Pnin

trimeter and sat down rather heavily with a wistful sigh:
    Samotsvétov króme ochéy
    Net u menyá nikakíh,
    No est' róza eshchó nezhnéy
    Rózovïh gub moíh.
    I yúnosha tíhiy skazál:
    'Vashe sérdtse vsegó nezhnéy...'
    I yá opustíla glazá...
    I have marked the stress accents, and transliterated the Russian with the usual understanding that u is pronounced like a short 'oo', i like a short 'ee', and zh like a French 'j'. Such incomplete rhymes as skazal - glaza were considered very elegant. Note also the erotic undercurrents and cour d'amour implications. A prose translation would go: 'No jewels, save my eyes, do I own, but I have a rose which is even softer than my rosy lips. And a quiet youth said: "There is nothing softer than your heart." And I lowered my gaze....
    I wrote back telling Liza that her poems were bad and she ought to stop composing. Sometime later I saw her in another café, sitting at a long table, abloom and ablaze among a dozen young Russian poets. She kept her sapphire glance on me with a mocking and mysterious persistence. We talked. I suggested she let me see those poems again in some quieter place. She did. I told her they struck me as being even worse than they had seemed at the first reading. She lived in the cheapest room of a decadent little hotel with no bath and a pair of twittering young Englishmen for neighbours.
    Poor Liza! She had of course her artistic moments when she would stop, entranced, on a May night in a squalid street to admire - nay, to adore - the motley remains of an old poster on a wet black wall in the light of a street lamp, and the translucent green of linden leaves where they drooped next to the lamp, but she was one of those women who combine healthy good looks with hysterical sloppiness; lyrical outbursts with a very practical and very commonplace mind; a vile temper with sentimentality; and languorous surrender with a robust capacity for sending people on wild-goose errands. In the result of emotions and in the course of events, the narration of which would be of no public interest whatsoever, Liza swallowed a handful of sleeping pills. As she tumbled into unconsciousness she knocked over an open bottle of the deep-red ink which she used to write down her verses, and that bright trickle coming from under her door was noticed by Chris and Lew just in time to have her saved.
    I had not seen her for a fortnight after that contretemps when, on the eve of my leaving for Switzerland and Germany, she waylaid me in the little garden at the end of my street, looking svelte and strange in a charming new dress as dove-grey as Paris, and wearing a really enchanting new hat with a blue bird's wing, and handed me a folded paper. 'I want a last piece of advice from you,' said Liza in what the French call a 'white' voice. 'This is an offer of marriage that I have received. I shall wait till midnight. If I don't hear from you, I shall accept it.' She hailed a taxi and was gone.
    The letter has by chance remained among my papers. Here it is:
    'I am afraid you will be pained by my confession, my dear Lise' (the writer, though using Russian, called her throughout by this French form of her name, in order, I presume, to avoid both the too familiar 'Liza' and the too formal 'Elizaveta Innokentievna'). 'It is always painful for a sensitive (chutkiy) person to see another in an awkward position. And I am definitely in an awkward position.
    'You, Lise, are surrounded by poets, scientists, artists, dandies. The celebrated painter who made your portrait last year is now, it is said, drinking himself to death (govoryat, spilsya) in the wilds of Massachusetts. Rumour proclaims many other things. And here I am, daring to write to you.
    'I am not handsome, I am not interesting, I am not talented. I am not even rich. But Lise, I offer you everything I have, to the last blood corpuscle, to the last tear, everything. And, believe me, this is more than any genius can offer you because a genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do. I may not achieve happiness, but I know I shall do everything to make you happy. I want you to write poems. I want you to go on with your psychotherapeutic research - in which I do not understand much, while questioning the validity of what I can understand. Incidentally, I am sending you under separate cover a pamphlet published in Prague by my friend Professor Chateau, which brilliantly refutes your Dr