Subject
Ancient translations of the Bible and the confusion of
elm,oak,teil and linde
elm,oak,teil and linde
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In "ADA" there are different elms, linden, teils and oaks, sometimes interchangeable and sometimes not. The curious mingled terms seem to have, at their origin, the biblical text and its translations. I wonder if Nabokov was familiar with the facts as they are described in the "Nature Bulletin No. 676-A April 21, 1962" Cf. www.newton.dep.anl.gov/natbltn/600.../nb676.htm #
Names of trees, and poems related to them, in this "biblical" context are already present in "Pale Fire," probably serving under another set of allusions - or to indicate a similar kind of "botanic incest theory"? (various scientific classifications and hybridizations morphed into human mixed affiliations).
In my initial readings of "Ada", for example, I only considered the clever indication of her discovery that, unlike Lucette, she was not Dan's daughter, as we see in her reply about "it's an elm,"* a point emphasized by Van's terrible pun (Toulouse/Two-Lice). The confusion bt. elm and oak is explained, and recreated, beforehand but, later, a linden tree and its "father" the oak, add to the mix.**
In "Ada" there's also a question linked to the "maidenhair tree" in a train station (confused with a ginkgo tree, if I'm not mistaken, and carried over to the novel's very beginning, in the album of dried plants found in the attic.) John Shade wrote a poem about the ginkgo and in PF there is an extensive wordplay about "L'if", the willow and the yew ***.
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# - The King James Version of the Bible mentions seven flowers, seven vegetables, several spices, and thirty-seven differently named trees. Some -- such as cypress, shittah, ash, and teil -- appear only once. Others -- notably the palm, olive, fig, and cedar -- occur many times. This version was completed in 1611, long before botany became an exact science.
Like several others, it was a translation by scholars who were not botanists, had never visited the Holy Land, did not realize that the native plants in that region were far different from plants in northern Europe, and made the mistake of identifying some of those mentioned in the Scriptures with familiar plants in England.
Consequently, the terebinth was called an elm or a teil, aspens were called mulberries, a mulberry was called "sycamine, " a species of fig was called "sycomore, " the Oriental planetree -- related to our sycamore -- was called a chestnut, the apricot became an apple, and the native Aleppo pine was called a fir or even, in Isaiah 44:14, an ash. The words "fir, " "pine, " "cypress, " "juniper, " and sometimes "cedar, " are used so loosely that it is almost impossible to determine what trees are referred to in certain passages.
In the Douay Version, Isaiah 6:13 contains the phrase: "as a turpentine tree, and as an oak. " In the King James Version this phrase became: "as a teil tree, and as an oak. " Teil is an obsolete English name for the linden or lime tree, related to our basswood, which is not native in Palestine. Undoubtedly, this passage refers to the Terebinth, a good-sized deciduous tree that is common on the dry lower slopes of hills in the Holy Land, All parts of it contain a fragrant resinous juice and turpentine is obtained from slashes made on the trunk and branches.
