Carolyn Kunin (on Vale de Gato's "Lolita" translation Lolita, brilho da minha vida, fogo dos meus flancos. Minha alma, minha lama. Lo-lii-ta: a ponta da língua enrola no palato e desliza, três socalcos, até que estaca, ao terceiro, nos dentes. Lo. Li. Ta) - It's gorgeous - I love it. Fogo dos meus flancos. 

 

Jansy Mello:  In " The Enchanter," following Dmitri Nabokov's 1986 translation from the Russian, we come across the word "loin" once more.

On the pocket Picador edition, p. 50, we read:" - and this foretaste of finding the girl alone melted like cocaine in his loins." 

 

 

Discussing his translation in the afterword ("On a Book Entitled The Enchanter") Dmitri N..refutes Andrew Field's (1986) hypothesis that the "Novel with Cocaine might have been a deliberate mystification by Nabokov..." That insertion, however, seems to be unrelated to the image employed by his father concerning the protagonist's fantasied pleasures, then likened to cocaine.(cocaine is also mentioned in "A Matter of Chance." There's a note by VN where he states that "            " 'Sluchaynost', one of my earliest tales, written at the beginning of 1924, in the last afterglow of my bachelor life, was rejected by the Berlin emigre daily RuV ("We don't print anecdotes about cocainists," said the editor, in exactly the same tone of voice in which, thirty years later, Ross of The New Yorker was to say, "We don't print acrostics," when rejecting "The Vane Sisters") and sent, with the assistance of a good friend, and a remarkable writer, Ivan Lukash, to the Rigan Segodnya, a more eclectic emigre organ, which published it on June 22, 1924. I would never have traced it again had it not been rediscovered by Andrew Field a few years ago." Cf.V.N., Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, 1975 .