Dear List,

I selected eitght references to "gitana" and "gitanilla" and "Esmeralda" in "ADA", to enlist your help to sort out some of VN´s references. Not being familiar with the works of Cervantes or Spanish literature, I was amazed to discover that there are two emerald-green eyed heroines in Cervantes: Dulcinea and Preciosa ( in Cervantes novel " La Gitanilla). Until today I had always considered every reference to green eyes as indicative of Lucette´s leavesdropping or mermaid presence ( as stressed by VN himself in note 8 below).

Now I´m not so sure. I also have the impression that VN deliberately misled the reader into thinking about J.L. Borges ( "Osberg" ) instead of Cervantes ( cf.. notes 5 and 7 below )

Jansy

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ADA: NABOKOV

1.beyond observing that some law of logic should fix the number of coincidences, in a given domain, after which they cease to be coincidences, and form, instead, the living organism of a new truth (‘Tell me,’ says Osberg’s little gitana to the Moors, El Motela and Ramera, ‘what is the precise minimum of hairs on a body that allows one to call it ‘hairy’?).

2. What he had asked little Cordula. In that bookshop behind the revolving paperbacks’ stand, The Gitanilla, Our Laddies, Clichy Clichés, Six Pricks, The Bible Unabridged, Mertvago Forever, The Gitanilla... He was known in the beau monde for asking that question the very first time he met a young lady.

3. ‘His wife’s lover played the triple viol. Look, I’ll borrow a book’ (scanning on the nearest bookshelf The Gitanilla, Clichy Clichés, Mertvago Forever, The Ugly New Englander) ‘and curl up, komondi, in the next room for a few minutes, while you — Oh, I adore The Slat Sign.’ (said Lucette)

4. Van’s eye over his umbrella crook traveled around a carousel of Sapsucker paperbacks (with that wee striped woodpecker on every spine): The Gitanilla, Salzman, Salzman, Salzman, Invitation to a Climax, Squirt, The Go-go Gang, The Threshold of Pain, The Chimes of Chose, The Gitanilla

5. A gitana predicts to the gloomy cavalier that before reaching the castle he will have succumbed to the wiles of her sister, Dolores, a dancing girl (lifted from Osberg’s novella, as was to be proved in the ensuing lawsuit).

6. The gitanilla bends her head over the live table of Leporello’s servile back to trace on a scrap of parchment a rough map of the way to the castle. Her neck shows white through her long black hair separated by the motion of her shoulder.

7. The film you saw was, no doubt, Don Juan’s Last Fling in which Ada, indeed, impersonates (very beautifully) a Spanish girl(...) Howard Hool argued after the release that he had been made to play an impossible cross between two Dons; that initially Yuzlik (the director) had meant to base his ‘fantasy’ on Cervantes’s crude romance; that some scraps of the basic script stuck like dirty wool to the final theme; and that if you followed closely the sound track you could hear a fellow reveler in the tavern scene address Hool twice as ‘Quicks.’ Hool managed to buy up and destroy a number of copies while others have been locked up by the lawyer of the writer Osberg, who claims the gitanilla sequence was stolen from one of his own concoctions.

8.We are even sorrier to have inveigled our Esmeralda and mermaid in a naughty prank. That sort of game will never be played again with you, darling firebird.

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C.Holdsworth:CERVANTES & PYNCHON

In the essay "Cervantine Echoes in Early Pynchon", Carole Holdsworth observed that: "The emerald-green eyes of Dulcinea call to mind still another green-eyed Cervantes heroine, Preciosa of the Exemplary Novel “La gitanilla.”

C. Holdsworth annotated: " a character of “La gitanilla” exclaims at her first sight of Preciosa, “estos sí que son ojos de esmeralda!” (“La gitanilla,” Novelas ejemplares 1 [Buenos Aires: Biblioteca Clásica y Contemporánea, 1966]: 28).

The text by Carole Holdsworth proposed to "discuss the possibility of the influence, in Nabokov's words the “spiritual irrigation,”of Cervantes upon the haunting story written by the twenty-two-year-old Pynchon" and she concluded: "For Nabokov, Shakespeare and Cervantes are equals in “the matter of influence, of spiritual irrigation”. The eternal waters of Cervantes's writings may well have irrigated Thomas Pynchon's early story “Low-lands.”