Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0023136, Sun, 29 Jul 2012 17:12:42 -0300

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Re: Shakespeare connection, part IV - Pale Fire
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Re: [NABOKV-L] Shakespeare connection, part IV - Pale FireStan K-Bootle:"...There’s always a lurking chess piece to spice up the action. (Hardly surprising: the pieces are named AFTER real-world counterparts! Thereafter, any comparisons between Chess and Human Warfare are quite superficial!)...The tingle in my spine, re-reading Mike M’s PF extract, comes with CK’s I once had to leave in the MIDST of a concert. Attentive ‘Native Anglophones’ will applaud Nabokov’s brilliant choice of the near-archaic/literary MIDST in the context of leaving a concert. ‘In the MIDST of’ is no longer fully synonymous with ‘In the MIDDLE of.’ One leaves, for example, an open-air concert in the MIDST of a rainstorm."

Jansy Mello: Great warnings related to allusionists and to the possibly deliberate near-archaic/literary use of "in the midst"
Unlike Mike Marcus's developments in relation to "ululations," *I would dismiss any association to Macbeth in the lines: "Hardly had the girls settled down when an electric storm that was to last all night enveloped their refuge with such theatrical ululations and flashes as to make it impossible to attend to any indoor sounds or lights."
The word is usually applied to the hooting sound produced by Mediterranean and Asian women in a celebratory mood, and it's also used (in Portuguese, at least) to recreate the howling winds during a tempest. I have the feeling that Nabokov employed it in this sense, adding to its scandal the kind of "theatrical" imitation, so dear to Kinbote, with no mind for its owlish origin.


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* - he wrote that he'd forgotten "to mention that the "ululations" in the barn might hint at another Macbeth allusion, since ulula in Latin means 'owl'. When Macbeth embarks on his regicide mission against King Duncan -- regicide being 'kibote' in Zemblan, or so Shade claims -- Lady Macbeth hears a faint noise, says "Hark! Peace! / It was the owl that shriek'd, the fatal bellman / Which gives the stern'st good-night. He [Macbeth] is about it". The morning after the murder, a Lord tells Macbeth about the weird goings-on during the night: lamentations and screaming, "the obscure bird / Clamour'd the livelong night". The owl is the obscure bird, and is associated with Macbeth himself."



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