Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0017337, Mon, 17 Nov 2008 14:26:43 -0200

Subject
Latin American honor and links
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B.Boyd: Obviously "Osberg" is an anagram of "Borges," but since there are 720 ways of rearranging the letters in "Borges" it seems legitimate to ask why Nabokov chose this particular anagram. My suggestions may be facile but they are not "rather prejudiced" and do not reflect my attitude to Borges (hardly relevant to explicating ADA) but, as my sentence makes clear, only Nabokov's attitude: "Since Nabokov found Borges rather limited . . . perhaps "Osberg" suggests cold (iceberg) or aridity (a mountain, German Berg, of bones, Latin os).

JM: Before this comment ( on a "rather limited" Borges) we find, in fact, in the same note by B.Boyd:
77.02-05: her lolita ( . . . little Andalusian gipsy . . . in Osberg's novel and pronounced, incidentally, with a Spanish "t," not a thick English one): Darkbloom: "Osberg: another good-natured anagram, scrambling the name of a writer with whom the author of Lolita has been rather comically compared.
I thought that B.Boyd's assumption about what was on VN's mind tended to favor negative aspects which VN expressed elsewhere: here, in VN's own words, I understood it would have been "another good-natured anagram".

Brazilian writer Machado de Assis is certainly familiar to some VN scholars ( various novels of his have been translated into English), but he is not often mentioned in connection to VN. A note to "The Nabokovian", 55 ( Fall 2005) with the title "TIME BEFORE AND TIME AFTER IN NABOKOV´S NOVELS" begins with a direct quote from M.Assis' marvelously ironical "Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas" (Ch 1, 1881).: "I hesitated for a while if I should start these memoirs from the beginning or from the end, if I should first describe my birth or my demise (.)Properly speaking, I am not a deceased author (.) my tomb was my second cradle. Moses, who also wrote about his death, did not commence with it (.): a radical distinction between this book and the Pentateuch. "

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