Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0020892, Wed, 20 Oct 2010 11:43:21 -0200

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Re: Andronnikiov and Niagarin: Dostoevsky in Pale Fire
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Alexey Sklyarenko: "...Interestingly, Trishatov, a character in Podrostok, is one of the first "sexually left-handed" characters in Russian literature (Kinbote, Pale Fire's mad commentator, is, of course, also left-handed sexually)."

JM: In the French translation of Pale Fire some of Nabokov''s wordgames have changed places. We find a "lien dedalien" and, in connection to Shade's fussy bimanism we read "bimane maniaque."

btw: Has anyone related, here in the List, the "synthesis of sun and star" to another verse by Shade ("cancel a sunset, restore a star") and to how Shade's poem ends? What do we see if not the moment when Shade believes it's still too early to retire (the sun has attained Sutton's pane etc) and so he goes out - to walk into a sunset and get killed? The symmetry indicates, to me at least, that he will now reappear as a star. It might be Balthazar's star, or one like Zeus's deceased Greek heroes, like his cup-bearer... (that's for PF's astronomers to verify.)

In the syllables Kinbote isolates from Hazel's jumbled letters, in the French translation, we find "or" (gold). This word now helped me to find Goldsworth* in the English original. Special words, which have been here discussed at great length, are not pointedly kept in French (such as "ament" instead of catkin, or "versipel"). Like the "atalanta" in Hazel's warning, or like kings, they merely disappeared.

In PF, CK on line 12, p.75, Kinbote refers to his presence as "Kinbote," in Zembla, proposing that his system of taxation should be named "Kinbote's Law." Does anyone know if there are any more such instances of Kinbote stradling into Zembla under his assumed name? I'm sure that all this has been noted before **.
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* ( pada ata lane pad not ogo old wart alan ther tale feur far rant lant tal told).
** and there's another misspelling. The word is "Technicology" (Cf. Everyman's Library,p.75; The Library of America, 487). I doesn't seem to be a pun, not this time.


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