JM: I’m away from my books, but recall VN in Lolita, discussing the cultural differences in defining “paedophilia,” mentions the fact that Beatrice was 9 years old when Dante was “smitten” -- or “lust at first sight,” as we say in Liverpool. (Wiki says she was 8 and Dante 9, so we don’t have either the HH/Lo or HH/Annabelle syndrome.)
 
Dante’s Astronomical insights are indeed wondrous. For an astronomer’s adulation, see
http://ephemeris.sjaa.net/0209/b.html

skb

On 15/11/2008 12:41, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:

Fran Assa: ... research comparing Pale Fire with its venerated poet John Shade and its would-be poet Charles Kinbote to Dante's Divine Comedy[...] Are there sufficient connections between the works to justify my belief that there may be an allusion here? [...] what would have been his purpose in such an
allusion?

JM: Because I remembered Argentinian Borges (once dscribed by VN somewhat loosely in relation to "miniature minotaurs"), and his exceptional collection of Essays on Dante, this is where I set my focus. In his prologue to these essays Borges describes a magic tapestry in which everything, past present and future, is represented.Next he compares this "microcosm" to Dante's Divina Commedia, clearly bounded by Roman Catholicism and Ptolemaic astronomy. The Arcadian hypothesis ( as a recovered place, similar to a paradise with its apple and serpent, where one can mourn for forever-lost love) is mentioned in relation to Dante. *  Borges' s chief emphasis, though, is on Dante's exceptional rendering of "details" and in his lectures we often can find views that are very closely related to Nabokov's own.
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