----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, January 23, 2005 7:59 AM
Subject: Fw: juntando pedaços ada1
Dear Don and List,
Since I am not a Nabokov academic specialist
and have no time to write articles connecting certain leads from VN´s texts, I´d
like to share the data I´ve been collecting while researching certain words
during my " reading of Ada in Portuguese" ( while I´m doing an informal revision
of a forthcoming translation of ADA, by Jorio Dauster ) . Most of these
informations have certainly already been discussed in the List and correctly
examined by Brian Boyd, but I still think that these informal links and
reminders might interest the List readers.
My research began with Queen Ada ( historical
figure that inspired the name of an oncidean orchid that is also linked (
but imprecisely) to the Butterfly orchis, ruled in Caria ( Anatolia) but
indirectly, through the Butterfly orchis, which has been a subject of
former mailings to the list, and Queen Ada as well.
‘I can
add,’ said the girl, ‘that the petal belongs to the common Butterfly
Orchis; that my mother was even crazier than her sister; and that the
paper flower so cavalierly dismissed is ...( Ada, Ch.1)
My
readings then proceeded to:
ADA:
The girl’s pale skin, so excitingly delicate to Van’s eye, so vulnerable to the
beast’s needle, was, nevertheless, as strong as a stretch of Samarkand
satin and withstood all self-flaying attempts whenever Ada, her dark
eyes veiled as in the erotic trances Van had already begun to witness (
Ada,ch17)
There
is a poem by Poe that speaks of Samarkand and Tamerlane. It seems that also Marlowe and Lord Byron
wrote about Tamerlane. I´ll bring more information on Poe and
his poem about Tamerlane at the end of the posting.
Tamerlane, the name was derived from the Persian Timur-i lang, "Temur
the Lame" by Europeans during the 16th century. His Turkic name is
Timur, which means 'iron'. In his life time, he has conquered more than anyone
else except for Alexander. His armies crossed Eurasia from Delhi to Moscow, from
the Tien Shan Mountains of Central Asia to the Taurus Mountains in
Anatolia. From 1370 till his death 1405, Temur built a powerful empire
and became the last of great nomadic leaders.
Character and Personality
There are abundant ancient sources
written about Tamerlane. We have the primary source from Spanish Ruy Gonzalez de
Clavijo, sent by King Henry III of Castile on a return embassy to Tamerlane.
There is also a Persian biography of Tamerlane by Ali Sharaf ad-Din and the Arab
biography by Ahmad ibn Arabshah; from Marlowe to Edgar Allan Poe, he
continues to fascinate us as hero or viper.
Timur claimed direct descent from Jenghiz Khan through the house of
Chagatai. He was born at Kesh (the Green city), about
fifty miles south of Sarmarkand in 1336, a son of a lesser
chief of the Barlas tribe
In
1941, the body of Tamerlane was permitted to be exhumed by a Russian scientist,
M. M. Gerasimov. The scientist found Timur, after examining his skeleton, a
Mongoloid man about 5 feet 8 inches. He also confirmed Tamerlane's lameness. In
his book The Face Finder, Gerasimov explains how he was able to
reconstruct exact likenesses of Timur from a careful consideration of his skull.
Different sources indicate that Timur is a man with extraordinary
intelligence - not only intuitive, but intellectual. Even though he did not know
how to read or write, he spoke two or three languages including Persian
and Turkic and liked to be read history at mealtimes. He had aesthetic
appreciation in buildings and garden. It has been said that he loved art so much
that he could not help stealing it! The Byzantine palace gates of the
Ottoman capital of Brusa were carried off to Samarkand, where they were
much admired by Clavijo. Ibn Khaldun, who met him outside Damascus in 1401
worte:
"This king Timur is one of the greatest and mightiest kings...he is hightly
intelligent and very perspicacious, addicted to debate and argument about what
he knows and also about what he does not know!"
Known to be a chess player, he had invented a more elaborate form of
the game, now called Tamerlane
Chess, with twice the number of pieces on a board of a hundred and
ten squares.
Reading further along
ADA:
ADA: "Ada had declined to invite anybody except
the Erminin twins to her picnic;
but she had had no intention of inviting the
brother without the sister. The
latter, it turned out, could not come, having
gone to New Cranton to see a
young drummer, her first boy friend, sail off
into the sunrise with his
regiment. But Greg had to be asked to come after
all: on the previous day he
had called on her bringing a
Otalisman from his very sick father, who
wanted Ada to
treasure as much as his grandam had a little camel of yellow
ivory carved in
Kiev, five centuries ago, in the days of Timur and Nabok. (ch
39)
More collected references, now a link bt.
Nabok/Genghis Khan/Tamerlane/Tatar/Anatolia:
There is, to be sure, an impressionistic whirl through the
author's family history (including a gallery of Tartar princes and
fin-de-siècle oddities) in: Speak, Memory
John Updike wrote: Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on
Shakespeare's birthday in 1899, in St. Petersburg (now Leningrad). His family
was both aristocratic and wealthy. The family name, indeed, may stem
from the same Arabic root as the word nabob, having been brought into
Russia by the fourteenth-century Tatar prince Nabok Murza.
On September 3, 1968, Nicholas Garnham interview with
VN: " My own life has been incomparably
happier and healthier than that of Genghis
Khan, who is said to have fathered the first Nabok, a petty Tatar
prince in the twelfth
century who married
a Russian damsel in an era of intensely
artistic Russian
culture".
