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RES: [NABOKV-L] Poe, Raven, Kafka
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JM:.. Ravens and rooks are both “corvus” Can anyone inform me if “kafka” indicates the raven or the rook in czech? ( still trusting novelist Murakami’s information). A second question ( related to the original in Russian in the translation provided by Google/Norquist): what does “elephant” mean in the poem?
Didier Machu: As you must know, 'elephant' may mean 'ivory' (elephantine: made of ivory; oliphant / olifant = ivory horn), hence: white piece
As for Philidor, he was a well-known French chess player of the 18th c., named (and esteemed) by Diderot (in Jacques le fataliste) and acquainted with Voltaire, Rousseau and others.
Steve Norquist: Shatranj, the ancient Persian predecessor of chess, had elephants instead of rooks, in the 7th century, and the queens were far less powerful than in the modern leader of the attack in a chess game, which google usually translates as "party" from the Russian. The game did not evolve into its current "Western" form until the 16th century.
Jerome Katsell: I don't believe "kafka" means raven in Czech. The usual for raven is "hravan," and "vrána" is used for crow. There's also "hravan polní," which means rook, the bird. The other rook, the chess rook/castle is "vĕž".
David Powelstock.: The Czech for 'raven' is 'havran' (not 'hravan') or 'krkavec,' both of which have been used to translate Poe's poem. 'Kavka' in Czech means 'jackdaw.' It most certainly would not be appropriate for Poe's poem.
JM: Wiki confirms a link to Kafka but, as David P. has indicated, it’s applied to Jackdaws (in Portuguese, “gralha”) and not to ravens nor rooks. His information was fundamental to reach: “The Jackdaw (Corvus monedula), sometimes known as the Eurasian Jackdaw, European Jackdaw, Western Jackdaw, or formerly simply the daw, is a dark-plumaged passerine <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passerine> bird in the crow <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvidae> family…In his 1979 work The Book of Laughter and Forgetting <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Laughter_and_Forgetting> , Milan <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milan_Kundera> Kundera notes that Franz Kafka's <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka> father Hermann had a sign in front of his shop with a jackdaw painted next to his name, since kavka <http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavka_obecn%C3%A1> means jackdaw in Czech <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_language> ...The sentence "Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz" is a commonly used example of a pangram <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangram> , (i.e. a sentence that contains all 26 letters of the English <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_alphabet> alphabet), while the sentence itself is only 31 letters long.” Among the references to the “daw”in literature, according to wikipedia, there’s one by Shakespeare (Hamlet).
Anyway, any Nabokovian trail stemming from Poe, Lenore Raven, or the chess-piece “rook” doesn’t encompass Kafka or jackdaws. Thanks to everyone!
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Didier Machu: As you must know, 'elephant' may mean 'ivory' (elephantine: made of ivory; oliphant / olifant = ivory horn), hence: white piece
As for Philidor, he was a well-known French chess player of the 18th c., named (and esteemed) by Diderot (in Jacques le fataliste) and acquainted with Voltaire, Rousseau and others.
Steve Norquist: Shatranj, the ancient Persian predecessor of chess, had elephants instead of rooks, in the 7th century, and the queens were far less powerful than in the modern leader of the attack in a chess game, which google usually translates as "party" from the Russian. The game did not evolve into its current "Western" form until the 16th century.
Jerome Katsell: I don't believe "kafka" means raven in Czech. The usual for raven is "hravan," and "vrána" is used for crow. There's also "hravan polní," which means rook, the bird. The other rook, the chess rook/castle is "vĕž".
David Powelstock.: The Czech for 'raven' is 'havran' (not 'hravan') or 'krkavec,' both of which have been used to translate Poe's poem. 'Kavka' in Czech means 'jackdaw.' It most certainly would not be appropriate for Poe's poem.
JM: Wiki confirms a link to Kafka but, as David P. has indicated, it’s applied to Jackdaws (in Portuguese, “gralha”) and not to ravens nor rooks. His information was fundamental to reach: “The Jackdaw (Corvus monedula), sometimes known as the Eurasian Jackdaw, European Jackdaw, Western Jackdaw, or formerly simply the daw, is a dark-plumaged passerine <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passerine> bird in the crow <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvidae> family…In his 1979 work The Book of Laughter and Forgetting <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Laughter_and_Forgetting> , Milan <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milan_Kundera> Kundera notes that Franz Kafka's <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka> father Hermann had a sign in front of his shop with a jackdaw painted next to his name, since kavka <http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavka_obecn%C3%A1> means jackdaw in Czech <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_language> ...The sentence "Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz" is a commonly used example of a pangram <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangram> , (i.e. a sentence that contains all 26 letters of the English <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_alphabet> alphabet), while the sentence itself is only 31 letters long.” Among the references to the “daw”in literature, according to wikipedia, there’s one by Shakespeare (Hamlet).
Anyway, any Nabokovian trail stemming from Poe, Lenore Raven, or the chess-piece “rook” doesn’t encompass Kafka or jackdaws. Thanks to everyone!
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/