Stan Kelly Bootle remembered Evsei Lazarevich
Slonim's birtdhay on January 30th. By coincidence only this January
did I learn that Dmitri's grandparents, both of them, had been involved,
in different occasions, in a duel which, fortunately, did not take
place.
In Sept.2005 I had asked the List for help in relation to
a sentence I wanted to quote and could not place. I was unable to find
it in English, so I presented it roughly as: "inkstained
fingerprints in our memory". It was untraceable at the time. Don
offered me a suggestion:"Could the phrase
Jansy is thinking of possibly be found in the sentence from Lolita I,4 (p.
14 of Annotated): "Through the darkness and the tender trees we could see
the arabesques of lighted windows which, touched up by the colored inks of
sensitive memory, appear to me now like playing cards -- presumably because
a bridge game was keeping the enemy busy."? Since this matter was once
or twice brought up at the List, I'd like to report that I located it, at
last.
It reads: ."He must be saving up...bright childish impressions whose paint
remains on the fingertips of the mind" .
It can be found in The Stories
of Vladimir Nabokov, 1995, on page 337. It is a line
of "Perfection".
In this same short-story I found VN
used the word "leggy", which also came up in the list in relation to Pnin's
"leggy thing". Here it comes, on page 335: "During
those first warm days everything seemed beautiful and touching: the
leggy little girls playing hopscotch on the sidewalk, the old
men on the benches, the green confettti...every time the air stretched its
invisible limbs." In this different context, I don't know how
"leggy" was translated.
In answer to Carolyn Kunin's
recent posting, Sklyarenko wrote: "Personally, I would
have rendered "leggy thing" as nogastaya shtukovina. I'm pretty sure that
at least one of the two Russian translators of "Pnin," G. Barabtarlo or S.
Ilyin, has done so in his version."