-------- Original Message --------
Okneraylks: I just emailed Dieter before seeing your posting.
Ooopski, I typed 827 rather than 872 days, but my existence-theorem is
not affected.
Now I see that Dieter was correcting yr word-count. I had no idea
where his numbers had come from. NB the language needs to be
specified! Chinese word-counts are not too helpful.
My mother, rest her dusha, was ADA GALLAGHER before she married my
putative father. The name is therefore precious to me.
The scope for word-play is enormous when you ponder the popular female
adjectival ending "-ada" in many Romance languages. Pregnancy would
embarrass- Ada.
Chilling poem, Alexey. Kholod i mrak. Brrrr
CT?H
Quoting Alexey Sklyarenko <skylark05@MAIL.RU>:
> Dear Mr. Kelly-Bootle,
>
> If you are so fond of figures, ADA, according to my very rapid and
> approximate calculations, contains about 203000 words.
>
> Accorging to present-day historians, at least one million people
> died during Blokada (as the Siege of Leningrad, the time span of
872
> days, from September 9, 1941, to January 27, 1944, is known), my
> paternal great-grandfather (who died of hunger in the Siege's
first,
> and worst, winter) being one of them.
>
> BLOKADA = BLOK + ADA. Among Blok's short poems there is the weird
> and ultra-pessimistic Golos iz khora ("A Voice from the Choir",
> 1910-14) that has these prophetic lines:
>
> O esli b znali vy, druz'ya,
> Kholod i mrak gryadushchikh dney!
>
> Oh, if you only knew, my friends,
> How cold and dark the days to come will be!
>
> About Blok (who is the most "Petersburgian" of all Russian poets)
in
> ADA, see my article in Zembla "The Dreams of Aleksandr Blok as
> Enacted in Nabokov's ADA by Van Veen and Vice Versa".
>
> Alexey Sklyarenko
>