Carolyn Kunin:... in referrring to Kinbote as the Great Beaver, Nabokov was indeed indicating a reference to the constellation Gemini, then the pail, "situla," turns out to indicate the constellation Aquarius. Situla is a star in the constellation Aquarius, but the name also is an alternate name, along with Ganymede, for the constellation itself and refers to the source from which Aquarius/Ganymede pours out the water/wine. It seems that in most cultures this constellation is associated with rains, floods, fountains.One astrological interpretation reads "The beauty of Ganymedes and his flight through the air link [Situla] to the ideas of personal charm and aviation with which [the constellation] is certainly connected."

JM: Forgotten items, when they are brought back, may point to other, often new things! You wrote about "Situla" ( connected to Ganymede) and...lo and behold, in "Pale Fire" we have CK describe a "seaside situla (toy pail); a sixty-five-carat blue diamond accidentally added in his childhood, from his late father’s knickknackatory, to the pebbles and shells in that pail"...

Abraham Adams: But the thing that makes Jansy's question of why Kinbote would define the word especially interesting is Shade's own reference to the works "Dim Gulf," "Night Rote," and "Hebe's Cup" as a "damp carnival" in line 959. This by itself would seem to exclude all but the watery definition of the word.
How might this apparent redundancy be, as Jansy suggests, an insinuation of Zemblan usage?

JM: "Redundancy" is a suggestive word for the repetitious round undulatory sea-music associated to jongleurs and song ("rote"), also to the empty repetition of "learning by rote" in a refrain...

Should I approach your comments, and MR's, to the early notes by CK on Gradus ( "...The force propelling him is the magic action of Shade’s poem itself, the very mechanism and sweep of verse, the powerful iambic motor. Never before has the inexorable advance of fate received such a sensuous form...") VN's tapestry acquires a particular round and round mechanical poignancy in myn ears.

I thought it strange that Kinbote, a Zemblan, felt the need to explain to American ears John Shade's words for his "Night Rote" poems... CK, as MR suggested, might have carried a Webster 2nd to his Cedarn cave...

(There are more items on the "watery definition" when we add JS's bunch of essays The Untamed/ Seahorse was "universally acclaimed"/ (It sold three hundred copies in one year)."

M.Roth: Kinbote's definition of "rote" is indeed in Webster's 2nd: "the noise produced by the surf dashing upon the shore." Attribution is given to James Russell Lowell:Rote is a familiar word all along our seaboard to express that dull and continuous burden of the sea heard inland before or after a great storm. The root of the word may be in rumpere, but is more likely in rotare, from the identity of this sea-music with that of the rote - a kind of hurdy-gurdy with which the jongleurs accompanied their song. It is one of those Elizabethan words which we New-Englanders have preserved along with so many others.

It is, of course, impossible to know whether or not VN followed the chain this far back. The Lowell, in particular, may have been hard for him to locate, since Webster's doesn't mention where in Lowell the word is mentioned.

JM: Thank you for the wonderful erudite information!

(M. Roth: In the Foreword (p. 22) Kinbote says "A few days later, as I was about to leave Parthenocissus Hall--or Main Hall (or now Shade Hall, alas)... the Parthenocissus covering the wall of Main/Shade Hall is absolutely the Virginia creeper. Thus, the word at the root of Vinogradus is also connected to Shade not just by the waxwing (sampel/ampelis) but by Parthenocissus quinquefolia which covers the Hall which will come to bear Shade's name

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