Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0010595, Thu, 18 Nov 2004 19:04:20 -0800

Subject
Fwd: TT-21 Rea comments & "Bolognese hospital"
Date
Body
Usual wild comments

John
82.1 "Dear Phil" -- we note that phil- is the stem for "love" in
Greek, and the basis for a number of words in other European
languages.

82.9 "not to be read by Tom Tam" -- this repeated syllable has
been commented on by several scholars as alluding in _Invitation
to a Beheading" in the form "There, tam, la-bas" to Bsudelaire's
Invitation au Voyage with its repeated "La". But I would note,
as Jansy has pointed out, that "that poem" in _Ada_ harks back
to one of Chateaubriand's, but likewise that it strongly
echoes Goethe's song by Mignon daughter of an incestuous
brother-sister relationship) in Wilhelm Meister, beginning
"Kennst du das Land". In it each stanza ends with the
repeated "Dahin, dahin", i.e. "there, there". This 1795 poem of
Goethe's precedes Chateaubriand's of 1806, Byron's English
translation of it(at the beginning of Bryde of Abydos, 1813 --
a tale of brother sister incest!), Zhukovsky's 1815 poem
cited in Nabokovian, Beaudelaire's "Invitation..." of 1857,
and the French version in the opera _Mignon_ if 1866. It is
of course likely that Nabokov knew all of these.

82.11 "a Bolognese hospital"-- Bologna is noted in Italy for its
food and fine cuising. Having to spend 2 weeks there once on a
deal that reimbursed us for receipted meals, we took our Michelin
Red, and went throudh the top listed restaurants, and for the
next week went back through them again. When I got back to Rome
my wife could not understand why I didn't want to take her out
to dinner!
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EDMUSING. I wonder whether the "Bolognese hospital" slicing operation may not
deliberately echo Bologna sausage whence American "baloney". "Bolognese
sausage" is made of a smoked blend of pork (Tamworth) and beef,
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82.25 "more precious than those of love" -- note the "Phil" of
the salutation.

83.29 "How can one treat dreams unless one is a quack" -- Another
jab at Freud and his work on dreams.

84.23-24 "File under Repos" -- we note that looking up the anagram
of "repos" in a Latin dictionary, yields "spero": the word for
"hope".

84. "R" It has been noted by our betters that the mirror image of
this letter yields the Russian letter that is the word for "I""
actually removing the right hand descender of the Latin letter
gives us "P" for Person.

John

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