Line 962: Help me, Will. Pale Fire.
Paraphrased, this evidently means: Let me look in Shakespeare for something I might use for a title. And the find is “pale fire.” But in which of the Bard’s works did our poet cull it? My readers must make their own research. All I have with me is a tiny vest pocket edition of Timon of Athens—in Zemblan! It certainly contains nothing that could be regarded as an equivalent of “pale fire” (if it had, my luck would have been a statistical monster).
English was not taught in Zemblan before Mr. Campbell’s time. Conmal mastered it all by himself (mainly by learning a lexicon by heart) as a young man, around 1880, when not the verbal inferno but a quiet military career seemed to open before him, and his first work (the translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnets) was the outcome of a bet with a fellow officer. He exchanged his frogged uniform for a scholar’s dressing gown and tackled The Tempest. A slow worker, he needed half a century to translate the works of him whom he called “dze Bart,” in their entirety. After this, in 1930, he went on to Milton and other poets, steadily drilling through the ages, and had just completed Kipling’s “The Rhyme of the Three Sealers” (“Now this is the Law of the Muscovite that he proves with shot and steel”) when he fell ill and soon expired under his splendid painted bed ceil with its reproductions of Altamira animals, his last words in his last delirium being “Comment dit-on ‘mourir’ en anglais?”—a beautiful and touching end.
It is easy to sneer at Conmal’s faults. The are the naďve failings of a great pioneer. He lived too much in his library, too little among boys and youths. Writers should see the world, pluck its figs and peaches, and not keep constantly meditating in a tower of yellow ivory—which was also John Shade’s mistake, in a way.
We should not forget than when Conmal began his stupendous task now English author was available in Zemblan except Jane de Faun, a lady novelist in ten volumes whose works, strangely enough, are unknown in England, and some fragments of Byron translated from French versions.
A large, sluggish man with no passions save poetry, he seldom moved from his warm castle and its fifty thousand crested books, and had been known to spend two years in bed reading and writing after which, much refreshed, he went for the first and only time to London, but the weather was foggy, and he could not understand the language, and so went back to bed for another year.
English being Conmal’s prerogative, his Shakspere remained invulnerable throughout the greater part of his long life. The venerable Duke was famed for the nobility of his work; few dared question its fidelity. Personally, I had never the heart to check it. One callous Academician who did, lost his seat in result and was severely reprimanded by Conmal in an extraordinary sonnet composed directly in colorful, if not quite correct, English, beginning:
I am not slave! Let be my critic slave.
I cannot be. And Shakespeare would not want thus.
Let drawing students copy the acanthus,
I work with Master on the architrave!