Stan Kelly: I suspect VN may also be
punning on the slang meaning of ‘hock’ = ‘pawn.’[ ] Later your goods are
REDEEMED = returned to you...There are fanciful ditties where the object being
pawned is one’s heart or dream. VN’s ‘Our Lady’s Tears’ falls into this
category.[AS's quote: 'Ah!'
said Demon, tasting Lord Byron's Hock. 'This redeems Our Lady's Tears.'
(Ada, 1.38)]
Jansy Mello: When I mentioned VN's
"multilingual puns" (Beauchamp/Campbell) I may have used the term incorrectly.
They are wordplays, but I don't know how to categorize them (not homonymy, not
paronymy). Stan's explanation about hock=pawn and goods redeemed plays
with polysemy. Nabokov's pairings of words in two languages (even
when, as it seems, he loosely paired Turvalski and
Waltzaway) belong to any special category among the
word-games?