Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0017528, Sun, 28 Dec 2008 18:09:55 -0200

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McDiarmid, Southey, etc.
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Matt Roth thanks "Dieter Zimmer for this very useful annotation on McDiarmid and others. One question: how can we assume that "Nabokov's source probably was a book by Robert Scott Fittis... Do we know that he used this book for other information? Google Books shows that there are many references to McDiarmid and "incoherent transactions," in Southey but also in works by other writers."
Jerry Friedman asks JM: "Has anything really changed now you know that the first quotation there is from SK-B and only the part starting with "PF" is from JF?". He used this example as a confirmation that we are often a prey to "incoherent transactions"...

JM: Thanks to JF for his correction: I must have confused messages and authors in the midst of a wealth of quotes and interspersed answers. I'm relieved to see that one may civilly correct misquotes here. JF added[ concerning: if the invented "Lallans" reappeared in another guise in VN's later "Transparent Things"]: " I'm not sure what you have in mind. "Lallans" is a Scots pronunciation of "Lowlands" and can mean Lowland Scots. The Lallans "invented" by "Hugh Mac Diarmid" was an attempt at making Scots into a literary language. Thus it was far less invented than Zemblan--more like a mirror image of Lingo-Grande...By the way, if Angus McDiarmid was a Gaelic-speaking ghillie, he was from the Highlands, not the Lowlands."

JM: As for "Lallans" I was considering Kinbote's whimsical appropriation, not Hugh's attempt to make Scots into literary language,or the pronunciation of "Lowlands" as "Lallans".
In English, not only in French, we get "lallition" ( and "laleo", in Spanish) so, with all the other words related to echolalic lulling double-Ls valued by VN, I thought that the idea of language's original baby-babbling would have appealed to him. I'm still in doubt about what he meant by "my Lalage" in relation to his best-selling novel.

Unfortunately I read German very slowly and this is why I had not yet reached Dieter Zimmer's comments in his thick and rich "Anhang" discussing issues related to the translation of Shade's poem, documentation focusing VN correspondence about PF, DZ's own annotations and timelines.
The Rowohlt 2008 edidion gave me such pleasure by simply looking at it that I let serious work lag behind...
I hope the appended contributions to F.F are soon translated into English.

BTW: my recollection of Nabokov's "rolled words" was incorrect: he uses this image to describe a sensuous response to his native language, trying to suppress anemic stereotypes (birches and roses!), encountered in Russian elegiac poems. By this he is trying to achieve an estrangement-effect, almost like the task of "versipeling" his own works from English into Russian and vice-versa.
In chapter 11, (SM) VN describes a youthful epiphany from watching the rain through stained-glass windows. The image of a drop weighing down a leaf he also mentioned here and reappears at least twice, particularly in TRLSK, when it acquires a tone of deep loss.
In Chapter 11 VN also returns to the theme of Sebastian Knight's style and moods derived from his ability to entertain various trains of thought simultaneously. These are some of the components of VN's "water-mark", elements which reappear like the inter-textual travels of a lorgnon or the solitary (unhappy) glove, often to bear witness to "cosmic synchronicity", ie, tuning in to activate, through words, a fluttering pair of butterfly wings ( for example) together with lashes and leaves, mineral shimmers and human flutterings all over the globe. A quantic "literary butterfly effect"...

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