JM: The enthusiastic article on Nabokov's "virtuoso
synaesthetic reverie," invited me to wonder about how the
author's color hearing would
have influenced Kinbote's Zemblan rendition
of Charles: would it subliminally sound like a light
brown "k," as in Karl,, or as a light blue "c" when he
writes in English?
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* For Nabokov,."V is a kind of pale, transparent
pink...And the N, on the other hand, is a greyish-yellowish oatmeal
color" In Speak, Memory: ”The long a
of the English alphabet… has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a
evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber)
and r (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed
hand-mirror of o take care of the white… Passing on to the blue group, there is
steely x, thundercloud z and huckleberry h. Since a subtle interaction exists
between sound and shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light
blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl.”For
the essayist, "One of the ravishing pleasures of reading Nabokov is
sensing a deep rightness in his word choices (even in English, which was his
second language) that goes beyond having a knack for finding le mot juste to
make his prose cohere at every level: phonetic, orthographic, and
semiotic."