SK-B: ...what's hard for any writer to fathom [!] is
whether the reader is as familiar as the writer with a word's range of meanings.
In the case of "rote," I can assure you that without CK's gloss, I and most
"native" Anglophones would not have associated "rote" with the "sound of the
sea." [...] A dozen arcane meanings for "rote" have also been noted here,
rarely found in everyday discourse.But, here's the key point: _without_ CK's en
passant definition, few, if any Anglophones would rush to look up "rote" in the
dictionary! It's the very fact of CK's parenthetical detour that has us
bothered. But not for long! Good Nabokovian re-readers will be moved to check
whether CK is teasing us or not [ WHAT IF, a draft of Shade's "Night Rote" turns up on a damp
card? ...By ocean lip the waters lap;/An ancient violin is heard /By rote
repeating endless crap ...]...We each acquire our
stock of words in diverse, uncharted ways.
He added: ...the "standard" meaning, and it makes reasonable sense in the
context of a _poem_ titled "Night Rote."...ponder plausibly, poetically about
nights spent "by rote," that is, habitually and mechanically, uncreatively and
so on.
Jansy
Mello: The more subjective our response to art, the less it may
be shared with other people. VN seems capable to ellicit descrepant
reactions and interpretations from his variegated readers (this often engenders
in me a feeling of "loneliness" that is not at all unpleasurable to
experiment). Just like the transformation undergone by Shaw's "Pygmalion"
(the play) in "My Fair Lady" (the musical) we move from your observation (
"that meaning seems to be from a rather localized
dialect..." ) to those found in various other dictionaries, even those in
Brazilian-Portuguese and Portuguese-Portuguese. In "My Fair Lady" there is a
line that goes like "there even are places where English completely
disappears: in America they haven't spoken it for years").
In a Brazilian,
French and Spanish rendering of "rote" we reached similar options: "ressaca,
ressac, resaca".
Probably another
translation, made in Portugal, would favor a different word for it.
In the Pale Fire
translation that was printed in Brazil, CK's parenthetical explanation was
omitted from the notes (!) since "ressaca" is immediately understandable by any
reader. Other alterations ensued. For example,
the bacchic "damp carnival" lost its carnal tone when the lines were
translated as:
"Foi Golfo em sombras meu
primeiro livro/
(versos livres); a ele se
seguiram/
A ressaca noturna e
A taça de Hebe,/
Último carro no úmido
desfile,/
because "carnival" was translated as "a
parade" (but not as a "paegeant") while CK's
manipulatory commentary lost some of its fleshy damp refrain.
( it is always a pleasure to read your messages, SK-B, and I
hope that the interrogation ( 1929 - ?) indicates many more years of
fruitful exchanges for all of us...)
It would be very interesting if any Nabokov scholar should
compare a selection of special words as they appear in a VN's original
writing and in its various translations into either English,Russian,
French, Spanish or Portuguese. I'm sure the results would be very surprising
indeed...