Alberto Manguel "Into the looking-glass wood: essays on words and the world" (1998), in the chapter "Reading white for black" mentions Vladimir Nabokov's disagreement with Edmund Wilson's criticism of his translation of Eugene Onegin (SO).

My edition is A. Manguel, "No Bosque do Espelho" ( Companhia das Letras, 2000 ) and I'm adapting his words back into the English. There will be other distortions. Manguel didn't append VN's original words nor did he indicate the pages where one

Manguel mentioned VN's theory about the translator's work and added: "Apparently Nabokov believed ( although I find it difficult to imagine that a master like him had intented to say such a thing) that languages are "equivalent" in relation both to meaning and to sound and that whatever can be imagined in one language may be re-imagined in another, without representing an entirely new creation."

The most probable place is Part Three ( Articles), in "Reply to my Critics". The closest lines: " Mr. Wilson can hardly be unaware that once a writer chooses to youthen or resurrect a word, it lives again...In several instances, English archaisms have been used in my EO not really to match Russian antiquated words but to revive a nuance of meaning present in the ordinary Russian term but lost in the English one. Such terms are not meant to be idiomatic..." (page 252,Vintage) but they are still far enough from Alberto Manguel's observation on Nabokovian theories about "equivalences" and the pre-Babelian translatability of all the languages. I'd have expected Manguel to be cognizant with linguistic concepts about the "signifier" and know how to apply them. In my opinion Nabokov was always very close to the symbolic dimension ( i.e, signifiers) and not to any imaginary fixed and equivalent "meaning" of the words and their sounds.

Along the way I found VN describe one (the only one) of his slips, Goethe's poem "Ueber allen Gipflen", presented as " Auf allen Gipfeln" (page 246). What I found interesting was - if we consider Kinbote's suicidal fascination ( Luzhin's, etc) with falling from a great height, or VN's intense preoccupation with his son as a mountain climber - the emergence of the German verb "fallen" (to fall) discernable in the slip ( Auf-allen) close to "Gipfeln" ( mountain summits).

Chapter 8 on "Rowe's symbols" ( VN mistook them as being representative of a kind of Freudian search for sexual innuendoes) he comments on "con" ( so frequent.."as to make every chapter a veritable compote of female organs",page 306), inspite of the putatively mali-scious "lexicon" memorized by Conmal...

I also found two references to another writer's envious venom trying to poison his rival ( reminiscent of Pushkin's Mozart and Salieri!).One, when mentioning E. Wilson (of course) and the other when describing Mr. R of "Transparent Things" ( asked if Mr.R was a parody of Mr. N) who "actually squirts the venom of envy at the infuriatingly smiling Adam von Librikov...an anagrammatic alias that any child can decode.." (page 196).

And... Red Admirables! (page 169). D.B.Johnson had praised my link bt Pale Fire and a Red Admiral in KQKn. And yet, it had been already mentioned by Alfred Appel (1970/71) when he asked: " That particular butterfly appears frequently in your own work, too. In Pale Fire[... ], the insect appears in King, Queen, Knave just after you've withdrawn the authorial omniscience..." Still, the point I wanted to make was not centered exclusively on the appearance of the butterfly but to the description of a gardener trundling a barrow and his automatic, mechanical way of moving in the same paragraph, close to the butterfly.

One of Manguel's quotes from Alice's Adventures (A mad tea-party ) reminded me of an exchange in Pale Fire where Kinbote shares a happy-hour with fellow professors and answers questions about having two ping-pong tables. When I went back to K's foreword I realized his answers were not at all similar to the March Hare's, but the "feeling" was the same. This happened not only in relation to the twin tables, but also with Aunt Maud's index opened in "M" (as in Maud's being as MAD as a hatter?).

1.`They were learning to draw,' the Dormouse went on, yawning and rubbing its eyes, for it was getting very sleepy; `and they drew all manner of things--everything that begins with an M--'/ `Why with an M?' said Alice./ `Why not?' said the March Hare.

"Another tormentor inquired if it was true that I had installed two ping-pong tables in my basement. I asked, was it a crime? No, he said, but why two? "Is that a crime?" I countered, and they all laughed."

2." ...that begins with an M, such as mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness-- you know you say things are "much of a muchness"--did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?' "

" I was brought up by dear bizarre Aunt Maud,/ A poet and a painter with a taste/...Her room/ We’ve kept intact. Its trivia create/A still life in her style:.../ The verse book open at the Index (Moon,/ Moonrise, Moor, Moral), the forlorn guitar,/..."

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