Abstract

In my final paper I will discuss Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem “The Erlking” as it relates to Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire (particularly in regard to Hazel). I will incorporate the many mistranslations of the title of the poem and Kinbote’s misinterpretations of the substance of the poem. I will discuss the erlking’s role as a scavenger in the woods on a scavenger hunt for humans and compare this to the reader’s role in a similar scavenger hunt through the commentary of Pale Fire.

I will show Gradus’ connection to “The Erlking.” I will delve into his representation of and similarities to the erlking as death and how Gradus has several inhuman qualities—his physical description, his journey through the prose, and his invisibility to all except Kinbote. I will also discuss his connection to the father in Goethe’s poem. Gradus, like the father, is on a journey and is hurried on that journey by death. Kinbote, as the son, is the only one who can see the killer approaching.

I will discuss the importance of the alder tree to both Goethe’s poem and Nabokov’s novel—its mythological connections and its contribution to the characters and novel as a whole. The bark and leaves of the alder tree can be used to make red and greed dyes, so I incorporate the use of these two colors throughout the novel. I will also discuss the use of trees in general as they appear throughout the commentary (“and ‘tree’ in Zemblan is grados”).

To tie everything together, I will discuss Hazel’s connection with “The Erlking.” Her death is as mysterious to her parents as the son’s death is to his father. She is the lost child; she is the erlking’s daughter; she is the tree.

The Erlking

THE ERLKING, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Who rides there so late through the night dark and drear?
The father it is, with his infant so dear;
He holdeth the boy tightly clasp'd in his arm,
He holdeth him safely, he keepeth him warm.

"My son, wherefore seek'st thou thy face thus to hide?"
"Look, father, the Erl-King is close by our side!
Dost see not the Erl-King, with crown and with train?"
"My son, 'tis the mist rising over the plain."

"Oh, come, thou dear infant! oh come thou with me!
Full many a game I will play there with thee;
On my strand, lovely flowers their blossoms unfold,
My mother shall grace thee with garments of gold."

"My father, my father, and dost thou not hear
The words that the Erl-King now breathes in mine ear?"
"Be calm, dearest child, 'tis thy fancy deceives;
'Tis the sad wind that sighs through the withering leaves."

"Wilt go, then, dear infant, wilt go with me there?
My daughters shall tend thee with sisterly care
My daughters by night their glad festival keep,
They'll dance thee, and rock thee, and sing thee to sleep."

"My father, my father, and dost thou not see,
How the Erl-King his daughters has brought here for me?"
"My darling, my darling, I see it aright,
'Tis the aged grey willows deceiving thy sight."

"I love thee, I'm charm'd by thy beauty, dear boy!
And if thou'rt unwilling, then force I'll employ."
"My father, my father, he seizes me fast,
Full sorely the Erl-King has hurt me at last."

The father now gallops, with terror half wild,
He grasps in his arms the poor shuddering child;
He reaches his courtyard with toil and with dread,--
The child in his arms finds he motionless, dead.

Looking at the poem itself, we also find many connections to Pale Fire. First and foremost, there is the death of a child. The father loses his son just as Shade loses his daughter. Shade alludes to 'The Erlking' just before talking about his grief (lines 653-667). In both 'The Erlking' and Pale Fire there is a person who sees things that aren't apparent to anyone else, though in the end what he sees actually is there. In Goethe's poem the son sees the erlking, but his father insists on it simply being the boy's imagination, and he gives a natural explanation for everything the boy claims to sense. It turns out that both son and father are neither entirely correct nor entirely incorrect. There is something that the son feels, hears, and sees, but it is not a person as the boy thinks it is. Likewise, the father insists that there is no person "with crown and with train" whispering in his son's ear, though it is not the wind and mist as he says it is. There is something that is there that is not human, and while it is not the wind and mist, it is, in a way nature. It is Death. The boy sees it, while his father cannot. In Pale Fire, Kinbote sees Jakob Gradus coming closer, approaching along the lines of Shade's poem (see Index entry 'Gradus, Jakob' for extensive list of notes on this, the most notable of which are the notes to lines 17 & 29, 209, 741, and 949), though no one else can see this. In a way Gradus is death itself. He represents death in Kinbote's mind, and brings about the death of not only Shade but of several other people he killed in the attempt to assassinate Charles the Beloved. Kinbote, like the boy in Goethe's poem, is the only one who can see Death coming.

