On 29/12/07 23:27, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
When you laugh, I want to transform the entire world so it will mirror you...aren't you and I gods? . . . I sense in my blood the rotation of unexplorable universes. . .(VN,"Gods")
Happy 2008 to you all...
JM
Jansy & Fellow Nabokovistas: I reciprocate, being too old and ungodlike to rotate. The quotation is new to me and especially exciting with its mathematical implications: the contrasts between reflective and rotational symmetries (which have deep influences in cosmology).
Had I stumbled across this verse unattributed, I think (or dare to think) that I would have identified our master’s voice?
My 2008 has been happy SO FAR! Urly daze [early days], as we Scousers say. I received as a prezzie the Pocket Penguin 34, CLOUD, CASTLE, LAKE (2005) which offers five of VN’s finest short stories at the improbable price of 30 Brit pence per masterpiece! There’s no explicit acknowledgement to translators, but since the stories are taken from earlier collections (out of reach as I type), I assume we are enjoying the fruits of Dmitri’s labours, many with his father’s collaboration.
DN: Lang mae yer lum reek! (Long may your chimney smoke)
There are 70 Pocket Penguins in the series, celebrating Penguin’s 70 years. I shudder un peu at some of the non-writers selected, but, what the hell ...
For Jansy and others on dis staff, I offer VN’s tease from The Admiralty Spire:
‘ ... how easy it is to guess that the author’s name is a pseudonym, that the author is not a man! Every sentence of yours buttons to the left.’
(Coincidentally, last night I was watching as Siegfried made a similar discovery in Act 3. Bru:nhilde’s shield must have buckled to the left! That’s no man, he screams ripping off his Auntie’s bra. Real naughty, that Ring Cycle.)
This brings us back to VN’s Gods:
When you laugh, I want to transform the entire world so it will mirror you...aren't you and I gods? . . . I sense in my blood the rotation of unexplorable universes. . .(VN,"Gods")
The poet-god (did the original have God upper-case?) seems to have real blood to sway his senses, the sign of a Greek demi-god or hints of the (related?) Christian Man-God reincarnation. Either way, VN gives us prophetic signs’n’wonders: serious cosmologists do posit multiverses which are forever unexplorable -- beyond direct spatio-temporal relations with our local cosmos. (Eddington in the late 1920s was exploring whether a 3+1-dimensional world could coexist with a 2+2-dimensional world. His answer: yes, but neither could ever know about the other’s existence. This was at Cambridge during VN’s very residence! Do we have a date for the Gods poem?)
Nearer to earth, in the poposed mirror-image transformation, the loved-one’s vestments will button to the right. But, of course, male coats will now button to the left. Note that this chirality is directly related to the two directions of rotational spin (male coats wrap clockise; female counter- or anti-clockwise. These and other spins play a key role in particle physics. Our universe may well FAVOUR male over female spin, or vice versa!) Is this just the chiral reversal of purely arbitrary dress-codes, or will the Viennese Witchdoctors who love to probe VN’s ID and ID-EST, seek some fanciful homoerotic deviations.
My spin [sic], which I hope Nabokovians will support at this festive point in space-time, is that we all unbutton in the appropriate direction and cavort naked with Ada and ardour, Hum and Lol, Shades and Grades of Kinny and Pninny and all, in VN’s transformed universe.
Stan Kelly-Bootle