Nice catch, Jansy. Your observation (that Kinbote describes the cards, not VN) foregrounds a particularly thorny problem: how to discern the relative reliability of Kinbote's narrative details. Is his New Wye (and Cedarn) narrative reliable, while the Zemblan narrative is a fantasy? Is there a test we can use to discern the reliability of CK's statements?

Ginko Pare Fire…Now readers can see the text for themselves,fresh from Shade’s hands, before Kinbote commandeered it so shamelessly…as well as facsimiles of the index cards that John Shade (like his maker, Nabokov) used for composing his poem, printed exactly as Nabokov described them.

JM: Where did Nabokov describe the index cards which originated Shade’s poem? Not in commandeering Kinbote’s Foreword?

Vladimir Nabokov Forum [mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU] Em nome de b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz
Enviada em: quarta-feira, 25 de agosto de 2010 19:40
Para: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Assunto: [NABOKV-L] Gingko Pale Fire: A Poem in Four Cantos by John Shade

http://www.gingkopress.com/09-lit/vladimir-nabokov-pale-fire.html

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