Sending this one again...
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, January 16, 2010 6:55 AM
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] Fw: [NABOKV-L] Powerful Kramler: Nabokov
decoded ...
JM:
Why not enjoy the 50 quotations ( or as many that we find the time
to read), spurred on by VN, but without having to refer everything back to
him again? James Twiggs addresses are a marvellous guide for verbal
travels.
A.Bouazza's quote from
Proust proves to be a real treat: [ "Readers of Proust will recall the
preparation of asparagus in the first part of his "A la recherche du temps
perdu", and, more significantly and relevantly, the following passage:..'what fascinated me would be the asparagus,
tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads...through a
series of imperceptible changes to their white feet...a rainbow-loveliness that
was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence
of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable
form..."] because through
it we get the feeling of late nineteenth
and early-twentieth literature and this enhances our joy of
reading Nabokov.
Bouazza's paragraph from
Proust (which I'd long forgotten, unlike VN whose references teem with the
excitement of reading such ecstatic "rainbow-phallic" fantasies) added a
particular sirinal iridescence to Flora's aspirin/asparagus in
TOoL...
In relation to BB's "Larvarium" (with
an "a"), what struck me most was the initial naming of "larvae",
following Carolus Linnaeus's original choice for the name in the
Seventeenth Century.
As far as "new coinages" go, his
classificatory poetry deserves the trophy:
"The word larva referring to the
newly hatched form of insects before they undergo metamorphosis comes from the
Latin word larva, meaning "evil spirit, demon, devil." To understand why this
should be so, first we need to know that the Latin word also was used for a
terrifying mask... Larva is therefore an appropriate term for that stage of an
insect's life during which its final form is still hidden or masked, and New
Latin 'larva' was thus applied in 1691 by Carolus Linnaeus, the
Swedish botanist who originated our system of classifying plants and
animals. The word larva is first recorded in English in its scientific sense
in 1768, although it had been used in its "spirit" sense in 1651 in a way
that foreshadowed the usage by Linnaeus. "
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth
Edition. Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company."
.................................................................
B.Boyd:
Sorry to be a party-pooper, but we know what Nabokov's preferred
English dictionary was, so it seems pointless to decide that this or that word
he has used is a coinage, when it's in Webster's Second.There, there are 5
different entries for "stang," and the first sense of the first entry is "A
pole, rail, or beam." "Larvarium" it defines as "A box or cage for the rearing
of insect larvae." As far as I know it is still possible to obtain old copies of
Webster's Second International Unabridged at ridiculously low prices from
Merriam-Webster.
James
Twiggs: Go here for a list of 50
quotations in which the word "stang" appears, including several from Gulliver's
Travels and other works that VN was sure to know:http://www.wordnik.com/words/stang/examples; ...but, as
Stan suggests, to what purpose?. One of the most interesting uses is
in the expression "riding the stang," which is explained here:http://www.answers.com/topic/riding-the-stang and,
in far more colorful language, here: http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/answers/articles5/X0017_Ride_the_wild_STANG.html But
isn't it possible that VN (or Shade), faced with the difficult problem of
finding a suitable one-syllable word at this point, simply made the best of a
bad situation? As for Webster's Second, it is online and free at http://machaut.uchicago.edu/