On 12/11/2008 00:58, "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:
<http://www.brooklynrail.org/>
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/11/books/poetry-language-and-love
Poetry: Language and Love
by Alexander Nazaryan
Vladimir Nabokov, Brian Boyd, Stanislav Shvabrin, eds., Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian Poetry
(Harcourt, 2008)
Love for Vladimir Nabokov was hardly a matter of the heart. He once suggested that a writer should work with “the imagination of a scientist,” and even his finest prose—probably Lolita and Speak, Memory—is more distinguished for a lapidary concern with the nuance of language than the humanistic and religious grappling of the great Russian novelists who proceeded him. Lolita may be a coquette, but it is the boundless possibility of English that is the true object of Humbert Humbert’s lust. An exemplary polymath, Nabokov found himself enthralled more by the near-infinite cornucopia afforded by words; the lives drawn by them sometimes seem secondary.
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In the interests of the Nabokovian linguistic precision being touted by reviewer Alexander Nazaryan, a key notion in modern linguistics is that the “cornucopia afforded by words” is not “near-infinite” but truly infinite. Indeed, we can state quite precisely that the number of finite sentences over a finite alphabet is aleph-0 (Cantor’s countable infinity). There’s literally “no end” to the list of possible sentences; and we can arrange them all lexicographically and assign each a unique positive integer 1, 2, 3, ... This is what we mean by a “countable” (or “denumerable”) infinity: any set whose members can be put into a 1-1 correspondence with the infinite set 1, 2, 3, ... This is not way-out arcane stuff, but first-year collegiate bread’n’butter maths from the late 19th century. What is arcane and enthralling is that, given an arbitrary mapping of integers to letters/words/sentences, the entire Nabokovian published corpus can be found embedded in sequences of the digits of (Greek) PI!
Moving quickly to Nazaryan’s conjecture that HH’s real lust was for words rather than for nymphets. Really? That would lead to a drastic re-reading of “Lolita” the novel! We would now seem to have HH inventing his carnal adventures; are Lo and his other victims merely figments of a frustrated but highly literate imagination? If so, surely Nabokov (the onlie begetter!) would have provided clues for such a hypothesis? As presented, VN offers the coherent narrative of a real luster after young, physical flesh. True, HH is not your average paedo. He relishes flowery, literary thoughts about his nymphets, but these are not substitutes for the real thing: the exploits he describes with equal relish (and accuracy?)
Stan Kelly-Bootle