In his commentary to Shade's poem Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) says that conchologists among the kings can be counted on the fingers of one maimed hand:
To return to the King: take for instance the question of personal culture. How often is it that kings engage in some special research? Conchologists among them can be counted on the fingers of one maimed hand. The last king of Zembla—partly under the influence of his uncle Conmal, the great translator of Shakespeare (see notes to lines 39-40 and 962), had become, despite frequent migraines, passionately addicted to the study of literature. At forty, not long before the collapse of his throne, he had attained such a degree of scholarship that he dared accede to his venerable uncle’s raucous dying request: “Teach, Karlik!” Of course, it would have been unseemly for a monarch to appear in the robes of learning at a university lectern and present to rosy youths Finnegans Wake as a monstrous extension of Angus MacDiarmid's "incoherent transactions" and of Southey's Lingo-Grande ("Dear Stumparumper," etc.) or discuss the Zemblan variants, collected in 1798 by Hodinski, of the Kongsskugg-sio (The Royal Mirror), an anonymous masterpiece of the twelfth century. Therefore he lectured under an assumed name and in a heavy make-up, with wig and false whiskers. All brown-bearded, apple-checked, blue-eyed Zemblans look alike, and I who have not shaved now for a year, resemble my disguised king (see also note to line 894). (note to Line 12)
Conchologists are people who study conchology (the branch of zoology dealing with the shells of mollusks). The French word for 'conch' or 'conch shell' is conque. In his story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" (1939) J. L. Borges (the author of "The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths," 1936) mentions Menard's symbolist sonnet which appeared twice (with variations) in the magazine La Conque and a cycle of admirable sonnets for the Baroness de Bacourt:
I have said that Menard's visible lifework is easy enumerated. Having carefully examined his private archives, I have been able to verify that it consists of the following:
a) A symbolist sonnet which appeared twice (with variations) in the magazine La Conque (the March and October issues of 1899).
r) A cycle of admirable sonnets for the Baroness de Bacourt (1934).
Borges's Menard is also the author of some vague, circumstantial sonnets for the hospitable, or greedy, album of Madame Henri Bachelier. The author of Don Quixote (1605, 1615), Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (c. 1547-1616) was one-armed (according to Kinbote, conchologists among the kings can be counted on the fingers of one maimed hand).
Shade's 999-line poem is almost finished when the author is killed by Gradus. Kinbote believes that, to be completed, Shade’s poem needs but one line (Line 1000, identical to Line 1: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”). But it seems that, like some sonnets, Shade's poem also needs a coda (Line 1001: “By its own double in the windowpane”). Coda (1928) is a poem by Dorothy Parker (née Rothschild, an American poet, literary critic and writer of fiction, 1893-1967):
There's little in taking or giving,
There's little in water or wine;
This living, this living, this living
Was never a project of mine.
Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is
The gain of the one at the top,
For art is a form of catharsis,
And love is a permanent flop,
And work is the province of cattle,
And rest's for a clam in a shell,
So I'm thinking of throwing the battle-
Would you kindly direct me to hell?
In Dorothy Parker's poem, 'shell' rhymes with 'hell' (the poem's last word). Shade's poem The Nature of Electricity (quoted by Kinbote in his Commentary) ends in the line "The roar of tyrants torn in hell:"
The light never came back but it gleams again in a short poem "The Nature of Electricity", which John Shade had sent to the New York magazine The Beau and the Butterfly, some time in 1958, but which appeared only after his death:
The dead, the gentle dead - who knows?
In tungsten filaments abide,
And on my bedside table flows
Another man's departed bride.
And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole
Town with innumerable lights,
And Shelley's incandescent soul
Lures the pale moths of starless nights.
Streetlamps are numbered; and maybe
Number nine-hundred-ninety-nine
(So brightly beaming through a tree
So green) is an old friend of mine.
And when above the livid plain
Forked lightning plays, therein may dwell
The torments of a Tamerlane,
The roar of tyrants torn in hell.
Science tells us, by the way, that the Earth would not merely fall apart, but vanish like a ghost, if Electricity were suddenly removed from the world. (note to Line 347)
Shade's murderer, Gradus is Kinbote's double. The Double is an essay by J. L. Borges included in The Book of Imaginary Beings (1957):
Suggested or stimulated by reflections in mirrors and in water and by twins, the idea of the Double is common to many countries. It is likely that sentences such as A friend is another self by Pythagoras or the Platonic Know thyself were inspired by it. In Germany this Double is called Doppelgänger, which means ’double walker’. In Scotland there is the fetch, which comes to fetch a man to bring him to his death; there is also the Scottish word wraith for an apparition thought to be seen by a person in his exact image just before death. To meet oneself is, therefore, ominous. The tragic ballad ‘Ticonderoga’ by Robert Louis Stevenson tells of a legend on this theme. There is also the strange picture by Rossetti (‘How They Met Themselves’) in which two lovers come upon themselves in the dusky gloom of a wood. We may also cite examples from Hawthorne (‘Howe’s Masquerade’), Dostoyevsky, Alfred de Musset, James (‘The Jolly Corner’), Kleist, Chesterton (‘The Mirror of Madmen’), and Hearn (Some Chinese Ghosts).
