NABOKV-L discussion

Not sure how a note would be added to Ada Online, but I think this one should be fairly uncontroversial.

On Van's first day back at Ardis in 1888, the details of his arrival morph, starting with:

"My horse caught a hoof in a hole in the rotting planks of Ladore Bridge and had to be shot. I have walked eight miles." (P.189)

Then a few lines later, the narrator reports that "[h]is train had broken down in the fields between Ladoga and Ladore, he had walked twenty miles[...]"

I have posted previously some ideas I have about Pale Fire being a parodic response to Northup Frye’s Archetypal Literary Criticism. Frye was influenced by the work of C. G. Jung, whose work I have also been suggesting is at the parodic core of PF.

Virtually every personage mentioned or alluded to in Pale Fire was associated with mysticism and/or the occult. I have compiled a list below. Note how many were members of the SPR, the esoteric/scientific society that is the template for Shade’s IPH. This is particularly important for my focus: Pale Fire’s hidden structure of Jungian alchemy and archetype.

In PF I think “Hodinski,”queen Yaruga’s lover, goliart and poet likely refers to Houdini, and further, to Nabokov himself.

I don't think this has been mentioned before.

In PF Kinbote jocularly calls Shade "you bad gray poet" and they both giggle like boys. 

"The Good Gray Poet" was the title of an 1866 biography of Walt Whitman by his friend William D. O'Connor. The nickname stuck.

Hello all,

I have recently taken on the position of Associate Editor for Reviews at the Nabokov Online Journal, and I am trying to get together a list of potential books and reviewers. If you have book on Nabokov that you would like reviewed, or if you are interested in writing a review for the NOJ (whether or not you have a particular book in mind), please reach out to me.  My email is mroth@messiah.edu.

Many thanks in advance,

Matt Roth

I believe I have a PF ‘find’ here:

Kinbote in his commentary to 922 quotes one of Shade’s discards:

England where poets flew the highest, now

Wants them to plod and Pegasus to plough;

Dear All,

I've started reading an essay by Carlo Ginsburg in his book "Wooden Eyes" (a reference to Pinocchio, which does literally mean wooden eye) entitled "Making it Strange; the pre-history of a literary device." And it got me to thinking ... I have always felt uncomfortable with the English translations of "ostranennie" into English. "Making it strange" is awkward, barely English at all. So I sat down at the computer and started exploring possible alternatives. And I came up with the following short list:

From Ada, part 1, chapter 6:

Alonso, a tiny wizened man in a double-breasted tuxedo, spoke only Spanish, while the sum of Spanish words his hosts knew scarcely exceeded half a dozen. Van had canastilla (a little basket), and nubarrones (thunderclouds), which both came from an en regard translation of a lovely Spanish poem in one of his schoolbooks.

Kinbote signs his foreword to Pale Fire with the date “August 19, 1959, Cedarn Utana.” This date contains crucial information to understanding the novel.