As Victor Fet pointed out to me (and as I had
vaguely suspected myself), bars in Lermontov's poem "Mtsyri" is not a
snow leopard (Uncia uncia, not found in Caucasus) but a leopard
(Panthera pardus that was once found there). Thanks to Victor for his
correction! Curiously that, in English, bars is the plural of
"bar."
To return to 'gory Mary': If I didn't knew that
this phrase was coined by Nabokov, I would have looked for it not in Joyce (as
Joseph Aisenberg suggests), but in Mayne Reid (the American writer of Irish
descent who, in The Headless Horseman, describes a duel in a
saloon). I would also think of Joseph Conrad (the English writer of Polish
descent), but I confess I didn't read him.
To return to the Arzni water: Mandelstam calls it
kolyuchaya, sukhaya / i samaya pravdivaya voda ("the prickly, dry /
and most truthful water," whatever that meant) in another surviving excerpt
of his "Destroyed Verses."
Another interesting word that has the same
consonants as Arzni is zurna, the Georgian musical instrument, a
kind of bagpipes, mentioned in Lermontov's "Demon" (VI): Zvuchit zurna, i
l'iutsya viny ("A zurna plays, and wines are poured").
Alexey Sklyarenko