In the Douay Version, Genesis 6:14, God commands Noah: "Make thee an ark of timber planks. " In the King James Version this is written: "Make thee an ark of gopher wood. " Modern scholars believe it means the extremely durable wood of the tall massive evergreen cypresses that, together with towering cedars and oaks, clothed the slopes of the Lebanon and other mountain ranges in Biblical times. "Gopher" is very similar to the Hebrew and Greek words for cypress. In the King James Version the Lord commanded Moses to build a tabernacle, an altar, an ark of testimony and a table for it, using "shittim wood." Shittim is the plural of shittah, the Hebrew name (Isaiah 41:19) for an acacia that grows on Mount Sinai and is the most common tree in the Arabian desert where the Israelites wandered for 40 years. Like the mesquite in our outhwest, it is a legume, its branches are armed with spines, and the fruit is a pod. Although gnarled, twisted and shrubby in the desert, elsewhere it becomes 25 feet tall and its hard, close-grained, orange-brown wood is valuable for cabinetwork. Another legume, very common in the Holy Land, is the evergreen carob or "locust-tree." Its seed pods, from 6 to 10 inches long, full of a sticky pulp and honey-like syrup when ripe, are used as food for livestock as well as people. Those were the "husks" eaten by the prodigal son (Luke 15:16) and probably the "locusts" eaten by John the Baptist (Matthew 3:4). A third legume, native to Palestine and similar to our redbud, is the famous "Judas-tree, " upon which, according to legends, Judas Iscariot hanged himself. Palestine, 3000 years ago, was a land of palm trees, especially the date palm that not only produces "bread, wine, and honey" but has, the Arabs say, as many uses as there are days in the year. Outside the walls of cities, wealthy people had "gardens" in which grew olive and fig trees, spices, and perhaps a few trees such as apricot, pomegranate, almond, pistachio, and Persian walnut. At the foot of the Mount of Olives there was a garden called Gethsemane. [Cf. online link to "Nature Bulletin" (676-A, 1962)]
* "Next day, or the day after the next, the entire family was having high tea in the garden...Marina remained for almost a minute wordlessly stretching across the table her husband’s straw hat in his direction; finally he shook his head, glared at the sun that glared back and retired with his cup and the Toulouse Enquirer to a rustic seat on the other side of the lawn under an immense elm." [...] ‘Well,’ he said, getting up, ‘I must be going. Good-bye, everybody. Good-bye, Ada. I guess it’s your father under that oak, isn’t it?’ ‘No, it’s an elm,’ said Ada. Van looked across the lawn and said as if musing — perhaps with just a faint touch of boyish show-off: ‘I’d like to see that Two-Lice sheet too when Uncle is through with it.’ "
** " 'Don’t let your cousin se morfondre when the weather is so fine. Take him by the hand. Go and show him the white lady in your favorite lane, and the mountain, and the great oak.’[...] "I think we are supposed to go and look at the grand chêne which is really an elm.’" or "They looked around...any green imp with coppery limbs could easily keep under surveillance from a fork of the giant elm...Lucette would come ever nearer...start to jiggle the board of an old swing that hung from the long and lofty limb of Baldy, a partly leafless but still healthy old oak (which appeared — oh, I remember, Van! — in a century-old lithograph of Ardis, by Peter de Rast.)" In different paragraphs we meet new indications: "Overhead the arms of a linden stretched toward those of an oak, like a green-spangled beauty flying to meet her strong father hanging by his feet from the trapeze. Even then did we both understand that kind of heavenly stuff, even then [...] "The teil [elm] is the flying Italian lady, and the old oak aches, the old lover aches, but still catches her every time’ (impossible to reproduce the right intonation while rendering the entire sense — after eight decades! — but she did say something extravagant, something quite out of keeping with her tender age as they looked up and then down)."
*** Pale Fire, Line 501: L’if "The yew in French. It is curious that the Zemblan word for the weeping willow is also "if" (the yew is tas)."
Wiki on "Taxus baccata" (yew) "The word yew is from Proto-Germanic *īwa-, possibly originally a loanword from Gaulish ivos, compare Irish ēo, Welsh ywen, French if (see Eihwaz for a discussion). Baccata is Latin for bearing red berries. The word yew as it was originally used seems to refer to the colour brown. On the other side, most romance languages kept the Latin word taxus : Italian tasso (Corsican tassu), Occitan teis (Catalan teix, Gasconic tech), Spanish tejo, Portuguese teixo (Galician teixu) and Roumanian tisā, same root as toxic. In Russian, the same root (presumably, borrowed from Roumanian) is preserved: tiss (тис).
wiki on "Salix" (willow): "Almost all willows take root very readily from cuttings or where broken branches lie on the ground. One famous example of such growth from cuttings involves the poet Alexander Pope, who begged a twig from a parcel tied with twigs sent from Spain to Lady Suffolk. This twig was planted and thrived, and legend has it that all of England's weeping willows are descended from this first one...Willows, sallows, and osiers form the genus Salix, around 400 species..."
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