Gradus is also akin to the father in 'The Erlking.' Both are on a journey throughout the entirety of the text. Gradus is on a journey from some mystical place (Zembla) to New Wye to assassinate Charles the Beloved, while the father is on his way home from some unnamed place. Death spurs them both on, but for two very different reasons. Gradus is going to New Wye to take the life of someone, while the father is going home in the hopes of preserving the life of his son. In each case, Death wins.


Gradus can be seen as both the erlking (Death) and the father in Goethe's poem. Each scenario has its own flaw - the erlking is neither human (as the son sees him) nor nature (as the father sees him), and, unlike the father, Gradus seeks to kill rather than to save - but that is the spirit of mistranslation. In this series of mistranslations of 'The Erlking,' Nabokov has found his place among them with Pale Fire. It is his own written translation of events in the tale of Den Elverkongen Datter.

An Addendum to Mistranslations of 'The Erlking'

The lines from Goethe's poem that Shade includes in his own come from a literal translation of the original German words. In the seventh stanza of the poem, the boy's fear of the erlking makes him unwilling (or unable, this is ambiguous) to continue on the journey home. The father gets frustrated at what he thinks is simply his son's overgrown imagination and exclaims that he will use force to make his son come home. The literal translation reads:

"I love you, your beautiful form entices me;

And if you're not willing, then I will use force."

This wording implies something that is so far off from the rest of the poem that it is almost laughable. Nothing else in the poem hints at rape, abuse, or any other maltreatment of any kind. A mistranslation very similar to this appears in Kinbote's note to lines 433-434. Disa writes a letter - in English - to Charles the Beloved stating, among other things, "I want you to know that no matter how much you hurt me, you cannot hurt my love." Between her translation to English, the translation of that into Zemblan by a Hindu member of the Extremist party, and a retranslation back into English for the reader, this sentence somehow turns into: "I desire you and love when you flog me." Again, this wording implies something that is so far off from the rest of the story that it is almost laughable. Thus, we see again the reflection of 'The Erlking' in Pale Fire. 

Mistranslations in 'The Erlking'

The legend of 'The Erlking' (according to Wikipedia):
Goethe's poem is based on "Erlkonig's Tochter" ("The Elf King's Daughter" in English), a German translation (by Johann Gottfried Herder) of a Danish poem which is based on a Scandinavian tale (remember that while Denmark is the southernmost part of the region, Scandinavia in general is so far north that it reaches well above the Arctic Circle). In the original tale, the antagonist is the Erlking's daughter; she sent out female elves to lure and capture humans to "satisfy her desire, jealousy, and lust for revenge."


Mistranslations of 'The Erlking" (according to Wikipedia):
The original Danish word 'elverkonge' literally means 'king of the elves.' The title of the original Danish poem was mistranslated into German as 'erlkonig,' which means 'Alder king.' (The appropriate translation would have been 'elfenkonig,' which bears a striking reZemblance to King Alfin.) Goethe kept the word 'erlkonig' for his poem, but when that was translated into English, the title was mistranslated again as 'Erlking,' or 'Elf King.' So the title came full circle from being "Daughter of the King of the Elves" to "Alder King" back to "Elf King." (Note for later that the word 'daughter' was dropped off.)


Already we see countless mistranslations throughout the history of this poem, and also its connection with the far north. We also find the name of one of the characters (Kinbote's father Alfin) in what would have been the title of Goethe's poem had Herder translated accurately. Because of this mistranslation, however, we pick up the term 'alder king' along the way.

