John Rea wrote: I have said elsewhere that our author treats language as a game
with secret rules: and on top of that he cheats... Thus, the word "fiume"
is the basic italian word for "river". This is what makes the consenting reader
equate it in meaning with Spanish "rio": and he will have quickly followed
this line of logic by associating "alto" = "tall"... This leads the reader
quickly to associaate, "rio grande" with "ri'alto", incorporating the [fi] of
"fiume' in this fluminous and fulminous brew. These word associations are
at the basis of a game called by linguists,"folk etymology" ... If my words
perish on line, please send a copy to ...any Dutch Brazilians, an ethnic group
with which I claim an affiliation based on a German preacher who ended up in
Flatbush.
JM: John Rea forgot to add Yalta to the
full fulminous fluminous flight that took-off from Fialta to end
up in Rio Grande ( with its northern flock of foreign
preachers). In short, fiumi (river in Italian) is unrelated to Fiume,
Yalta and Fialta to every (unconsenting) reader. So much for the tin-foil
and shimmer... Btw, I read that the yellow car
that crashed against a circus-truck in VN's novel was named "Icarus" only in its
English translation (Tammi's "Problems of Nabokov's poetics" has
yet to be consulted) - so it is as fictional as the
city of Fialta and the novels in which it appears. Do I
digress?