Subject
Einstein and Langevin
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A. Sklyarenko:[...] once catapulted with an uppercut an unfortunate English tourist, a certain Walter C. Keyway, Esq., into the porter's lodge for his jokingly remarking how clever it was to drop the first letter of one's name in order to use it as a particule, at the Gritz, in Venezia Rossa (1.36). In the canonical Russian translation of the New Testament "Son of David" is rendered Syn Davidov. SYN DAVIDOV [...]
JM: I thought until now that Baron Klim Avidov had flavitaed and reshuffled Vivian Darkbloom and his other relatives. Now I find it catapults us into biblical King David in an Antiterran language, its forbidding lore and fascinating culture. Thank you Sklyarenko for sharing your very informative and amazing achievement.
J.Aisenberg picked up S K-B's antigravitational joke on me [ she ponders setting off in an "imaginary" space-ship in order to test the Einstein "rejuvenation" formula] to puzzle about astronauts getting younger and VN.'s notion of time.
For JA, in Speak Memory and Ada, Nabokov "was saying that he literally did not believe in time, was suggesting a notion of Chronological relativity" whereas for him "it doesn't seem like time exists." I cannot even suggest we might depart from Henri Bergson's philosophy about time to better read Nabokov, since Bergson's trick mustache is as mysterious as Einstein's real one.
Perhaps, following Swift's irrefutable hints, we'd better restrict ourselves to an Aurea Mediocritas when we restrap our knapsacks ( "Non videmus id manticae quod in tergo est" quoth JS - and I mean J.Swift, not J.Shade even though the IPH chapter must have been written in a swift vein).
How serious should we keep while reading VN? I've already swallowed tongue and cheeks.
Last Sunday, in Rio, I attended mass in an early Seventeenth Century chapel. Above the altar there was a curious, almost Oedipal, Holy Trinity ( the Godhead in the center, at the left an angel bearing a golden sun and, at the right, another angel holding a half-moon). The priest mentioned the "pale fire of the moon" and applied "Revelations" to refer to this carving!
I checked the internet to what seemed to me his alusion ( Rev 12:1), but I found no "pale fire" indicating the Virgin.
I learned that "just as the moon reflects the light of the sun, so Mary, with the moon under her feet, reflects the glory of the Sun of Justice, Jesus Christ*." The artisan's poetic rendering had been followed by another and then another, carrying us away from the naive artistic vision to a prietly and a philosopher's interpretations and from there onto higher ecclesiastical authorities... before looping into a retranslation in another simple language.
I think that we may also read VN "negatively" as, for example, when we point out what authors, wisdom, theories that VN definitely did not conjure up. As it is I'm now quite certain that VN's title "Pale Fire" has no relation to the Virgin Mary standing in the place of a ghostly dove and representing the transitory body of a Church as it is sustained by a transcendent light...
....................................
* - different interpretations: Pope St. Gregory posited, "The sun stands for the light of truth, and the moon for the transitoriness of temporal things; the holy Church is clothed like the sun because she is protected by the splendor of supernatural truth, and she has the moon under her feet because she is above all earthly things" (Moralia, 34, 12). Or St. Bernard: "The sun contains permanent color and splendor; whereas the moon's brightness is unpredictable and changeable, for it never stays the same. It is quite right, then, for Mary to be depicted as clothed with the sun, for she entered the profundity of divine wisdom much, much further than one can possibly conceive" (De B. Virgine, 2).
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JM: I thought until now that Baron Klim Avidov had flavitaed and reshuffled Vivian Darkbloom and his other relatives. Now I find it catapults us into biblical King David in an Antiterran language, its forbidding lore and fascinating culture. Thank you Sklyarenko for sharing your very informative and amazing achievement.
J.Aisenberg picked up S K-B's antigravitational joke on me [ she ponders setting off in an "imaginary" space-ship in order to test the Einstein "rejuvenation" formula] to puzzle about astronauts getting younger and VN.'s notion of time.
For JA, in Speak Memory and Ada, Nabokov "was saying that he literally did not believe in time, was suggesting a notion of Chronological relativity" whereas for him "it doesn't seem like time exists." I cannot even suggest we might depart from Henri Bergson's philosophy about time to better read Nabokov, since Bergson's trick mustache is as mysterious as Einstein's real one.
Perhaps, following Swift's irrefutable hints, we'd better restrict ourselves to an Aurea Mediocritas when we restrap our knapsacks ( "Non videmus id manticae quod in tergo est" quoth JS - and I mean J.Swift, not J.Shade even though the IPH chapter must have been written in a swift vein).
How serious should we keep while reading VN? I've already swallowed tongue and cheeks.
Last Sunday, in Rio, I attended mass in an early Seventeenth Century chapel. Above the altar there was a curious, almost Oedipal, Holy Trinity ( the Godhead in the center, at the left an angel bearing a golden sun and, at the right, another angel holding a half-moon). The priest mentioned the "pale fire of the moon" and applied "Revelations" to refer to this carving!
I checked the internet to what seemed to me his alusion ( Rev 12:1), but I found no "pale fire" indicating the Virgin.
I learned that "just as the moon reflects the light of the sun, so Mary, with the moon under her feet, reflects the glory of the Sun of Justice, Jesus Christ*." The artisan's poetic rendering had been followed by another and then another, carrying us away from the naive artistic vision to a prietly and a philosopher's interpretations and from there onto higher ecclesiastical authorities... before looping into a retranslation in another simple language.
I think that we may also read VN "negatively" as, for example, when we point out what authors, wisdom, theories that VN definitely did not conjure up. As it is I'm now quite certain that VN's title "Pale Fire" has no relation to the Virgin Mary standing in the place of a ghostly dove and representing the transitory body of a Church as it is sustained by a transcendent light...
....................................
* - different interpretations: Pope St. Gregory posited, "The sun stands for the light of truth, and the moon for the transitoriness of temporal things; the holy Church is clothed like the sun because she is protected by the splendor of supernatural truth, and she has the moon under her feet because she is above all earthly things" (Moralia, 34, 12). Or St. Bernard: "The sun contains permanent color and splendor; whereas the moon's brightness is unpredictable and changeable, for it never stays the same. It is quite right, then, for Mary to be depicted as clothed with the sun, for she entered the profundity of divine wisdom much, much further than one can possibly conceive" (De B. Virgine, 2).
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/