Pale Fire and Orson Scott Card

As I said in class the other day, there are several things from Pale Fire that show up in various places in Card's writing. Nothing from this novel is central in anything Card writes, but the things he does take are all important in Pale Fire.

The subterranean tunnels that Kinbote and Oleg crawl through appear in Card's short story "Dust," where a boy follows a strange girl through a subterranean tunnel to reach a fantasy land. Kinbote imagines that he and Oleg crawled through tunnels as children, and their childish imaginations created a land of fantasy within the tunnels. Conversely, at the end of "Dust" the boy grows up and begins to believe that his adventure through the tunnel was merely his imagination.

The alphabet scanning in the barn with Hazel is seen in Card's novel Speaker for the Dead, the second novel in his Ender saga. One of the characters becomes paralyzed and uses alphabet scanning to communicate with his family.

Kinbote and Shade live in New Wye, Appalachia. Appalachia is also the name of a state in Card's fantasy series The Tales of Alvin Maker. The series follows Alvin around a United States that is slightly altered - politically, culturally, and linguistically - from the country we live in today. Kinbote also entertains the existence of a world that is slightly different than the one we know (a world which includes Zembla, Appalachia, and Utana on the map).

Card's Homecoming Saga reflects Pale Fire in several ways. After destroying Earth, humans had to relocate to the planet Harmony until an AI computer program deems them worthy of returning to their home planet. Finally, 40 million years later (when the story begins), a select group of humans is finally ready to return to Earth. In the first book in the series, The Memory of Earth, the humans must learn from the computer program's memory of Earth how to make the appropriate starships to return them home. The use of the word memory has obvious connections with our class. The memory chip itself is structured like a memory palace, and Card describes it as having many compartments or rooms in a house where different bits of information are stored.
Also in the saga, the problem of repopulating Earth comes up, so everyone in this rag-tag group of humans has to marry within the group. One of the couples consists of an apparently romantically devoid biologist and a closet homosexual historian. They put off getting married - she because she doesn't believe in love, and he because he is not interested in her - but then realize that they must marry and have children for the betterment of their small community. They eventually marry out of duty, and after the historian finally confesses his homosexuality to her, the scientist begins to fall in love and remains in love with him even though she knows he will never love her back. We see this in Pale Fire with Kinbote's marriage to Disa. They marry out of political duty and attempt to have a son to pass the crown down to (for the betterment of their small country). Disa loves Kinbote and will always love him even though she knows it will never be reciprocated.
The third parallel between the Homecoming saga and Pale Fire lies in the Index. Literally. The piece of hardware that is the computer program's memory chip is called the Index. It holds the answers to everything the original, Earth-born humans thought the future humans would need to know, just as the Index of Pale Fire contains everything Kinbote thinks the reader needs to know.

Scavenger Hunt

As Gradus walks through the index cards and lines of Shade's poem, he is on a scavenger hunt, jumping around Europe and finally the States looking for Kinbote. In the same way, we, the readers, are jumping around the commentary from page to page looking for order in this cacophony of notes. We are trying to find the crown jewels, we are trying to find out who Charles Kinbote really is, we are trying to find the real reason why Gradus is on a murder mission. If Gradus is a figment of Kinbote's imagination, then are we not a figment of Nabokov's imagination? Now take into account that imagination is more real than "reality." So I'd say yes, we are a figment of Nabokov's imagination, just as important to his novel as Shade and Kinbote and Gradus, for without us his novel is nothing. It takes a competent reader to read this book the way it should be read - as a literary scavenger hunt.

Paper Topic

My paper topic will be gradual Gradus (see note to lines 17, 29). I will look at the literal (albeit imagined) path he takes from Zembla to New Wye. I will also look at the transformative path that he takes through Kinbote's mind, from being merely a picture in an album in Goldsworth's house to being a faulty agent in a faulty scheme to assassinate the former king of Zembla.