Dear List,
I'd totally forgotten that "Mademoiselle O" had
been "originally written in French and was first published in the
review Mesures, Paris, 1939. It was translated into English with the kind
assistance of the late Miss Hilda Ward, and came out in the Atlantic Monthly and
in the Nine Stories. A final, slightly different version, with stricter
adherence to autobiographical truth, appeared as chapter 5 in my memoir
Conclusive Evidence, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1951 (also published in
England as Speak, Memory, by Victor Gollancz, 1952)." Cf. appendix in "The
Stories of Vladimir Nabokov."
It means that the words I quoted with such relish were not the same as
those Nabokov has employed in his original text in French.
My plan was to bring up the "distill - still" sentence, again, to
check for its echoes in "Pale Fire." Now I'm unsure if this linkage
is possible, because I ignore who penned them in English
"There she sat, distilling her reading voice
from the still prison of her person." and " She had not
allowed us to walk under the organ-pipe-like system of huge icicles that hung
from the eaves and gloriously burned in the low sun. "
The words in question are: distill/still (close to
PF's "stillicide."), organ-pipe icicles and eaves (as "stilettos"). I
wondered if, anywhere, lurked the word "style" as their sonorous shadow
either then, or later in PF ("stiletto" "stilus" and "stile" - with
a "cloak and dagger
hint-glint...regicide")*
Pale Fire (lines 34/36 )
Whatever in my field of vision dwelt —
An indoor scene, hickory
leaves, the svelte
Stilettos of a frozen stillicide —
(lines 92/93)
Its trivia create
A still life in her style: the
paperweight
Of convex glass enclosing a lagoon...
CK (note to lines 34-35)
My
dictionary defines it as "a succession of drops falling from the eaves,
eavesdrop, cavesdrop." I remember having encountered it for the first time in a
poem by Thomas Hardy. The bright frost has eternalized the bright eavesdrop. We
should also note the cloak-and-dagger hint-glint in the "svelte stilettos" and
the shadow of regicide in the rhyme.
In the internet I found a harsh criticism of Nabokov's short-stories and of
his "englishing" them: "
Nabokov perhaps felt little real affinity for the
short story, which he called "a small Alpine form" of the novel. This seems an
odd claim to make of a writer whose collected stories runs to nearly 800 pages.
But the fact remains that he abandoned the form in 1951, even before Lolita's
success freed him of the need to write for his rent. He returned to it later
only to (as he put it) "English" untranslated stories, and to retranslate ones
he thought poorly rendered." The reviewer adds: "
Some critics disparage
Nabokov's straddling of 19th-century realism and modernism as clumsy. But even
if it were the case (which it isn't) that none of his stories worked, they would
remain worth reading for the metaphors and similes..." On "Signs and
Symbols": "
The story brilliantly challenges the presentation of "reality" in
fiction...and the conception of the short story as a rigidly calibrated machine
in which nothing is without purpose or meaning. Little wonder that Nabokov was
happier amid what he saw as the larger, freer expanses of the novel."
(
A brief survey of the short story part 28: Vladimir Nabokov
... 25 Aug 2010 ... Love' and ' Mademoiselle
O' were snipped out of Nabokov's memoir Speak,
www.guardian.co.uk/books/.../short-story-vladimir-nabokov - )
.....................................................................................................................................................
* To return to online dics and commentaries
about etymologies and quotes:
(a)
Notes on the Origin and Etymology of "Stylus"
and "Style" May 26, 2010 Yinwai Lilith Lee
"...Diego de Saavedra
Fajardo (1584-1648) was a Spanish writer ...In one of his works, República
literaria, he writes about a dream in which he visits the Republic of Letters as
a physical place...Among the subjects that he has selected to deliberate upon, a
passage on the history of book making may provide modern readers with some
interesting information.What Is a Stylus? "Others [books] were on thin
leaden plates, and some on tablets, covered with a thin face of wax, on both
which the characters were cut with a small iron point, called stilus, whence we
have the phrase of a good or a bad stile [1]."...The Style of Stylus:
According to Saavedra Fajardo, the term style is derived from the writing
instrument stylus when one starts talking about a good style or a bad style. In
the Spanish text, the two meanings are represented by the same word estilo. In
the English translation, it is rendered differently, in stilus and stile.Thus,
the original meaning of style is essentially the writing style, which later is
transferred onto other types of style, such as a person's appearance, the way he
or she dresses or behaves, etc. Style or Stile? In the early eighteenth
century, stile was still written with an i, as can be seen in the text, which is
precisely the translation of the Latin word stilus meaning "spike." It was
changed into y when the etymology of the word was wrongly attributed to the
Greek word stylos, which means "pillar" or "column." [1] The passage is from the
first English version of República literaria by an unknown translator: Saavedra
Fajardo, Diego de. The Commonwealth of Learning; or a Censure on Learned Men and
Sciences, London: R[ichard] J[aneway], 1705. Reference: Hodgson, Charles.
