A.S: “In his poem Slava (“Fame,” 1942) VN mentions Apollon (an Apollo butterfly) that he has missed in childhood [   ] The author’s mysterious visitor (presumably, the devil himself) compares his host to bazarnyi fakir (a bazaar fakir)[  ]                                                           

“your unfortunate books/without soil, without path, without ditch, without threshold,/will be shed in a void where you brought /forth a branch,/as bazaar fakirs do (that is, not without faking),/and not long will it bloom in the smoke-colored air.”

JM: I wonder if fake fakirs, or penitential pilgrims, are indicated in the lines about an elm, here copied from ADA in Aqua’s ravings: “a half-Russian, half-dotty old doctor, doc, toc, ditty, dotty, ballatetta, deboletta... [  ]stop that record, or the guide will go on demonstrating as he did this very morning in Florence a silly pillar commemorating, he said, the 'elmo' that broke into leaf when they carried stone-heavy-dead St Zeus by it through the gradual, gradual shade…”