-------- Original Message --------
Jansy:
Can I report my PF-related discovery that may not be new at all?
The nickname of Ramon Mercader, Trotsky's murderer (Aug 21 1940) was
JACQUES.
One must admit some similarities with the Gradus mission and aliases.
I found this reading The Chief Culprit by ex-Soviet Intelligence
Officer Viktor Suvorov, as recommended by Victor Fet. Unlike Gradus,
Jacques returned to Russia after serving 20 years in a Mexican jail,
was showered with honors, and, according to a grim Soviet joke, wrote
a treatise called "Alternative Uses for Ice-Picks."
Next: may I correct or maybe burnish what _might_ be a
misunderstanding on your part:
"Sans" was a normal, unexotic synonym for "without" in Shakespeare's
time. When the Bard uses "sans" (about 16 times) it's usually on its
own ("a confidence sans bound" etc) EXCEPT in that _one_ memorable
quote (oft borrowed) where he uses four "sans" in succession.
Shakespeare uses "without" only about thrice as often as "sans," so
you might say the choices between the Latin/Norman "sans" and
Anglo-Saxon "without" were made for practical poetic reasons
(scansion, euphony, ...) For iambics, it's rather useful have mono-
and bi-syllabic synonyms. "Sans" like many Elizabethan words,
gradually wilted but never completely withered away! 18th century and
later writers would use "sans" in what you might call a deliberately
"archaic" manner much as we find "ye" and "gazooks."
The point is: not to endow Fitzgerald's* or Kinbote's choice of "sans"
with any special sprinkling of allusion-glitter.
* You can call it Practical Poetics. "Sans" lets FitzOmar pack a lot
into 8 syllables, and at the same time maintain the deliberately
archaic flavor of his quatrains.
skb
Quoting jansymello <jansy@AETERN.US>:
/
> JM: Last year (April) we had a lively exchange about Kinbote/VN:
"I
> shall try to exist. I may turn up yet...a writer in exile, sans
> fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art... And
> as J.Friedman wrote then: "...he was even less "sans anything but
> his art"...The blurring is very strange indeed...
> Sans fame... sans audience... "
>
> The references ( Fitzgerald's "Sans wine, sans song, sans singer,
> sans end", and Shakespeare's: "Sans teeth, sans eyes...," from As
> You Like It [ "All the world's a stage/ And all the men and women
> merely players... Last scene of all,/That ends this strange
eventful
> history,/ Is second childishness and mere oblivion,/ Sans teeth,
> sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."] at the time didn't
include
> Prospero and The Tempest (it was mentioned in BS, I think), nor
> Rupert Brooke's "The Fish".
>
> RB makes his presence felt in RLSK, in a tantalizing way,
directing
> his lines to "an English unofficial rose" from Berlin, whereas
> Sebastian's experience was oriented in the opposite direction -
but
> equally an exile's.
> In RB's "Fish" there are no historic, linear registers of birth
and
> death, no individual memory, no consciousness. Nabokov aimed at
more
> than a "dank sufficient heaven"...
> "Dateless and deathless, blind and still,
> The intricate impulse works its will;
> His woven world drops back; and he,
> Sans providence, sans memory,
> Unconscious and directly driven,
> Fades to some dank sufficient heaven."
>
> By queer coincidence someone quite unrelated to Nabokoviana sent
me
> news about an immortal living thing, a medusa (carrying her inborn
> umbrella!), or a Turritotopsis, who grows into maturity, sexuates,
> reproduces, involutes and becomes sexless and immature again, to
> start from scratch. Cf. Immortal life cycle of Turritotopsis...
> Nabokov's "real transcendental" doesn't necessarily have to be
> situated "above our world", does it? How about... "invisible
> presence somehow felt in this our world"?
>
>