"Etymology of the Word Style." Podictionary950, 30 Mar 2009,
[http://podictionary.com/?p=1847], accessed 26 May 2010. Copyright Yinwai Lilith
Lee. Read more at Suite101: Notes on the Origin and Etymology of "Stylus" and
"Style" http://www.suite101.com/content/notes-on-the-origin-and-etymology-of-stylus-and-style-a241256#ixzz16dVAtqMk
Style, following podictionary 950, Mar 30th,
2009 "In Latin stilus was a stick in the ground. It had a pointed
end so that you could poke it more easily into the ground.
The word for this
pole was transferred to a writing instrument because at first people didn’t
write with pen and ink, but like the chalkboards of the old one room school
house, people instead practiced their writing on a tablet covered with soft
wax...They gave the little pointed instrument the same name they gave to the
similarly-shaped poles that they stuck in the ground. And so a little
pencil-like device was called a stylus. This was a little confusing to medieval
scholars trying to understand the etymology of the word stylus because they saw
this Latin word meaning both a pencil and a pole for sticking in the ground and
they jumped to the conclusion that the word must have come from the Greek word
for “pillar” or “column” which was stylos. Hence they incorrectly corrected
everyone into spelling the word stylus with a “y.” Now that we can see how a
pencil got called a stylus it isn’t that much of a stretch of the imagination to
see that style was first applied to how one expressed oneself in
writing."
(b) The Italian word
"stiletto" comes from the Latin stilus meaning: "a stake; a pointed
instrument".[wiki]
(c) stillicide: (Law) Law a right or duty relating to
the drainage of water from the eaves of a roof onto adjacent land [from Latin
stillicidium, from stilla drop + -cidium, from cadere to fall]
Collins
English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged © HarperCollins Publishers 1991,
1994, 1998, 2000, 2003.
stillicide: definition
from Wiktionary, the free dictionary :Water falling in drops, especially in a
row from the eaves of a roof, or from icicles or stalactites.
1962: Whatever
in my field of vision dwelt – / An indoor scene, hickory leaves, the svelte /
Stilettos of a frozen stillicide – / Was printed on my eyelids' nether side /
Where it would tarry for an hour or two, / And while this lasted all I had to do
/ Was close my eyes to reproduce the leaves, / Or indoor scene, or trophies of
the eaves. — Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
(law) stillicidium; the right to
collect such drops from a neighbor's roof that overhangs one's own property.
Retrieved from http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stillicide
stillicide: definition from World Wide Words is
copyright © Michael Quinion, 1996–2010
"The word is not one of that melancholy collection
ending in -cide that refers to an act of killing or something that kills
(suicide, pesticide), since it comes from a different Latin verb, caedere, to
fall. The first part is from Latin stilla, a drop; the English word is a
reformulation of Latin stillicidium, falling drops. The Latin word could mean in
particular the drip of rain from the eaves of a house, which is exactly
equivalent to an ancient meaning of our eavesdrop. This meaning led to the main
historical sense of the word, a legal term in Scots law... It’s not a word much
encountered these days. When it appears it has the sense of falling water, not
the legal one. It is in a poem in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire: “Stilettos of a
frozen stillicide”, one of a collection of unusual words in that section that
also includes shagbark, torquated, vermiculated, preterist, iridule, and
lemniscate. Its most famous use is perhaps that by Thomas Hardy, again in a
poem:
They’ve a way of whispering to me —
fellow-wight who yet abide
—
In the muted, measured note
Of a ripple under archways,
or a lone
cave’s stillicide.
www.worldwidewords.org/.../ww-sti1.htm
-