Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0014419, Sun, 17 Dec 2006 07:07:32 +0300

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Fw: [NABOKV-L] Kinbote: camouflage or coincidence? Kot or
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Re: [NABOKV-L] Kinbote: camouflage or coincidence?Alexey: But who is paying vira (the Russian equivalent of "kinboot") for the murdered Shade?

Carolyn: Hodge, perhaps?

Carolyn, I thought at first that you were joking but then looked at the matter closer and realized that your idea might be not as absurd as it seemed. The phrase KOT OR means "what is the time" in Zemblan (see Kinbote's note to line 149). Kot seems to be Zemblan for "which" (or "how much") but it is Russian for "tom-cat." Or seems to be Zemblan for "hour," but it is French for "gold." The phrase kot or can thus be read in Franco-Zemblan as "how much gold" and in Russo-Zemblan as "cat hour" (an allusion to the learned tom-cat that day and night walks on the golden chain around the great oak in the wonderful preambule to Pushkin's "Ruslan and Liudmila"?). Hodge was also a learned tom-cat, wasn't he?

On a different plane, kot or looks like the truncated Russian phrase kotoryi chas ("what is the time," literally: "which hour [is it]?"). The other possibility to translate the question "what is the time" to Russian would be to say skol'ko vremeni (literally: "how much time [is it]?"). One remembers a philological anecdote from one's student days:

A person on a New York street asks a stranger:
"How much watch?"
"Two watch."
"Such much!"
"Oh, I see that you, too, studied English at the Leningrad University."*

This story can be also told as if the characters were two spies of the Gradus type. The question will be then a password and the answer a reply to that password.

Alexey

*Also, I shall never forget my orchestra-seat neighbor in a Leningrad theatre, a German, who explained to me in the interval between the two acts of Goethe's "Egmont" (it was performed, with a "synchronous" translation for the non-German part of the audience, by a German company) that to ask time in German one must say "Wie spaet ist es" and not "Wieviel Zeit ist es." He repeated the correct phrase twice, the second time very slowly. I was twelve or, may be, thirteen and it was my first conversation with a foreigner.

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