Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0021557, Fri, 22 Apr 2011 13:57:30 +0300

Subject
cats in ADA and in Pushkin
Date
Body
...and the hill, and the big chain around the trunk of the rare oak, Quercus ruslan Chat. (2.7)

"Chat." probably hints at Chateaubriand; on the other hand, chat is French for "cat." "In the extraordinary lines, among his greatest, that Pushkin added in 1824, four years after its publication, to the beginning of Ruslan and Lyudmila" (EO Commentary, vol. Two, p. 139) the learned cat day and night walks on a golden chain around the green oak:

U lukomor'ya dub zelyonyi;
Zlataya tsep' na dube tom:
i dnyom i noch'yu kot uchyonyi
vsyo khodit po tsepi krugom

(I don't have a copy of Verses and Versions in which, I suspect, there would be VN's translation of these lines.)

Alexey Sklyarenko

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