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THOUGHTS: kot or in PF & learned cat in Pushkin
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Alexey Sklyarenko writes:
I hope Beth Sweeney will pardon me for not remembering about this animal earlier, when I wrote my previous message to the List (posted on April 5; the first version of the present message was written four days ago, an or, "hour", or so after the submission of the initial "kotor").
To the second edition (1828) of his Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820) Pushkin added a wonderful introductory poem that begins:
U lukomor'ya dub zelyonyi,
Zlataya tsep' na dube tom.
I dnyom i noch'yu kot uchyonyi
Vsyo khodit po tsepi krugom.
Poidyot napravo - pesn' zavodit,
Nalevo - skazku govorit.
("A green oak grows at the sea, / A golden chain is on that oak. / Night and day a learned cat / Paces the chain round the tree. / When he goes to the right, he sings a song, / When he goes to the left, he tells a fairy tale.")
Samuel Johnson being a savant, his cat, Hodge, must be as learned an animal as the cat in Pushkin's poem. Pushkin's fairy tale cat paces a golden chain that winds round the oak (cf. Quercus ruslan Chat. that grows in Ardis park: Ada, 2.7; "Chat." hints at Chateaubriand, but chat is also French for "cat"). When he goes to the right, he sings a song ("Pale Fire" the poem consists of Cantos, i. e. "songs"), when he goes to the left, he tells a fairy tale (Kinbote's Zembla that makes up most of his Commentary is a fairy tale; note that, as a homosexual, Kinbote is "sexually left-handed" and that, in the political sense, "left" is associated with Revolutions and social disasters of the type that happened in Nabokov's Russia and Kinbote's Zembla).
To S. K.-B.: I too noticed a cat-and-mouse game in "catamite". According to Kinbote (see his note no l. 49), the same game can be found in the second line of Shade's poem The Sacred Tree:
The ginkgo leaf, in golden hue, when shed,
A muscat grape,
Is an old-fashioned butterfly, ill-spread,
In shape.
Like Kinbote, I do not know if it is relevant but:
1. The Ginkgo Tree is a famous poem by Goethe;
2. There are both King and inkog ("incognito" trunkated and spelled in Russian) in "ginkgo";
3. The epithet "golden" (cf. zlataya tsep', "golden chain", that winds round the oak in Pushkin's poem) may correspond to French or and, thus, to the Zemblan word for "hour";
4. The word "shed" is almost a homophone of Shade;
5. There is musca (Latin for "fly"; cf. Aquila non captat muscas, "an eagle doesn't catch flies") in "muscat" (which comes from muscus, Latin for "musk");
6. Zemblan for "tree" is grados (as Kinbote tells us in the same note; note that radost' is Russian for "joy");
7. Kot is German for "faeces, excrement". This word occurs in a poem from Goethe's "West-oestlicher Diwan" (1819, the ginkgo poem first appeared in the same book);
8. There is doktor ("doctor" as spelled in Russian) in the phrase kot or dog (anglo-russ., "cat or dog"). In fact, kot or dog - doktor = ginkgo - king (that dog = God is irrelevant);
9. There is also a cat-and-mouse game in Ada (cf. Van's words to Percy de Prey at the picnic in Ardis the Second: "May I give you, Count, some more of the mouse-and-cat - a poor pun, but mine").
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I hope Beth Sweeney will pardon me for not remembering about this animal earlier, when I wrote my previous message to the List (posted on April 5; the first version of the present message was written four days ago, an or, "hour", or so after the submission of the initial "kotor").
To the second edition (1828) of his Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820) Pushkin added a wonderful introductory poem that begins:
U lukomor'ya dub zelyonyi,
Zlataya tsep' na dube tom.
I dnyom i noch'yu kot uchyonyi
Vsyo khodit po tsepi krugom.
Poidyot napravo - pesn' zavodit,
Nalevo - skazku govorit.
("A green oak grows at the sea, / A golden chain is on that oak. / Night and day a learned cat / Paces the chain round the tree. / When he goes to the right, he sings a song, / When he goes to the left, he tells a fairy tale.")
Samuel Johnson being a savant, his cat, Hodge, must be as learned an animal as the cat in Pushkin's poem. Pushkin's fairy tale cat paces a golden chain that winds round the oak (cf. Quercus ruslan Chat. that grows in Ardis park: Ada, 2.7; "Chat." hints at Chateaubriand, but chat is also French for "cat"). When he goes to the right, he sings a song ("Pale Fire" the poem consists of Cantos, i. e. "songs"), when he goes to the left, he tells a fairy tale (Kinbote's Zembla that makes up most of his Commentary is a fairy tale; note that, as a homosexual, Kinbote is "sexually left-handed" and that, in the political sense, "left" is associated with Revolutions and social disasters of the type that happened in Nabokov's Russia and Kinbote's Zembla).
To S. K.-B.: I too noticed a cat-and-mouse game in "catamite". According to Kinbote (see his note no l. 49), the same game can be found in the second line of Shade's poem The Sacred Tree:
The ginkgo leaf, in golden hue, when shed,
A muscat grape,
Is an old-fashioned butterfly, ill-spread,
In shape.
Like Kinbote, I do not know if it is relevant but:
1. The Ginkgo Tree is a famous poem by Goethe;
2. There are both King and inkog ("incognito" trunkated and spelled in Russian) in "ginkgo";
3. The epithet "golden" (cf. zlataya tsep', "golden chain", that winds round the oak in Pushkin's poem) may correspond to French or and, thus, to the Zemblan word for "hour";
4. The word "shed" is almost a homophone of Shade;
5. There is musca (Latin for "fly"; cf. Aquila non captat muscas, "an eagle doesn't catch flies") in "muscat" (which comes from muscus, Latin for "musk");
6. Zemblan for "tree" is grados (as Kinbote tells us in the same note; note that radost' is Russian for "joy");
7. Kot is German for "faeces, excrement". This word occurs in a poem from Goethe's "West-oestlicher Diwan" (1819, the ginkgo poem first appeared in the same book);
8. There is doktor ("doctor" as spelled in Russian) in the phrase kot or dog (anglo-russ., "cat or dog"). In fact, kot or dog - doktor = ginkgo - king (that dog = God is irrelevant);
9. There is also a cat-and-mouse game in Ada (cf. Van's words to Percy de Prey at the picnic in Ardis the Second: "May I give you, Count, some more of the mouse-and-cat - a poor pun, but mine").
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/