Subject:
Nabokov sighting: an amazing parenthesis
From:
"Jansy" <jansy@aetern.us>
Date:
Fri, 16 Feb 2007 09:59:39 -0300
To:
"Vladimir Nabokov Forum" <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>

Dear List,
A friend called my attention to a book on "contemporary Writing", edited by John Sturrock, aiming at exploring "the state of world literature today" (i.e, 1996). There are contributors from twenty eight different places ( African and Arab countries,Australia, Brazil, India, Ireland, Poland, Spain, West Indies, etc).
 
The Index informed me that the name of Nabokov came up twice. One, under "India",  in the essay written by Richard Cronin, when discussing Mukherjee's The Golden Gate, through two translators of Pushkin and stanzaic verse ( Charles Johnson and Nabokov, rapidly mentioned because of Pale Fire).
 
The second entry is for "United States" ( Wendy Lesser ) that begins with: "contemporary American literature might be said to have begun in 1965, with the serial publication of Truman Capote's (1924-84) In Cold Blood...
W. Lesser discusses at some lenght John Updike and the Rabbit series, where Updike
"..tells us something about the state of the nation at large...mainly through the devastatingly accurate rendering of detail.. to shoot a reality through the heart with a precisely turned descriptive phrase. ( In this respect he is very much the inheritor of Vladimir Nabokov ( 1899-1977), whose writing life in English spanned the period from 1941 to 1969, and whose famous Lolita came out in 1955.  Nabokov's only major works after 1960 were Pale Fire ( 1962), a hilarious send-up of academia, and Ada ( 1969), a book whose heroine's name was meant to evoke its central theme, ardour; but even with this relatively small output, Nabokov's effect on a later generation of American writers has been significant")....Updike is in some ways what Orwell accused Salvador Dali of being, a genius only from the elbow down...( The Oxford Guide to Contemporary Writing, J. Sturrock, Oxford University Press, 1996, page 427).
 


Subject:
Nabokov sightings II: Oxford and famous writers and literary characters and novels.
From:
"Jansy" <jansy@aetern.us>
Date:
Fri, 16 Feb 2007 10:39:41 -0300
To:
"Vladimir Nabokov Forum" <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>

Margaret Drabble's "The Oxford Companion to English Literature" (1985) Preface informs that "in the entries for American authors, emphasis has been placed on Anglo-American connections and responses: the selection of contemporary American authors has been partly guided by British appraisals, which sometimes differ considerably from those current in the United States, although indisputably major figures have been included as a matter of course".
 
Under New Yorker, the, an American weekly magazine... there is a reference to Updike, but not to Wilson or Nabokov.
The entry for Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, is a bit long to copy ( it covers almost half-page, soon followed by Naipaul), but it begins with: "Russian novelist, poet, and literary scholar.... in 1940 he moved to the U.S.A, working as a lecturer at Wellesley College...From then on all his novels were written in English... Nabokov's reputation as one of the major, most original prose writers of the 20th cent., a stylist with extraordinary narrative and descriptive skill and a wonderful linguistic inventiveness in two languages, is based on his achivement in the novels..( listed) and on several volumes of short stories.  All his works first written in Russian were translated into /english with his own collaboration, and the English novels into Russian...
The entry Lolita, mentions only a novel by V.*Nabokov.
 
Under entries for the letter A there are Adam ( old servant in *As you like it), Adamastor , Adam Bede. No ADA.    Under H, no Humbert Humbert.
In K, there is Kipling's KIM, Kind Harts Dreame, Kind of Loving and various Kings, even King Charles's Head from Dickens.  No King Charles II, no Charles Kinbote, though. In S, there's no John Shade either, but there is a Shadow, from Shakespeare's Henri IV, as one of Falstaff's recruits... There is Vane, Vanessa, Vanhomrigh( see Swift, J.)
 
I wonder what we could find about VN published in Cambridge. The books I have within easy reach were all edited by the Oxford University Press.



Subject:
Fw: On scorpions and men
From:
"jansymello" <jansy@aetern.us>
Date:
Fri, 16 Feb 2007 21:46:16 -0300
To:
"Vladimir Nabokov Forum" <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>

Victor Fet generated a wonderful Nabokov sighting at:
http://www.science.marshall.edu/fet/euscorpius/fetpubl/Wanderings%20under%20the%20Constellation%20of%20Scorpio.pdf  : "While Nabokov attracted his night moths by the light of a lantern, we go after our beasties Diogenes-style."
 
The scorpions are (almost) appetizing! Victor's reference to VN suggested a text ( one not included in "Dar") about "Father's Butterflies". Also in Speak Memory ( p.135): " on cold, or even frosty, autumn nights, one could sugar for moths by painting tree trunks with a mixture of molasses, beer, and rum. Through the gusty blackness, one's lantern would illumine the stickily glistening furrows of the bark and two or three large moths upon it imbibing the sweets... 'Catocala adultera!' I would triumphantly shriek in the direction of the lighted windows of the house..." 
I wonder what "adultera" stands for in the world of moths, some kind of "fake"? And, before that, on page 125, VN mentioned the butterfly that not only looks like a leaf but its wings create grub-bored holes, and added: "mimetic sublety, exuberance and luxury far in excess of a predator's power of appreciation" - - "I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception". ( the image in the attach is of a Zaetis itys strigosus, photograph and book "Brazilian Nature in Detail" by Fabio Colombini.)
 
Screen memories, in art, might also engender "mimetic sublety" and here I was reminded of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa/ Bernardo Soares who wrote in Autopsychobiography (1931): The poet is a faker/ Who’s so good at his act /He even fakes the pain /Of pain he feels in fact.( translation: 2006, Richard Zenith)



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