Carolyn Kunin: "...Quercus (oak) and chat. do
indeed refer to the learned cat who day and night walks around the oak tree,
first to the left and then to the right. / Ruslan and Liudmilla -- first few
lines.
On seashore far a greenoak towers,
And to it with a gold chain
bound,
A .learned cat whiles away the hours
By walking slowly round and
round.
To right he walks, and sings a ditty;
To left he walks, and tells a
tale....
[ ] Somethings are never abbreviated and botanical names, I
believe (could be wrong)are among them. So chat. referring to Chateaubriand
would not be correct botanical Latin. It would be Chateaubriandiensis, meaning
he was the one that discovered the Quercus ruslanicus.
Jansy Mello: Do we need to pinpoint exactly Chat. or
chat? Why not oscilate between the two?
Here's an extract from ADA with an unrelated Chateaubriand,:entomologist,
and François-René Chateaubriand (born in St. Malo)writing about "du grand chêne
a Tagne"...
"During the last week of July,
there emerged, with diabolical regularity, the female of Chateaubriand’s
mosquito, Chateaubriand (Charles), who had not been the first to be bitten by it
but the first to bottle the offender...The Boston Entomologist for August, quick
work, 1840.. was not related to the great poet and memoirist born between Paris
and Tagne (as he’d better, said Ada, who liked crossing orchids).
Mon
enfant, ma sœur,
Songe à l’épaisseur
Du grand chêne a Tagne;
Songe à la
montagne,
Songe à la douceur —
— of scraping with one’s claws or
nails the spots visited by that fluffy-footed insect characterized by an
insatiable and reckless appetite for Ada’s and Ardelia’s, Lucette’s and Lucile’s
(multiplied by the itch) blood."
And, at various places, there's the Bryant castle (Chateaubriand) and
St.Malo songs, and incestuous siblings, and Mlle La Rivière's "Enfants Maudits"
There's even more verse: "My sister, you remember still/The
spreading oak tree and my hill? // Oh! Oh! qui me rendra mon Aline/
Et le grand chêne et ma colline?/ Oh, who will give
me back my Kill/ And the big oak tree and my hill?"
There's a lot of
re-re-reading to do, just in case...
.............................
I was puzzled by
something else that I just glanced through while, as usual, on my way to
somewhere else. Was do these allusions to "dark blue sea" hide and
reveal?
"...the orchids came from Demon who preferred to stay by the sea,
his dark-blue great-grandmother.’
go down, and bury or burn this album at
once, girl. Right?
‘Right,’ answered Ada. ‘Destroy and forget. But we still
have an hour before tea.’
Re the ‘dark-blue’ allusion, left
hanging:"
Particularly if compared
with the ultramarine goings on in Proust's Guermantes: :"Van could not
help feeling esthetically moved by the velvet background he was always able to
distinguish as a comforting, omnipresent summer sky through the black foliage of
the family tree. In later years he had never been able to reread Proust (as he
had never been able to enjoy again the perfumed gum of Turkish paste) without a
roll-wave of surfeit and a rasp of gravelly heartburn; yet his favorite purple
passage remained the one concerning the name ‘Guermantes,’ with whose hue his
adjacent ultramarine merged in the prism of his mind, pleasantly teasing Van’s
artistic vanity." .