Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0026638, Fri, 20 Nov 2015 00:45:49 -0200

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RES: [NABOKV-L] lastochka & other birds in Pale Fire
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Fet, Victor to Carolyn's query: No, they are not synonyms. A swift (Russ. strizh, стриж), Apodus, is a highly aerial bird that belongs to family Apodidae (order Apodiformes). They are the fastest fliers among birds (speed over 100 mph recorded) . They are superficially similar to swallows <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swallow> (Hirundinidae), but are not closely related. (Swifts are more closely related to hummingbirds.) [snip]



Jansy Mello: You bring us fascinating information about birds and literature in your stimulating answer to Carolyn’s query.



Since in Portuguese the superficial similarity between both birds is reflected on the choice of similar names for them (Swallow: Andorinha; Swift: Andorinhão), I felt curious about their differences and did some googling, when I found another word in English for the swift: a “martlet” (little martin)*. Unfortunately the Wikipedia site on heraldry seems to refer to the swifts and to the swallows indiscriminately, at least in one paragraph, although the reference to the swifts is left clear in the rest of the notes. Cf. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martlet> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martlet



This same site mentions that the martlet “also appears in Shakespeare's Macbeth Act 1 Sc 6, when King Duncan and Banquo call it a 'guest of summer' and see it mistakenly as a good omen when they spot it outside Macbeth's castle, shortly before Duncan is killed.”

“This guest of summer,

The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,

By his loved mansionry, that the heaven’s breath

Smells wooingly here. No jutty, frieze,

Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird

Hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle.

Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,

The air is delicate.”



……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….



*-I remember that Prof. Pnin travels from one novel to another and, in Pale Fire (where there’s already Sybil as a swallow/hirondelle), he is described as a humorless “regular martinet” (by C.K). The reference in PF, though, is not to the whip nor to the bird, but to people that behave with the cruel strictness of the French inspector named Jean Martinet.

It’s impossible to be certain that V.Nabokov didn’t play with the misadventures of this word’s various meanings when he chose to describe Pnin landing in the ornithological PF as a “martinet”…
btw: Sybil, more than once described as on “a perch”, would have no resemblance to the “footless” swift, right?
“Speaking of the Head of the bloated Russian Department, Prof. Pnin, a regular martinet in regard to his underlings (happily, Prof. Botkin, who taught in another department, was not subordinated to that grotesque ‘perfectionist’): "How odd that Russian intellectuals should lack all sense of humor when they have such marvelous humorists as Gogol, Dostoevski, Chekhov, Zoshchenko, and those joint authors of genius Ilf and Petrov."




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