Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0017842, Sun, 8 Mar 2009 01:55:57 +0300

Subject
racemosa
Date
Body
I can add to what Victor has said on the subject that there is also a mention of racemosa (my favorite tree, by the way) in Speak, Memory (you can easily find it via the Index). In "Drugie berega" (Chapter Three, 4) one finds imeni bezumnogo Batyushkova mlechnaya cheryumukha ("milky racemosa of mad Batyushkov's fame").
Besedka muz ("Bower of Muses", 1817), the most famous poem of Konstantin Batyushkov (1787-1855), the poet who was to go mad in the early 1820s, begins with the lines:

Pod teniyu cheryomukhi mlechnoy
I zolotom blistayushchikh akatsiy

("In the shade of milky racemosas
and golden-glistening pea trees",
as Nabokov renders them in the Commentary to his translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin; vol. 3, p. 13)

Racemosa is a tree that can walk. See Leo Tolstoy's piece Kak khodyat derev'ya ("How the trees walk").

Alexey Sklyarenko

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