Jansy: I do hope you are not overly bedazzled by Alexey’s amusing, fanciful, sky-larking “links.” (Note the Brit idiom: “Blimey, what a lark!”) It’s really a weird, wide stretch to take any mention of that most-widely used word “song” (even by Pushkin) and leap to VN’s use of “Canto” in Shade’s Pale Fire poem. First, although the prime meaning of the Italian “canto” (via Latin “cantus”) is undoubtedly “song,” a secondary, technical meaning (the divisions of a long poem) gives Shade’s “Cantos” an obvious link to Dante’s Commedia* (We hardly need Shade’s bust of Alighieri to help us). Dante’s masterpiece is not divided into songs; in whatever language it appears, the divisions are cantos! The English for Dante’s and Shade’s “Canto” is “Canto.”
And my reading of VN’s choice of “Canto” as the height of deliberate irony and sarcasm will be shared by the many who see Shade’s poet-tasting as the least Dantean conceivable. Both discuss the “Afterlife,” of course, but Dante, helped by a rime-rich emerging Italian, gives us a sublime, poetic “solution!” (Namely, things can get pretty bad for sinners: prends garde á toi!) Shade’s account is brilliantly, hilariously banal, scraping the barrel of an unhelpful English lexis for rimes that confirms VN’s love of William McGonagall (1825-1902), “The world’s worst poet ... so giftedly bad he backed unwittingly into genius."
* “Commedia,” recall, signifies “a happy ending” rather than slapstick comedy.
PS: GUESS WHAT I found in the Urban Dictionary ;=) Matt: forget that old Webster II!
1. preterist
n. A collector of cold nests.
Earlier meanings include 'a person more interested in the past than present or future.'
Here it applies specifically to those nostalgic and obsessed over past shags. Compare the phrase 'A night on the nest' for a one-night-stand!
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 10/04/2009 17:52, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
Alexey Sklyarenko:To the second edition (1828) of his Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820) Pushkin added a wonderful introductory poem that begins:
U lukomor'ya dub zelyonyi,/Zlataya tsep' na dube tom./I dnyom i noch'yu kot uchyonyi/Vsyo khodit po tsepi krugom./Poidyot napravo - pesn' zavodit,/Nalevo - skazku govorit.("A green oak grows at the sea, / A golden chain is on that oak. / Night and day a learned cat / Paces the chain round the tree. / When he goes to the right, he sings a song, / When he goes to the left, he tells a fairy tale.")
Pushkin's fairy tale cat paces a golden chain that winds round the oak (cf. Quercus ruslan Chat. that grows in Ardis park: Ada, 2.7) When he goes to the right, he sings a song ("Pale Fire" the poem consists of Cantos, i. e. "songs"), when he goes to the left, he tells a fairy tale (Kinbote's Zembla that makes up most of his Commentary is a fairy tale; note that, as a homosexual, Kinbote is "sexually left-handed"...)
//snip
Alexey's addition of Pushkin's poem is GREAT!!! It heads or entails another way of looking at Pale Fire, through Pushkin's perspective with cat, songs and fairty-tales.