TOM (sorry I called you Tim; I have a faulty keyboard!):
Tomorrow’s TLS (marked Jan 16 2009 but delivoured the day!) carries a review by Joe Phelan o’ Robert Crawford’s “THE BARD — Robert Burns, a biography. (Cape, 20 pund)” Seems destined to upset the “Scottish Heritage Industry!” But whit’s noo? Discussing the bizarre mix of Kirk sermonizing, heavy drinking and lusty couplings, there’s a quote from Burns’s famous “The Holy Fair”:
How monie hearts this day converts
O’ sinners and o’ Lasses!
Their hearts o’ stane, gin night are gane,
As saft as any flesh is.
There’s some are fou’ o’ brandy,
An’ monie jobs that day begin,
May end in HOUGHMAGANDIE,
Some ither day.
“18th-century Scots was clearly a language rich in synonyms for the last pastime*, and Burns makes use of most of them in his poetry.” (Joe Phelan, TLS, ibid)
* I.e., houghmagandie as fornication. An old joke sees COMING THROUGH THE RYE as a euphemism for shagging in a corn field.
This and similar poems were surely known to many “down south” including VN’s Cambridge literary circles? Hadrian’s Wall had lang syne crumbled! Among the most popular tourist trinkets sold on Princes Street are tea towels embroidered with Scots word lists and mottoes, where it’s hard to separate wheat from chaff: genuine “reeking lums” and “nicky tams” from the Harry Lauder oots-mon stage excesses of “it’s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht!” In other words, we need not confine VN’s sources of Lowlands dialect to his Scots tutor. In particular, one wonders if VN was a tad too wee a bairn to learn “houghmagandie” from tutor Burness?? BTW, Rabbie’s father’s name is officially recorded as WILLIAM BURNES, a reminder to all listers NOT to FASH (worry) theirselves over SPELLING, which is quite a MODERN snare and distraction! (Burn being a stream, the toponym is hard to pin down as any sign of blood kin. Compare the 20 or so Unrelated Shak[e]spe[a]re families in 17th-century Warwickshire alone ;=))
Here are some of my NEW YEAR NABOKOVIAN RESOLUTIONS:
- Re-read Pale Fire in the light of all the marvelously inventive allusion-hunting from Matt, Brian, Dieter, Jansy, Priscilla et al.
And esp. Matt’s helpful taxonomy of VN’s allusions. AIM: decide if VN is a greater poet than JS!
(My copy of Verses & Versions has just arrived from amazon.com. Using a US credit-card, my bill was only $26.40 (NOT $40 as advertised) plus $7.98 postage to UK. Thanks to Stanislav Shvabrin for this money-saving tip.)
2. Re-review Priscilla Meyer’s Grand Unified Theorem linking Lolita and Onegin (Thesis: America & Russia) with Lolita and Pale Fire (Antithesis: America & England) leading to the Hegelian Synthesis in Ada. ASK: does her confusion over Angus and Hugh MacDiarmid dilute her conclusions &/or falsify her methodology? Are we really supposed to gain insights into the evolutions of European languages/literatures? Are we really expected to learn new biographical facts about VN’s linguistic/cultural odysseys?
Both suggestions seem counter to VN’s opposition to the “novel as vocational text book.”
On 04/01/2009 22:06, "Nabokv-L" <nabokv-l@UTK.EDU> wrote:
Subject:
Re: [NABOKV-L] McDiarmid, Southey, etc.
From:
Stan Kelly <skb@bootle.biz> <mailto:skb@bootle.biz>
Date:
Thu, 1 Jan 2009 14:00:25 +0000
To:
Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU> <mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
But Tim, there's no lack of SCOTS OOT type dictionaries
available for Sassenacks ootside Hibernia
skb
On 30 Dec 2008, at 15:31, NABOKV-L <NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU> <mailto:NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU> wrote:
Dear All,
As a native speaker of the so-called "Lallans", born in Ayrshire, may
I remind Nabokophiles that the young VN had a Scots tutor, Mr Burness.
He may have been related to Robert Burness (later Burns), the poet of my
native Mauchline, where great aunt Poosie and her husband Wullie Gibson
were the proprietors of Poosie Nansie's Howff, the setting of Burns's
Jolly Beggars Cantata. I speculate that Mr Burness (who turns up in
Pale Fire under another name) introduced the young VN to certain
Lowland Scots expressions. It is unlikely that VN would have
encountered such terms such as "houghmagandie" in Cambridge, Berlin,
Paris, Stanford, Wellesley or Cornell.
Seasonally, lang may yer lum reek...
Tom Rymour