Jerry Friedman: It's
impossible for me, and I suspect was for VN, to see a mention of
Swinburne's "Dolores" without thinking about sadism and masochism[...] I
don't see how Oursler or the reviewer who quotes him could have missed it
either.[...] I can't see the surname "Quine" without thinking
about the Harvard philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine [...] Another Quine
is Richard Quine, an American actor and director [...] In the inevitable VN
coincidence, his last directing credit was /The Prisoner of
Zenda/ (1979), starring "Peter Sellers & Peter Sellers".[...] I'm
afraid I may have only provided more red herrings.[...] how little
Zemblan natural history there is in /Pale Fire/. Nabokov must have been
telling us those bogs and butterflies were in his imagination.
JM: A few more red
herrings! Like the joy by going round and round the fire in
a ceremonial dance VN once mentioned ( in
"Lolita"?) instead of taking a short-cut...
The "Dolores" poem, mentioned explicitly in Ada,
presents an interesting link bt. Lolita and Ada:
Swinburne's lover was called Dolores and Adelaide (Adah Menken,
nicknamed "Great Bear"):
"For Menken, probably
born as Adelaide McCord in Milneburg, Louisiana, or possibly Philomène Croi
Théodore or Dolores Adios Los Fiertes in New Orleans, there was an ongoing play
of identities: multiple versions of her birth, her parentage, her ethnicity. Her
ongoing art work in that sense was an elaborate self-construction".
We've been discussing VN's relationship with female writers ( I'm skipping
sado-masochism and wild eroticism...) and Menken's formal innovation
as a poet, like that of Walt Whitman, whom she knew from the New York café
scene of the early 1860s, was in the open/projective/free verse line of her
later poetry. In this she need no longer be viewed as an imitator of Walt but as
someone drawing like him from the Bible and Ossian [...]while driven by a very
different sense of mind & body." [...] Her book of largely free-verse poems,
Infelicia, published shortly after her early death, caused astonishment &
bewilderment, & only now may appear as what it surely was: the emergence of
an unfettered woman artist & poet. [MENKEN, ADA ISAACS. [PSEUD. OF
DOLORES ADIOS FUERTES]. INFELICIA. London, Paris, New York: 1868. 12mo, (4),
viii, 142pp, frontis portrait, reproduction of a letter by Charles Dickens.
Green cloth, slightly worn at extremities, gilt lettering on front and spine.
Gilt edges, contemp. bookplate. title loose, otherwise a good, sound copy. ¶
First Edition, published a week after the author's death.Offered for US$ 125.00
by: Dailey Rare Books - Book number: 6273].
btw: I cannot see VN
referring to logician Quine as "Quine, the Swine"...Probably Quine stands for
somebody else. I've tried to jumble the sounds, search for a pun (most
of VN's puns, while spontaneously playing with polisemy, are
marvellous. The deliberate ones are often similar to Prof. Pnin's...) - but
with no success.
For those who want to follow the thread, there are old
VN-postings, by A.Sklyarenko, on Pushkin's "Poltava", Maria, decembrists
and all. Thnnks, in retrospect, AS...
S K-B on Priscilla Meyer's
SWTSHH: “Kinbote’s translation back into English from Uncle
Conmal’s Zemblan translation of Timon reads [...] “We may conclude that in
Zemblan, as in Anglo-Saxon and modern German, the sun is feminine, and the moon
is masculine.” Priscilla doesn’t mention that Kinbote’s sea is now overtly
neuter (it). Worth noting the relevance of these gender shifts to the debate
with JA/JM re-translational hurdles. Many LitCritters go all GIDDY over genders,
reading irrelevant sex-genders into grammatical-genders! [...] PS: Good news for
iPod Touch and iPhone users. A FREE application from the ap.store called
SHAKESPEARE, gives you searchable online-text access to ALL the plays[...] This
is HiTech serendipity at its highest! "
JM: Grammatical-genders are puzzling.
The sea, neutered for Kinbote, is feminine in French and masculine in Portuguese
and Spanish, although sun and moon are masculine and feminine, respectively, in
all three. Does your erudite high-tech inform about the
lines in BS: follow the perttaunt jauncing
'neath the rack/ with her pale skeins-mate ?