Jansy: your informative reply much appreciated. it’s a well-ploughed mine-field: English being both enriched and bothered by so many Anglo-Saxon and Latinate synonyms. For diverse historico-socio-linguistic reasons, the latter are associated with scientific and religious scholarship, while the former are rated as less learned or even downright crude. The posh/polite/evasive versus the native/peasant/candid! (I simplify, of course. There is also that third Norman-French strand, a minor Celtic influence, followed by massive global borrowing, all complicating the messy evolution of modern English(es).)
Key moments are the Lollard’s struggle for an English Bible that ploughboys could read without Priestly intermediaries/interpreters (translators really suffered back then - nowadays we simply malign and underpay them), and, more relevant to our VN-list, the Lady Chatterley’s Lover scandal. No velvety, delicate deltas*, pudenda or vaginas, no tumescent, priapic penises or phalluses for D H Lawrence’s randy, honest son-of-the-soiled!
Good authors, too, who once knew better words,
Now only use four-letter words, writing prose!
Anything Goes! (Cole Porter)
But compare:
The portions of a woman that appeal to man’s depravity
Are fashioned with considerable care (G&S parody, lists all known synonyms for delta, ending with the “ugly” A-S unmentionable. Attributed to Stephen Potter ?)
That the Anglo-Saxon plainspeak intimate body-part words are indeed shorter (and often wrongly considered less euphonious) than the alien, unEnglish imposed Latin “refinements” (ironically, the ink-horn terms are always the least horny!) is a mixed blessing for poets and novelists. In spite of campaigns by feminists such as Germaine Greer, the natural-native four-letter words for faeces, coitus, vagina and penis still leave a nasty taste [sic?]. (The BBC TV program Balderdash devoted to obscure etymologies “shocked the nation” when Greer calmly traced the history of ceynt/cunt, adding a plea for the taboos to be lifted).
I certainly sympathize with VN’s (and Cole Porter’s and the Archbishop of Canterbury’s) strong opinions that many authors do offend with relentless in-your-face “swearing.” But I think there are other, better, literary grounds for criticizing Lawrence, Miller, Updike, and, on occasions, Joyce. En passant, I’ve never agreed with VN’s belief that the word “sex” is inherently nasty. (Incidentally, the earliest citation for “sex” meaning “sexual intercourse” is 1929, the very year I was born. Spookily fatidic?)
- Delta, the DIFFERENCE OPERATOR, is a deliciously magical symbol to us mathematicians. Delta-x is a DISCRETE non-zero increment/decrement in the variable x, risking the INDISCREETENESS of being taken to a ZERO LIMIT when Newton and Leibniz independently invented the Calculus. Much philosophical confusion about the ratios of VANISHING GHOSTS. And still a central problem in current physics: mass/energy is quantized but are the two fundamental
measurables (space, time) discrete (digital) or continuous (analogue)?
HH’s choice of alternatives to “delta” (delicate or otherwise!) are NOT the same as VN’s choices! The novelist is rightly constrained (within obvious delta-limits!) by HH’s specific European multilingual-cultural background, close but not identical to Nabokov’s. The narrative-linguistic context is also delicate: HH is talking and reacting to an American-English audience, with much humour and even open disdain (especially with Lo’s hip-girly slang).
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 08/02/2010 22:13, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
Stan Kelly-Bootle:"..does Dauster’s translation reflect the impact on Anglophone ears of “and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torn”? HH’s devotion seems genuinely human...Yet there’s that forced alliteration, sign of an academic poet manqué? (Where have we met one those elsewhere?!)...the coy euphemism ...reveals HH’s devious mind. He calls a nipple a nipple but goes all clinically abstract...this is VN the novelist brilliantly planting ambiguous clues [...] VN’s use of omoplates in TOoL...It’s just inexplicably FUNNY. Like the Beatles singing I Wanna Hold Your Metacampus."
JM: Omoplate or escapula, delta.... how do they sound in Portuguese? Fairly common like manual,sanguine, dental, cordial, palpebral*
The excised sentence about "velvety delicate delta" reads voluptuously musical but quite "normal": "... mesmo que teus mamilos inchem e se rachem, mesmo que se macule e rasgue teu jovem e adorável delta, tão delicadamente aveludado... " It's the sentence itself, its literary correctness and structure, that which creates a kind of distancing effect.
On second thoughts, what other words could Humbert Humbert have delicately employed in lieu of the "delta"?
//coupé