I could not find former references in the List to Saint Francis, but I remember postings on this subject.I thought this image of St. Francis, with a sun shining on the pale moon of his halo quite suggestive.
The Saint's name brings together John (Francis) Shade and Kinbote ( Charles Xavier )Jansy
Dear Jansy:
I’m more convinced of a plausible link between the textually ‘contiguous’ names of Shade and Kinbote than by your suggested pun linking Barts and Beardsley. In “Signs and Symbols” there may be warning against rash ‘connectionism’:
“The system of his delusions had been the subject of an elaborate paper in a scientific monthly, but long before that she and her husband had puzzled it out for themselves. ‘Referential mania,’ Herman Brink had called it.”
Then, again, I could be on the brink of committing the same sin of ‘manic’ cross referencing? As DN oft reminds us: he sees his dad smiling from above at our donnish capers.
I find another link — to the thread that refuses to die -- how the ‘borrower’ can or should pronounce ‘borrowed’ names. Your Saint has blessed an eponymous Catholic school in Liverpool but the locals call it Saint Francis EKS-avier
with the famous Scouse fricative K. It makes for a colourful ‘f**k off’ which is a monosyllabic FKOFF on Merseyside.
I mention this to show that some Anglophones are unfazed by Slavic consonantal clusters such as DN’s initial DM[itri] or ‘VK’ as in “V KANADOO” (‘to Canada’). For a decent Russian rolling of the Rs [sic] [in Dmitri and Vladimir etc] you must travel to Scotland or Wales. (BTW: the ‘ll’ in a Welsh Mello is a real challenge for outsiders.)
Interestingly (to some), fans here handle the prename of the Liverpool FC player XAVI Alonso with stunning precision. Not EKS-AVI, HAVI, SHAVI or DJAVI but the proper Basque CHAVI!
A final [?] thought on the sweet sound of NABOKOV, since I helped re-trigger the recent re-debate. Note that my interest was VN’s reaction to the variants rather than the variants themselves.
The two-edged fact, DN, is that your iconic SirName has been lovingly globalized and branded rather like Guiness or CocaCola. [fnote 1]
Each isogloss orders and gets its omnipresent drink with a wide variety of g’s ui’s k’s o’s l’s and a’s [fnote 2]
(Some may be (wrongly?) tempted to decline [sic] KocaKola as a singular [sic] compound [sic] feminine noun: Daite mne Koka-Koloo?)
Similarly, the jolie servante in W H Smith directs me to the right shelves when I ask for VN’s books. If I use my near-immaculate Russian intonation, she’s likely to say “You mean NAHbuhkoV?” Which, of course, is true! [fnote 3]
Stan Kelly-Bootle
fnote 1: “In fact, I don't seem to belong to any clear-cut continent. I'm the shuttlecock above
the Atlantic, and how bright and blue it is there, in my private sky, far from the pigeonholes and the clay pigeons.” (1968 BBC Interview)
fnote 2: Very few non-Anglophones can, or even try to, mimic the Yankee diphthongs imposed on the original Spanish ‘coca’ or W. African ‘kola.’ Likewise, few Anglophones manage to achieve the crisper, less diphthongal ‘stressed’ vowels of say French and Russian. The bane of Berlitz is correcting “EEUHl Faay Boowh” (“Il fait beau”)
fnote 3: Just assuming VN’s claim that Ghengiz Khan fathered the first Nabokov, it’s fun (but tiring) to compare the phonetic systems of Russia and TatarStan (no relation!). The Tater language (formerly ‘Cyrilized’ in CCCP by Uncle Joe but now appearing with Romanized and Arabic scripts) enjoys ‘rounding’ vowel harmony with no neutral vowels. The putatively ‘original’ Nabokov would, I posit, sound quite different from either Webster or DN: no schwas anywhere, but no stressed ‘o’ either. All three syllables democratically even.