As Victor Fet pointed out to me (and as I had vaguely suspected myself), bars in Lermontov's poem "Mtsyri" is not a snow leopard (Uncia uncia, not found in Caucasus) but a leopard (Panthera pardus that was once found there). Thanks to Victor for his correction! Curiously that, in
English, bars is the plural of "bar."
To return to 'gory Mary': If I didn't knew that this phrase was coined by Nabokov, I would have looked for it not in Joyce (as Joseph Aisenberg suggests), but in Mayne Reid (the American writer of Irish descent who, in The Headless Horseman, describes a duel in a saloon). I would also think of Joseph Conrad (the English writer of Polish descent), but I confess I didn't read him.
To return to the Arzni water: Mandelstam calls it kolyuchaya, sukhaya / i samaya pravdivaya voda ("the prickly, dry / and most truthful water," whatever that meant) in another surviving excerpt of his "Destroyed Verses."
Another interesting word that has the same consonants as Arzni is zurna, the
Georgian musical instrument, a kind of bagpipes, mentioned in Lermontov's "Demon" (VI): Zvuchit zurna, i l'iutsya viny ("A zurna plays, and wines are poured").
Alexey Sklyarenko
All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.