„The night is breathless.“ This line of the poem Hotel Room by Vladimir Nabokov intrigued me. How does the night breathe or not breathe? Does it mean that the air is stifling hot? Or that the night seems to be holding its breath? Or that the night has died?
Let me first share the poem with you:
Hotel Room
Not quite a bed, not quite a bench,
Wallpaper: a grim yellow.
A pair of chairs. A squinty looking-glass.
We enter – My shadow and I.
We open with vibrant sound the window:
the light‘s reflection slides down to the ground.
The night is breathless. Distant dogs
with varied barks fracture the stillness.
Stirless, I stand there at the window,
and in the black bowl of the sky
glows like a golden drop of honey
the mellow moon.
I got to know the poem through my Russian friend Marina. Thanks to her, we could compare the original and the translated version and spent an afternoon combing through the poem, so to speak.
The Russian word for „breathless“ is „lifeless“, as well as „breathless“ and „dead“. The meaning of „lifeless“ is slightly different from „breathless“, in that it implies „motionless and not breathing“ in one. The night being “breathless” seems to refer to stillness here, but it being “lifeless” might also refer to the person’s perception of the night than to the night itself. We were left wondering, which is always refreshing.
Like breathing itself, the poem is full of contrast between movement and stillness in each stanza: the still room which the poet enters with his shadow (another breathless entity), the opening of the window into the still night and the arrested position of the person by the window and the moon.
There are also other contrasts related to breathing: the contrast between inside and outside, as well as between sound and silence. The inside of the room of the first stanza, the transition to the outside through the opening of the window in the middle stanza and the connection of the night sky with the moon in the last stanza. There is silence in the first as well as the last stanza but it is not the same silence, they could not be more different. A fundamental change has taken place through the opening of the window, a change from one reality into another, a journey. Only the moon remains a constant presence, though perceived very differently, in the beginning as a light phenomenon and in the end as a source of inspiration and nurture.
Marina and I found out that Hotel Room was written in Ukraine in 1919, where Nabokov had fled to with his family from Russia, shortly before he went to study at Cambridge University.
Here is the original Russian Version:
Номер в гостинице
Не то кровать, не то скамья.
Угрюмо-желтые обои.
Два стула. Зеркало кривое.
Мы входим – я и тень моя.
Окно со звоном открываем:
спадает отблеск до земли.
Ночь бездыханна. Псы вдали
тишь рассекают пестрым лаем.
Я замираю у окна,
и в черной чаше небосвода,
как золотая капля меда,
сверкает сладостно луна.
8 апреля 1919, Севастополь
Source: Unfortunately I don’t have the sources to either version of the poem.