Customer Reviews

Poems and problems

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I have to respectfully disagree with the previous reviewer. I haven't read the poems, but I've worked on the problems on-line. They are anything but easy. I have found them devilish, elegant, challenging, and confounding. Of course, I admit that everything's relative. I'm not a tournament player; I play purely recreationally. However, I suspect that even if you are a strong player and can solve the problems with much less effort than I, you'll appreciate their ingenuity and originality.

I can't say anything about the problems except that "problems are the poems of chess": their absolute worth is not measured in terms of difficulty, but of beauty. And as far as beauty is concerned, Nabokov is an (if not *the*) expert on it.

What is there to say, then, about the (literal) poems? I, for one, love them. They happen to be perfectly, Nabokovianly beautiful. But, love them or hate them, one thing is certain: Nabokov knew his poetic workbench, and knew it well. You'd be hard-pressed to find a moment here where the Nabokov-the-craftsman falls short. The poems are flawless and lovely (lovely [adjective] "Having a beauty that appeals to the heart or mind as well as to the eye") and some of them are truly moving. That said, what irks the other reviewer is probably that they are not terribly daring, iconoclastic, bold, innovative, nor possessed with such terrible and terrifying fervency as one can find in some art, including Nabokov's fiction. Doesn't bother me, and shouldn't bother most Nabokovphiles, as the aesthetic (and the attitude!) are all here. But if you insist that all the art you consume be not merely beautiful and good, but "great"--or, worse still, "great" at the expense of beauty and goodness--perhaps you'd be better served by a volume of Allen Ginsberg.

nabokov, while being a superb writer of fiction, isn't the best poet there is. i'm not saying the poems in this collection were bad, just nothing spectacular. (the chess problems on the other hand were a joke, way too easy)

which is a shame because, like many other fiction writers, he found great dissapointment in the world not viewing him as a poet. but, once again, it's because he didn't produce that many stellar poems. it was interesting to see a well-known translator translate his own work. it has to bring something new to the world of translation. i wonder if it has any special problems...