains etaient
tachees de mousse, et mes orteils etaient
rouges, a cause des fleurs ecrasees.

Je sentais le bel arbre vivre quand le vent
passait au travers; alors je serrais mes
jambes davantage et j'appliquais mes levres
ouvertes sur la nuque chevelue d'un rameau.

And here is an image of Pierre Louÿs, the Parnassian poet who continued to write delicate erotic verses even while on his deathbead.