Subject
Re: reading ADA anagramatically
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Sklyarenko: May I shift, after the lively debate over PALE FIRE, to ADA? "Van's maternal grandmother Daria ("Dolly") Durmanov was the daughter of Prince Peter Zemski, Governor of Bras d'Or, an American province in the Northeast of our great and variegated country..." (1.1). Bras d'Or ("arm of gold") is the name of [...] Victor Fet pointed out to me that labra (pl. of labrum, Latin for "lip") was an entomological term, meaning "part of the mouth of an arthropod". Victor noted that there was labra in "Labrador", "Calabria" (region in S Italy; cf. mysterious "Gypsy politicians or Calabrian laborers" who appear at the picnic in Ardis the Second: 1.39), and palabra (Spanish for "word"; pah, pronounced rather like palabra's first syllable, is Ada's beloved expletive and the first word that Van hears her say: 1.5)...We have thus bridged, in only three paragraphs, several places in different parts of both our world and Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet, on which ADA is set), including the river that flows in Nabokov's (and mine) home city. May be, my "anagramatic" method is worth anything, after all? May be, a € million? :)
JM: Bras d'Or: French cognac;
Labrador: labourer (almost an anagram);
Libra: "balance = scale", related to caliber.
Libra-balance- Bilanz=accounting, balance sheet.
Libra=British Pound.
Why not accept, instead of a € million, its equivalent in pounds? Your anagramatic method is informative and quite fascinating, difficult to emmulate ands worth its weight in gold, euros, pounds.
C.Kunin [to Jansy,Besides all the JG initials I realized a kind of Kinbote/Botkin play with initials. John Shade and Samuel Johnson are JS and SJ. I don't know if this has been mentioned before] I don't recall that anyone noticed this before - - I hadn't. Congs![...] You asked why I called John Shade the "anti-John the Revelator" - - because he hides so much and reveals so little.
JM: Anti-John, the Revelator...(that's as good an inversion as KC's). Is it because he reveals so little, like a revolutionary revelatory Anti-Terra either reveals or unveils Terra?
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