-------- Original Message --------
To Jansy: The jack/knave is one of the four most important cards
in the game of all fours and its descendants, so it's not lowly,
even if the game is. Another family of card games where jacks
are important is euchre.
From: Vic Perry <vicperryzoo@YAHOO.COM>
[snip question about italics in poem, which I have no idea about.]
> 2) That translation into Zemblan of Timon of Athens that is the
only
book
> Kinbote has with him in the cabin while he writes his commentary -
whatIS
> it?
In my opinion, that's a very good question, which has attracted
surprisingly little attention from the commentators I've read.
Brian Boyd, as you know, goes into considerable detail about the
passage from /Timon/ without saying anything about where Kinbote
got his re-Englished lines (except for attributing /Timon
Afinsken/ to Hazel, with the rest of Zembla).
I have the impression (I wish I could remember if I read it
anywhere) that one theory says Kinbote has a /Russian/ version
of /Timon/. This would have him looking at Russian text and
calling it Zemblan, a graver dementia than anything else he
shows in the book, in my opinion, calling into question his
reliability outside Zembla (which Boyd believes in). Maybe an
improved version would have him doing his re-Englishing earlier
for some reason, writing down a note on this passage, and then
looking at this note while he writes his commentary and thinking
that he has a Zemblan volume somewhere. This is getting a little
elaborate, and I've wondered whether the impossible 32mo volume
is one of those discrepancies that I keep looking for.
Thanks to Matt Roth, by the way, for pointing out that the year
that Walter Campbell left Zembla is not a discrepancy.
> This might be no mystery at all if you take a certain view of the
> fictional situation,
Shadean, for instance, or a view like Walter Miale's suggestion
that Kinbote is much more inventive and deceptive than people
give him credit for.
> but I sense a physical reality to this volume thanks
> to its limitations - if it is purely imaginary, why doesn't
Kinbote
> imagine a whole library of Zemblan literature there with him?
Maybe just because he doesn't need to?
> Also, the
> way it pops up incongruously in one of the Zemblan
adventures,suggesting
> a real object being incorporated into a dream, like the sound of
analarm
> clock transmuted into the cry of a siren.
Or is this Kinbote's careful planning?
> Boyd makes a lot of Kinbote's incompetence as a scholar causing
his
> inability to find the phrase "pale fire" in Timon, but there's no
> incompetence, really, if the version Kinbote has with him is a
> translation - of any kind, actually.
Well, one might ask why Kinbote didn't take his one-volume
Shakespeare with him, or buy one on his way through New York or
Chicago or Buffalo Boys, Idoming. He'd read the poem twice and
knew he'd have to comment on the "Help me, Will!" line.
> So did Kinbote complete one and only one book in Zemblan, a
translationof
> Timon that he carries with him, and attributes to Conmal (whom
hedefends,
> weirdly, personally)?
There's one I never imagined--but wouldn't he have some vague
memory of the original?
Jerry Friedman used to play California Jack, a game of the
All Fours family, with his brother.