Jansy: larvorium and larvarium may not really differ in the big wide wonder-world of words. Just as dictionarize and dictionarise are the same word, even if computerized/ised spell chequers throw up a mismatch!* There may well be some JS/VN poetic off-license at work, some punning on the roots. A Roman entomologist’s toilet might be called a larvatorium? The possibilities are endless and beyond logical analysis. Genuine neologism (meaning what?); typo (whose?); or playful orthography (but less obvious than fountain/mountain. Fun to speculate but I don’t think there’s sufficient evidence. Some dictionary somewhere may have larvorium, either as an alt. spelling (you could double the size of any Webster listing all alt. spells), or as a word with a totally unexpected meaning. That is a hard lesson in linguistics: the etymological fallacy. Who would have thought that ‘silly’ (via G selig OE saelig = blessed) would end up so sillily as ‘daft?’
I love DN’s ‘Real and Plausible.’ In one popular song, the ENGLISH ‘Vraie Chose’ becomes the FRENCH ‘Le Real Thing!’
Vive le Franglais Renversé. (Eng. ‘a souvenir’ = Fr. ‘un keepsake.’)
Verisimilar is VERY SIMILAR to Plausible but a tad MUSTIER.
* The Urban Dictionary listed ‘diarise’ (to enter an appointment in a diary) with no alt. spelling. For fun, I submitted a new definition for ‘diarize.’ Both verbs are now enshrined with separate meanings, much to the confusion (I hope) of future word-hunters.
S (trying to tell the word from the trees) KB
On 21/01/2010 00:06, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
[QUERIES]
1. Is there any explanation about Nabokov's choice for a neologism ("larvorium") in John Shade's poem if we later find that he used the dictionarized "larvarium" in Ada?
2. Brian Boyd wrote that " 'Stang' in The Gift would almost certainly have been Nabokov's change to translator Michael Scammell's more colloquial equivalent for the Russian "shtang" in the original..." Does he know what had been M.Scammell's more colloquial equivalent which Nabokov discarded for "stang" in "The Gift"?
3. Nabokov's work "Pouchkine, ou le vrai et le vraisemblable" ( 'Pushkin, of the True and the Verisimilar') has been published in English, in Dmitri Nabokov's translation, as "Pushkin, or the Real and the Plausible" (The New York Review of Books, March 31, 1988:38-42). Stephen Blackwell, in his notes 52 and 53 (Introduction) published in "The Quill and the Scalpel," writes that "The essay on Pushkin is particularly significant in that its title echoes one of Goethe's, "On the True and the Verisimilar in Art," as well as Chernyshevsky's own master's thesis, "On the Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality." Is the link to Chernyshevsky's thesis the reason why Dmitri Nabokov chose to translate "Le Vrai (true)" as "The Real" (and its relation to "Plausible"?).