Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0014050, Mon, 13 Nov 2006 15:42:47 -0200

Subject
the next omnibus ( a bit awkward,too artificial but...)
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Date
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M. Roth wrote: So VN often mistook "Nobody" for "Nabokov."
Carolyn K. answered back: Well, he would be, wouldn't he? I mean nobody would be mistaken for Nabokov.
It's the same joke - - Polyphemus's and the Looking Glass king's - - hm. Hadn't thought of it before - - Kinbote is the Looking Glass king?

Jansy Mello: That's the kind of short witty answer I usually associate with Carolyn K. and brevity and the soul of wit. Still, new ideas and exciting debates demand longer space.

Serge Soloviev: remarked that: ... the part of the poem describing the love of Shade to Sybil seems to me the weakest, less poetic of all... Do anybode else see it under this angle? Could this be the intention of VN? "four thousand times your pillow has been creased/ By our two heads"...

Jansy Mello: I had observed that in my opinion John Shade's poem was not in any way erotic. Andrew Brown contradicted me pointing to Shade's dedication to Sybil and I argued back,etc. So, apparently Serge and I both see Shade's "love for Sybil" with a grain of salt. After I picked up the "two creased pillows" I tried to suggest Shade was hinting at other lillicit love affairs, but my argument is not very strong. The Vogelweide "Unter dem Linden" is too old to be meaningful at that point. It doesn't really match the the intention in "shared pillow" and, probably... the wench is dead..

D. Zimmer observed that: "It probably is futile to ask whether the date palm really belongs in that Appalachian Shakespeare Alley, potted or not, for whether Kinbote "invented" it outright or based it on his "memories" or on some "notes" in his pocket diary, it certainly comes straight out of Shakespeare,
without any detour to the Wordsmith campus."

Jansy Mello: If we consider Serge Soloviev's remark about "the version proposed by Ada is not about trees...Oka is a river near Moscow (well known to Russians), and Baie is Bay/Golf ... that followed the query on Ada's palm, in Marvell: "To win the palm, the oak, ...", couldn't the entire exchange ( external to Kinbote and Shade's Wordsmith...) be also an added playful transversion similar to "la Baie du Palmier" ( SS's Palm Beach) - without stopping its straight from Shakespeare origin?
See, in an article posted today by Sandy Klein ( extracted from Ron Rosenbaum) on "reader's envy" we find:
"Claudia proceded to describe a way of seeing into Ada, seeing through its crytpograms to some essence in a dimension slightly beyond, behind, beneath, the text."
VN himself confirms that "stelar" ( add *, ie, "aster-isks" ) view when he describes:
Gogol's style as " it gives one the sensation of something ludicrous and at the same time stellar, lurking constantly around the corner" (NG,142) and considered that "the prose of Pushkin is three-dimensional; that of Gogol is four-dimensional , at least" (NG,145).

I also chose to understand that VN´s own prose is "four-dimensional" and therefore, I can picture Shakespearean's trees, Wordsmith's and Marvell's Garden in Pale Fire and, perhaps, also "nowhere".





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