Variations on: “Shade [smiling and massaging my knee]: "Kings do not die — they only disappear, eh, Charles?" ” (Pale Fire)
Still wondering about Erwin’s song (from VN’s “A Nursery Tale” adapted short-story in a London play) and the musician G. Rossini, I finally came to his overture of “The Barber of Seville” - where I read a comment on the youtube link stating that “old artists never die, they just become enchanted”.
It reminded me of Kinbote’s reported dialogue with John Shade and this time I found a new site with innumerous variations of the same idea.
The closest to Nabokov’s is the already mentioned “Old magicians never die, they just disappear” [already discussed in a past VN-L exchange on Thursday, August 03, 2006 12:49 PM with Subject: [NABOKV-L] Kings never die...( Pale Fire). https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A3=ind0608&L=NABOKV-L&E=quoted-printable&P=133618&B=------%3D_NextPart_000_0023_01C6B721.C7AC00E0&T=text%2Fhtml;%20charset=iso-8859-1]
For other examples found at this new site: http://www.joe-ks.com/archives_sep2004/Old_People_Never_Die.htm
Kinbote’s quip isn’t very original at all…