wonderful detection..you must read everything with a microscope.


-----Original Message-----
From: Alexey Sklyarenko <skylark1970@MAIL.RU>
To: NABOKV-L <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Sent: Mon, Dec 23, 2013 5:25 pm
Subject: [NABOKV-L] Marquis Quizz Quisana in Ada

She [Cordula] talked on and on, and he [Van] lost the thread of her discourse, or rather it got enmeshed in the rapid landscape, which his gaze followed over her shoulder, with a sudden ravine recording what Jack said when his wife ‘phoned, or a lone tree in a clover field impersonating abandoned John, or a romantic stream running down a cliff and reflecting her brief bright affair with Marquis Quizz Quisana. (1.42)
 
The rattling sound of quizisans (cheap self-service dining-rooms) is mentioned by Pasternak in Vozvrashchenie ("The Return"), a poem included in Sestra moya zhizn' ("My Sister Life"):
 
Чтоб полдень осязал
Сквозь сон: в обед трясутся
По звону квизисан
Столы в пустых присутствиях...
 
This is immediately preceded by a quatrain in which thunderclouds in cucumbers (tuchi v ogurtsakh) have pistol duels/commit suicides out of despair:
 
Чтоб щёлкали с кольца
Клесты по канцеляриям
И тучи в огурцах
С отчаянья стрелялись.
 
Van to Cordula: 'Tell me something to distract me, though you distract me as it is, un petit topinambour as the Teuton said in the story.’ (1.42)
 
Vivian Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): topinambour: tuber of the girasole; pun on 'pun' ('calembour').
 
In Kalugano Van out of despair has a pistol duel with Captain Tapper, of Wild Violet Lodge.
 
Alexey Sklyarenko
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