Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0019194, Fri, 22 Jan 2010 14:24:46 +0000

Subject
Re: [NABOKOV-L] [Queries] about Larvorium,
Scammell's colloquial equivalent for shtang and The Real and the
Plausible.
Date
Body
Jansy: larvorium and larvarium may not really differ in the big wide
wonder-world of words. Just as dictionarize and dictionarise are the same
word, even if computerized/ised spell chequers throw up a mismatch!* There
may well be some JS/VN poetic off-license at work, some punning on the
roots. A Roman entomologist¹s toilet might be called a larvatorium? The
possibilities are endless and beyond logical analysis. Genuine neologism
(meaning what?); typo (whose?); or playful orthography (but less obvious
than fountain/mountain. Fun to speculate but I don¹t think there¹s
sufficient evidence. Some dictionary somewhere may have larvorium, either as
an alt. spelling (you could double the size of any Webster listing all alt.
spells), or as a word with a totally unexpected meaning. That is a hard
lesson in linguistics: the etymological fallacy. Who would have thought that
Œsilly¹ (via G selig OE saelig = blessed) would end up so sillily as Œdaft?¹

I love DN¹s ŒReal and Plausible.¹ In one popular song, the ENGLISH ŒVraie
Chose¹ becomes the FRENCH ŒLe Real Thing!¹
Vive le Franglais Renversé. (Eng. Œa souvenir¹ = Fr. Œun keepsake.¹)

Verisimilar is VERY SIMILAR to Plausible but a tad MUSTIER.

* The Urban Dictionary listed Œdiarise¹ (to enter an appointment in a diary)
with no alt. spelling. For fun, I submitted a new definition for Œdiarize.¹
Both verbs are now enshrined with separate meanings, much to the confusion
(I hope) of future word-hunters.

S (trying to tell the word from the trees) KB


On 21/01/2010 00:06, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:

> [QUERIES]
> 1. Is there any explanation about Nabokov's choice for a neologism
> ("larvorium") in John Shade's poem if we later find that he used the
> dictionarized "larvarium" in Ada?
>
> 2. Brian Boyd wrote that " 'Stang' in The Gift would almost certainly have
> been Nabokov's change to translator Michael Scammell's more colloquial
> equivalent for the Russian "shtang" in the original..." Does he know what had
> been M.Scammell's more colloquial equivalent which Nabokov discarded for
> "stang" in "The Gift"?
>
> 3. Nabokov's work "Pouchkine, ou le vrai et le vraisemblable" ( 'Pushkin, of
> the True and the Verisimilar') has been published in English, in Dmitri
> Nabokov's translation, as "Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible" (The New
> York Review of Books, March 31, 1988:38-42). Stephen Blackwell, in his notes
> 52 and 53 (Introduction) published in "The Quill and the Scalpel," writes that
> "The essay on Pushkin is particularly significant in that its title echoes one
> of Goethe's, "On the True and the Verisimilar in Art," as well as
> Chernyshevsky's own master's thesis, "On the Aesthetic Relations of Art to
> Reality." Is the link to Chernyshevsky's thesis the reason why Dmitri Nabokov
> chose to translate "Le Vrai (true)" as "The Real" (and its relation to
> "Plausible"?).
>


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