The ancient Egyptians believed that the Double, the ka, was a man’s exact counterpart, having his same walk and his same dress. Not only men, but gods and beasts, stones and trees, chairs and knives had their ka, which was invisible except to certain priests who could see the Doubles of the gods and were granted by them a knowledge of things past and things to come.
To the Jews the appearance of one’s Double was not an omen of imminent death. On the contrary, it was proof of having attained prophetic powers. This is how it is explained by Gershom Scholem. A legend recorded in the Talmud tells the story of a man who, in search of God, met himself.
In the story ‘William Wilson’ by Poe, the Double is the hero’s conscience. He kills it and dies. In a similar way, Dorian Gray in Wilde’s novel stabs his portrait and meets his death. In Yeats’s poems the Double is our other side, our opposite, the one who complements us, the one we are not nor will ever become.
Plutarch writes that the Greeks gave the name other self to a king’s ambassador.
Cabbages and Kings (1904) is a novel by O. Henry (the penname of William Sydney Porter, an American writer, 1862-1910) made up of interlinked short stories and set in a fictitious Central American country called the Republic of Anchuria. The novel' title is borrowed from the poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter" in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass (1871). O. Henry is the author of The Prisoner of Zembla (1912), “a rather silly lampoon of medievalism.” O. Henry's story The Roads We Take (1910) ends in 'Shark' Dodson's words: "Bolivar cannot carry double." In Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (One: XV: 10) Onegin wears shirokiy bolivar (a top hat with wide rims):
Бывало, он еще в постеле:
К нему записочки несут.
Что? Приглашенья? В самом деле,
Три дома на вечер зовут:
Там будет бал, там детский праздник.
Куда ж поскачет мой проказник?
С кого начнет он? Все равно:
Везде поспеть немудрено.
Покамест в утреннем уборе,
Надев широкий боливар,3
Онегин едет на бульвар
И там гуляет на просторе,
Пока недремлющий брегет
Не прозвонит ему обед.
It happened, he'd be still in bed
when little billets would be brought him.
What? Invitations? Yes, indeed,
to a soiree three houses bid him:
here, there will be a ball; elsewhere, a children's fete.
So whither is my scamp to scurry?
Whom will he start with? Never mind:
'tis simple to get everywhere in time.
Meanwhile, in morning dress,
having donned a broad bolivar3,
Onegin drives to the boulevard
and there goes strolling unconfined
till vigilant Bréguet
to him chimes dinner.
3. Hat à la Bolivar. (Pushkin's note)
In Zametki perevodchika II ("A Translator's Notes, Part Two," 1957) VN mentions Onegin's vigilant Bréguet and Onegin's bolivar hat:
47. Недремлющий брегет.
Дюпон, выпустивший в 1847 г. довольно удачный по дикции, но совершенно изуродованный разными промахами прозаический французский перевод ЕО, делает забавную ошибку на своём же языке. Он пишет «son breguet» и при этом поясняет в примечании: «Из уважения к тексту сохраняем это иностранное выражение, которое у нас почитается безвкусным; в Париже говорят: мои часы…» Дюпон, конечно, не прав. И Скриб, и Дюма, и другие парижане употребляли «мой брегет» совершенно так же, как Пушкин. Но вот что мило: по-французски «брегет» не мужского рода — как думает Дюпон, — а женского: «ma breguet».
У того же элегантного Дюпона находим: «Ленский с душою прямо Гётевской»; но зачем смеяться над давно опочившим французским инженером путей сообщения, когда русский комментатор Бродский пишет (1950), что боливар либерала Онегина «указывает на определённые общественные настроения его владельца, сочувствующего борьбе за независимость маленького народа в Южной Америке». Это то же самое, как если бы мы стали утверждать, что американки носят головные платки («бабушки») из сочувствия Советскому Союзу.
At the end of his essay VN mentions tysyacha i odno primechanie (a thousand and one notes):
Так скажут историк и словесник; но что может сказать бедный переводчик? «Симилар ту э уингед лили, балансинг энтерс Лалла Рух»? Всё потеряно, всё сорвано, все цветы и серёжки лежат в лужах — и я бы никогда не пустился в этот тусклый путь, если бы не был уверен, что внимательному чужеземцу всю солнечную сторону текста можно подробно объяснить в тысяче и одном примечании.