Carolyn Kunin [ James
Twiggs: I stubbornly resist all totalizing, only-I-have-the-key
interpretations of Pale Fire...marching to the tune of a Gradus right this
minute.]I wonder if Nabokov meant it to be so hard to find the solution. I can
only surmise that he really didn't care. However I am heartened to know that I
am not the only person to have found this solution[...] I believe Martin Gardner
could have solved it fairly easily[...] I am not all that bright (IQ <120)
and I think it took me four or maybe even five total readings. Someone truly
brilliant could probably do it in two.
JM: I was ready to
give in to Gradus, but I found out that there is life after death after
all!
Carolyn unearthed (should I say unaethered?) my past
L-posting on a Magritte painting, in connection with Gradus, his umbrella and
black hat.
She added a few wikisnippets on its title " la
Golconda". It seems to have everything to do with vampires ( the good ones, I
mean, not the Vsleslavs).
Just like my grandkid Juliana's recent passion for a
vampire named Edward ( - and he is..."a vegetarian", at least as
vampires go), following a best-selling trilogy by Stephenie Meyer* and
the "Twilight" movie, directed by Catherine
Hardwick. I also read about Chris
Costner Sizemore and her books, following the success of Joan Woodward in
the Eve-movie: "I'm Eve" and "A mind of my own", where she confesses she
has had not only three, but twenty different personalities.God
bless Hollywood.
A.Sklyarenko switches
from "Pushkin to Tyutchev, author of the short poem Bezumie ("Madness",
1830)." in which he speaks of the shock he expierenced when
hearing the skylark...The bird's voice stunned the poet's soul like a
horrible laughter of madness: Kak bezum'ya smekh uzhasnyi / On vsyu dushu
mne potryas." It's interesting that VN seldom (if ever) mentioned Virginia
Woolf. The birds she could hear sang in Greek. When
switching over to England, A.S. adds: "Shelley's incandescent
soul" is mentioned in Shade's poem The Nature of Electricity (see Kinbote's note
to l. 347). On the other hand, the title of one of Shades' books of poetry,
Hebe's Cup, seems to refer to the last stanza of Tyutchev's poem Vesennyaya
groza ("The Spring Thunderstorm", 1828) that mentions yet a third bird, the
eagle," to remind us that Shade's parents were ornithologists, Sybil's
maiden name was Irondell, the ashen waxwing and much more.
Piers Smith: Truffling for meanings isn't a bad metaphor for what
hermeneuts do[...] give birth to others or end up hobbling around on zimmer
frames. And what Nabokov intended need not be very important anyway. As well as
being a profoundly unfashionable approach to textual curiosities, the search for
an author in PF, or any other narrative, does the reader a terrible disservice.
In this case, the author / reader pairing *within* the text strikes me—another
reader—as being an accurate reflection of what is going on outside it. No end to
what we can come up with. At the moment, I like the Pushkin translation parody
idea best.
JM: Piers Smith notes that the
author/reader pairing within the text...is an accurate reflection of what is
going on outside it. Split-readers, I suppose. And yet, VN's parodying
himself in a Pushkin translation parody seems to me quite unlikely, although
equally entertaining. Why do we need to come up with an end when literary
after-life can be such fun?
..................................................................................
*- "Breaking Dawn", the last in the trilogy, is not yet
available in Portuguese. Juliana is successfully learning
English because Meyer returns to the same sentences over and over, with
its ancillary "gasped, groaned, muttered," and, as she remembered
the same lines in the other two in Portuguese, it became a piece of
pie. No such luck awaits her with Nabokov,
though.