Vladimir Nabokov. Humo tórpido
Vladimir Nabokov. TORPID SMOKE
Through a chink between the door leaves, unseen, avid fingers took away what he held, and now he was lying again on his couch, but the former languor had vanished. Enormous, alive, a metrical line extended and bent; at the bend a rhyme was coming deliciously and hotly alight, and as it glowed forth, there appeared, like a shadow on the wall when you climb upstairs with a candle, the mobile silhouette of another verse.
Drunk with the italianate music of Russian alliteration, with the longing to live, the new temptation of obsolete words (modern bereg reverting to breg, a farther "shore," holod to hlad,