Matt Roth responding to
Vitaly: "Perhaps VN is just making a dirty joke here, much
in line with the Kiss Me Kate reference. The secret, subterranean,
back-door passageway, explored by King Charles and Oleg is depicted by Kinbote
as a stylized anus, full of “blind pokings…magic apertures and penetrations, so
narrow and deep as to drive one insane.” So of course VN had the
passage run beneath corialANUS LANE and tiMON (moan) ALLEY (later, we see the
king and Oleg “moaning like doves”)."
Jansy Mello: The "Timon (moan) Alley" seems
to be a representative of Nabokov's insistent punning, which so distressed
Edmund Wilson and was nicely explained away, by Simon Karlinsky, in
his commentaries to the "Dear Bunny-Dear Volodya" edition. The connection bt.
Corionalus Lane and "blind pokings...magic apertures" is an excelllent
one.
I often I had enough time and talent to pursue varios PF
items. For example, after reading about Dante Alighieri's having written
notes and commentaries to his poems, or on the structure of the
"Divina Commedia" taking its shape after its themes,* I felt
sorry that I knew no Italian and was unfamiliar with the great poet's works
( his contemporaries are mentioned in ADA, by mad Aqua. I'm unsure if
there's any direct allusion to him in that novel.)
Dante makes a quick imagetic appearance in "Pale Fire,"
though: "in the forenoon, lurking in the ruptured shadows of
his first-floor study where a bright goblet of liquor quietly traveled from
filing cabinet to lectern, and from lectern to bookshelf, there to hide if need
be behind Dante’s bust; on a hot day, among the vines of a small arborlike
portico, through the garlands of which I could glimpse a stretch of oilcloth,
his elbow upon it, and the plump cherubic fist propping and crimpling his
temple."
.................................................................
* -
"... In
the early part of the century in which Dante was born, the literary language of
Tuscany was still Latin, and not the least of his services to his country was
his influence in finally establishing the dignity of Italian as a medium for
great literature...More important, however, were his two great works in the
vernacular, the “Vita Nuova,” a series of poems with prose commentary, on his
love for Beatrice, and the “Divina Commedia.”. "