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Re: Wilson's Night Thoughts, redwop
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Matt Roth: ...about the rest of Wilson's Night Thoughts. Alas, there is not much there that relates to PF. There is one other amphisbaenic poem, called "Reversals, or Plus ca change,"...Then there is a limerick, "Le Violon D'Ingres De Sirine," ...There is no mention of Red Wop that I could find....I did find, in another source, a reference to this particular reversal. In 1927, while VN was living in Berlin, the German publisher Teubner... published a book by W. E. Collinson called Contemporary English: A Personal Speech Record...On page 10, Collinson says that his parents employed "the back-slang form redwop to disguise the fact that we were being given a 'powder'."
JM: You never cease to amaze me with your thoroughness and exciting discoveries. Oops, "Night Rote" was John Shade's creation, not Wilson's "Night Thoughts."
EW's limerick is funny, as expected, but I surmise it was not a success with "Sirine." The amphisbaenic title, related to "reversals," with its alternative French saying ,suggests that things can be turned around and turned back but nothing new shall result from the process: it seems to be a kind of "farewell" to engaging in further exercises of the kind.
I'm intrigued by Ingres' "violon" (a lady's lyric contour, I assume) in connection to young VN.I was reminded of an amusing exchange bt the two friends when they discussed if it was possible to make love in the back of a cab (or a specific make of car). VN's letters to Wilson were not always typed by Vera, some were hand-written but I don't think their discussion was more than related to literature and logistics...
Probably, as I can deduce, the quotation marks enclosing "red wop," in "Pale Fire," may simply indicate that these reversals were not authored by Shade orWilson, nor by VN. There is still a question in the air: why did Nabokov return to them twice (in his verses addressed to Wilson and in Pale Fire). Did Roger Bacon also resort to the English "slang" to disguise the dangers of this "powder"? In modern times, could it also serve to suggest, instead of explosives and medicine, a specific and unlawful drug?
Changing the subject. Yesterday I read a summary of Harold Bloom's appraisal of "Lolita", published in Portuguese in a newspaper edition, dated 1994. Bloom was referring to "Lolita's" ecstasies through language and wondering why Nabokov had consistently rejected Freud's theories about the "life and death instincts". Bloom thought that Nabokov was well aware that "a nymphet's dangerous magic" resulted from the proximity of eros, animality and death (we recently broached VN's choice of "Libitina" as the name for Lavender's Villa, hiding butterflies and Venus "Lubentina"), although HH's sentence denied this kind of interpretation.
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Another (totally irrelevant) item, one which came to my mind when I read Harold Bloom's reference to a sentence, in "Lolita": "The science of nympholepsy is a precise science." It relates to the idea of "a precise science" (which Bloom attributes to Nabokov, not to HH), because it reminded me of the Portugese the motto related to sea-voyagers and explorers, such as Vasco da Gama, which are regularly attributed to the author of the "Lusiadas," (Camões).
It states: "Navegar é preciso, viver não é preciso", ie "Navigating, not life, is a precise (art/activity)," when a double meaning may be read into it because the verb "precisar," also means "to need" (we could read the motto as: "it is necessary that the sea is explored whereas human life is unimportant.")
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