Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0021814, Thu, 14 Jul 2011 14:08:17 -0300

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Re: Mademoiselle Condor
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A.Sklyarenko: "L'arbre aux quarante ecus d'or, at least in the fall". - The French call ginkgo biloba "l'arbre aux quarante ecus." ... The (otherwise charming) girls in Pushkin's poem have one little defect: they lack what women have between legs.* [*in a letter of November 25, 1892, to Suvorin Chekhov wrote: "lift up the hem of our Muse's skirt and you'll see there a flat spot."] Apparently, it is not the case with Miss Condor (con d'or), as Lucette dubs the almost naked mulatto girl onboard the Tobakoff who resembles Ada (3.5).

JM: I once thought that Nabokov's reference to forty jars in Bend Sinister (I think) indicated the story of Ali Baba and the forty thieves. Now that the ginkgo biloba/ "quarante ecus" stood out from its sentence, I'd better abandon my former theory (in its application to Ada) and move on to maidenhair! (gingko/maidenhair leave quite an impression or, at least, ink-blots in an early infolio)*
And the forty damsels lacked something between their legs? I suppose they would. ( It was Gogol, not Chekov, whose beautiful girls had a face that was as smooth and flat as an egg, as Nabokov mentions in his biography of Gogol while he was thinking about...Freud!)



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* " ...'Volosyanka.’...vulgar Russian word for Maidenhair...Maidenhair. Idiot! Percy boy might have been buried by now! Maidenhair. Thus named because of the huge spreading Chinese tree at the end of the platform. Once, vaguely, confused with the Venus’-hair fern. She walked to the end of the platform in Tolstoy’s novel. First exponent of the inner monologue, later exploited by the French and the Irish. N’est vert, n’est vert, n’est vert. L’arbre aux quarante ecus d’or, at least in the fall. Never, never shall I hear again her ‘botanical’ voice fall at biloba, ‘sorry, my Latin is showing.’ Ginkgo, gingko, ink, inkog. Known also as Salisbury’s adiantofolia, Ada’s infolio, poor Salisburia: sunk; poor Stream of Consciousness, maree noire by now. Who wants Ardis Hall!"

wikipedia: Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba; in Chinese and Japanese ??, pinyin romanization: yin xing, Hepburn romanization: icho or ginnan), also spelled gingko and known as the Maidenhair Tree, is a unique species of tree with no close living relatives. The tree is widely cultivated and introduced, since an early period in human history, and has various uses as a food and traditional medicine...The species was initially described by Linnaeus in 1771, the specific epithet biloba derived from the Latin bis 'two' and loba 'lobed', referring to the shape of the leaves.[13] Two names for the species recognise the botanist Richard Salisbury, a placement by Nelson as Pterophyllus salisburiensisand the earlier Salisburia adiantifolia proposed by James Edward Smith. The epithet of the latter may have been intended to denote a characteristic resembling Adiantum, the genus of maidenhair ferns


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