Subject
Re: What the skater retakes
From
Date
Body
People have thought she tried to cross the lake
At Lochan Neck where zesty skaters crossed
From Exe to Wye on days of special frost.
CK: Could zesty skaters be an anagram in Russian (Alexey)?
I don't think it is an anagram. In her (unrhymed) translation of the poem Vera Nabokov renders zesty skaters as azartnye kon'kobezhtsy.
Not everybody may realize that Lochan is a pun not only on loch ("lake" in Scottish) but also on lokhan' ("bath-tub" in Russian), the word VN used (misspelling it as lokhan and giving it a wrong gender*) in his translation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (the Mock Turtle's song about Beautiful Soup):
Skazochnyi sup - ty zelen i pryan.
Toboy napolnen goryachiy lokhan!
Lokhan' is usually kidney-shaped (cf. similarly shaped Hourglass Lake** in Lolita). The distance between the lake's shores must be the shortest at Lochan Neck. Nevertheless, Hazel gets off at Lochanhead.
"Special frost" clearly corresponds to "(one oozy footstep) Frost." In her translation Vera Nabokov makes a footnote explaining that "Frost" is both the name of an American famous poet and English for moroz.
*Actually lokhan' is feminine and rhymes with ran' (early hour), dryan' (trash), or, say, glukhoman' (backwoods).
**Ochkovoe ozero in the Russian version. Ochki is Russian for "reading glasses". Perhaps also a play on ochkovaya zmeya, cobra.
Alexey Sklyarenko
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/
At Lochan Neck where zesty skaters crossed
From Exe to Wye on days of special frost.
CK: Could zesty skaters be an anagram in Russian (Alexey)?
I don't think it is an anagram. In her (unrhymed) translation of the poem Vera Nabokov renders zesty skaters as azartnye kon'kobezhtsy.
Not everybody may realize that Lochan is a pun not only on loch ("lake" in Scottish) but also on lokhan' ("bath-tub" in Russian), the word VN used (misspelling it as lokhan and giving it a wrong gender*) in his translation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (the Mock Turtle's song about Beautiful Soup):
Skazochnyi sup - ty zelen i pryan.
Toboy napolnen goryachiy lokhan!
Lokhan' is usually kidney-shaped (cf. similarly shaped Hourglass Lake** in Lolita). The distance between the lake's shores must be the shortest at Lochan Neck. Nevertheless, Hazel gets off at Lochanhead.
"Special frost" clearly corresponds to "(one oozy footstep) Frost." In her translation Vera Nabokov makes a footnote explaining that "Frost" is both the name of an American famous poet and English for moroz.
*Actually lokhan' is feminine and rhymes with ran' (early hour), dryan' (trash), or, say, glukhoman' (backwoods).
**Ochkovoe ozero in the Russian version. Ochki is Russian for "reading glasses". Perhaps also a play on ochkovaya zmeya, cobra.
Alexey Sklyarenko
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/