Anatolia,
or Asia Minor as it was known in ancient times, has been inhabited for 30,000
years. A bridge land due to its location, it possesses an abundance of natural
resources, water, good soil, a fairly suitable climate. It has always been
attractive to settlers, such as the Hittites, Urartians, Phrygians and the
Greeks.
Anatolia:
Greek word that means " Sunrise" ( "oriental" )
............................................................................
ADA:
" King
Wing, the latter’s wrestling master, taught the strong lad to walk on his hands
by means of a special play of the shoulder muscles, a trick that necessitated
for its acquirement and improvement nothing short of a dislocation of
the caryatics (ch 13)
Complementary data:
"The Erechteum
may look complicated & traditional initially, but strking innovations were
made by its unknown architect. The porch of Caryatics is
the highlight of this Greek construction. It is well-known for its unique
columns, that make use of female figures to replace the more traditional
columns...
Caryatid: Figura di donna, o anche
di uomo, impiegata come colonna o pilastro. Il nome deriva da Karuai, fanciulla
della città di Caria.
Other
Comments:
This part that deals with Van´s brachiambulation and
tarantine sail legs, makes reference to Caria ( city of Ada in
Anatolia ) through the word "caryatics" and a few paragraphs
before that we find Lady Erminin´s blue eyes lookeing down on the
scene from a Persian blue sky...
These references point to VN´s knowledge of Caria´s
Queen Ada. I don´t know enough about the geography ( either ancient or
modern ) but blood-lineages link Tarento ( through
Pyrrhus ) to Persia ( Alexander ) and Caria
( Ada ). I copied an extensive family-tree from the internet
that was a bit confusing but which brought this relation in a roundabout
way ( Ada as Alexander´s step-mother leads to Olympia, his biological one
that is a relative to one Pyrrhus...)
..........................................................................................
Connections bt. Divan
& Ottoman, Arab World and Goethe
I was researching today Goethe´s "West-Oestliche
Divan", i.e a collection of poems that links East and West
( Cf. ADA: Greg Erminin "on the
previous day had called on her bringing a Otalisman from
his very sick father" ) and thinking about the
Ottoman empire and an "ottoman" ( couch ) and
divan ( also couch) to reach the German poet´s "Talisman"
verses, when I discovered how strongly linked to the Arab world, philosophy and
writing Goethe had been. It came to me as a truly enormous
surprise.
Goethe´s Divan on
Talismans:
Talismane
Gottes
ist der Orient!
Gottes ist der Occident!
Nord- und suedliches
Gelaende
Ruht im Frieden seiner Haende!
Er, der einzige
Gerechte,
Will fuer jedermann das Rechte.
Sei von seinen hundert
Namen
Dieser hochgelobet! Amen.
Mich verwirren will das Irren,
Doch
du weisst mich zu entwirren.
Wenn ich handle, wenn ich dichte,
Gib du
meinem Weg die Richte!
Connection bt. Allan Poe and
Tamerlane
Edgar Allan Poe: He also, though
few remember it, drew deeply on the culture of the Middle East: history,
religion, personages, legends and ideas. And although his sources of information
were usually second hand - derived from commentaries and translations, rather
than original texts - he put his Saracenic-Arabic-Mongol-Islamic motifs to a
wide variety of ingenious uses: slapstick comedy, biting satire, earnest
philosophy and sentimental depictions of heroes. Some of his exotic references
are admittedly designed to impress the reader with his erudition, but he also
displayed a sincere respect for the Eastern materials he imported.
Equally fanciful, but much
more delicate in tone, is Poe's treatment of Tamerlane, the 14th-century Mongol
conqueror also known as Timur Lang (Timur the Lame). Claiming descent from
Genghis Khan, Tamerlane captured Samarkand, led an army against Persia, invaded
Russia and subdued parts of India and Asia Minor. A ruthless conqueror,
Tamerlane slaughtered thousands of captives, (See Aramco World,
September-October 1975) and left pyramids of skulls as monuments to his
victories. Yet Poe improvises a love story to humanize or possibly
sentimentalize the conqueror.
Original in concept and
executed with surprising skill - considering that he was 17 when he wrote it -
this poem presents Tamerlane on his deathbed confessing a secret grief that for
years has made him sick at heart. In his youth, he says, he had a tender side to
his nature that impelled him to seek out the company of a sympathetic young
woman to whom he could confide his fears and disappointments. But then, in his
daydreams, he heard:
... the crush of
empires — with thecaptive's prayer—
The hum of
suitors—and the tone
Of flattery round a
sovereign's throne.
He said he thought of her as a
suitable queen to share his glory but in his impatience left abruptly intending
to return later. Of course, when he goes back, the girl has died and their
special bower is overgrown with weeds.
This, no doubt, is sentimental
and romantic, but the force of its theme triumphs: each individual neglects his
deepest feelings only at great peril to his own happiness. Everything
considered, "Tamerlane" was a brilliant poetic debut.
The most difficult of all
Poe's poems, "Al Aaraaf," is also the work most heavily saturated with Eastern
terms and concepts. This relatively lengthy work, which also utilizes elements
from Shakespearean drama and Indian lore, is probably the most explicit example
of the deep impression Middle Eastern thought made on Poe. The title of the
poem-derived from an English version of the Koran - refers to an area between
heaven and hell (al-a'raf- dividing lines) where departed souls can
distinguish between the blessed and the damned. According to Poe's source - a
commentary by the translator - this zone was a sort of limbo where mortals whose
lives had been a perfect balance between good and evil remained until purified
.
( A geographycal
Tartary appears described in Ada.
Remember that Tartarus also means the third and profoundest part of
the Greek HADES ( Hell )
)