Charles Nicol: Field's
description of ADA as an essay on the nature of time in which the metaphors
gradually become a story is at least partially based on VN's TV interview.
I believe that what it ends up describing is the eventual Part 4 of the novel.
JM: Thanks. Charles Nicol. I'll look into the TV
interview. Nabokov's metaphors about his metaphors reveal much about his
theories on language.
I remember he
once said, in a totally different context, that metaphors are a bamboo
bridge between poetry and prose. Extending the flow of my associations I
was led to his idea about truth and verosimilitude
stated in his French essay about Puskin ("Le Vrai et le Vraisembable")
and one of his poems (quoted by Andrew Field, one of the few books I brought
along to Rio, so all other quotes will be imprecise, since only kept by
simple memory) in which he
compares Pushkin and his song to a rainbow.
AF,p.72: Pushkin is a rainbow over all the
land
Lermontov, the Milky way above the mountains,,
the