Jansy Mello: The Erminins were
Jews, probably converted to Christianity. Tancredo's beloved
Clorinda and Erminia were Moslems, later also converted to
Christianity.
After we compare not only the
similarity of their surnames/names in Tasso and Nabokov but also the
stories, it becomes a complicated task to determine what could
have been Van's intention when he exclaims:" ‘Who cares,’ ..., ‘who cares about all those stale myths, what
does it matter — Jove or Jehovah, spire or cupola, mosques in Moscow, or bronzes
and bonzes, and clerics, and relics, and deserts with bleached camel ribs? They
are merely the dust and mirages of the communal mind.’
.
Greg's addendum, perhaps, clarifies the issue a
little bit:" 'The Romans,’... ‘the Roman colonists,
who crucified Christian Jews and Barabbits, and other unfortunate people in the
old days, did not touch pork either, but I certainly do and so did my
grandparents.’
Some time ago I wondered if "torquated"
pheasant could be a convoluted allusion to Torquato Tasso, in Pale
Fire. The idea of changing one's faith or allegiance might then explain
the reference to the tracks that point back because of reversed his
shoes... But of course, the reference in PF is to a torque,
and it also brings us back to reversions* (In the picnic scene in
Ardis, close to the dialogues mentioned above, Van begins to attempt his
own topsy-turvy twists, during his act of maniambulation, including his
intention to turn metaphors upside-down - whatever that
means** .
"Torquated beauty, sublimated
grouse,
Finding
your China right behind my house.
Was he in Sherlock Holmes, the
fellow whose
Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes?
..........................................................................
* -
Torque, moment or moment
of force ...is
the tendency of a force to rotate an object about an axis,
fulcrum,
or pivot. Just as a force is a push or a pull, a torque can be thought of as a
twist to an object. Mathematically, torque is defined as the cross
product of the lever-arm distance and force,
which tends to produce rotation (wiki).
**
- "It was
the standing of a metaphor on its head not for the sake of the trick’s
difficulty, but in order to perceive an ascending waterfall or a sunrise in
reverse: a triumph, in a sense, over the ardis of time. Thus the rapture young
Mascodagama derived from overcoming gravity was akin to that of artistic
revelation in the sense utterly and naturally unknown to the innocents of
critical appraisal, the social-scene commentators, the moralists, the
ideamongers and so forth. Van on the stage was performing organically what his
figures of speech were to perform later in life — acrobatic wonders that had
never been expected from them and which frightened
children."