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Re: Pale Fire's "Backdracht"
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Hello, Don
In Portuguese, a cough is "tosse" and "per" is the prefix that indicates how per-vasive it must sound in a crowd of children....(It's a privilege to be a foreigner sometimes, while reading another foreigner use a language that is almost as strange to him).
The "tinkling muscovy glass" must pertain to something I first saw only this year while my grandchildren ecstatically jumped on dirty sidewalk puddles, covered with a thin gray sheet of ice in a redundancy of "verglass" - just like Perrault's invention of Cinderella's crystal shoe (vair-verre-glass, as explained by VN in "Pnin").
I still have to do to consult a dictionary, though, for the term "muscovy" which I had originally absorbed as suggesting "Moscow" now, misteriously, gives me a taste of foxy green grapes...
Jansy
----- Original Message -----
From: D. Barton Johnson
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Friday, October 06, 2006 7:21 PM
Subject: [NABOKV-L] Pale Fire's "Backdracht"
From Commentary to Line 12: that crystal land"
"Medical care was spreading to the confines of the state: less and less often, on his tour of the country, every autumn, when the rowans hung coral-heavy, and the puddles tinkled with Muscovy glass, the friendly and eloquent monarch would be interrupted by a pertussal "backdraucht" in a crowd of schoolchildren"
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"Pertussal" simply pertains to "cough".
"Backdraucht" is a Scottish term glossed as in (2).
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BACKDRAUCHT, n. [ˈbɑkˈdrɑxt]
(1) The drawing in of the breath.
*Ags.(D) 1922 J. B. Salmond Bawbee Bowden xii.:
Wi’ the backdraucht [he] sent a moofu’ o’ tea up throo his nose.
*Fif. 1825 Jam.2:
We was whaslin like a blastit stirk i’ the backdraucht.
(2) The gasp of one with whooping-cough.
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In Portuguese, a cough is "tosse" and "per" is the prefix that indicates how per-vasive it must sound in a crowd of children....(It's a privilege to be a foreigner sometimes, while reading another foreigner use a language that is almost as strange to him).
The "tinkling muscovy glass" must pertain to something I first saw only this year while my grandchildren ecstatically jumped on dirty sidewalk puddles, covered with a thin gray sheet of ice in a redundancy of "verglass" - just like Perrault's invention of Cinderella's crystal shoe (vair-verre-glass, as explained by VN in "Pnin").
I still have to do to consult a dictionary, though, for the term "muscovy" which I had originally absorbed as suggesting "Moscow" now, misteriously, gives me a taste of foxy green grapes...
Jansy
----- Original Message -----
From: D. Barton Johnson
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Friday, October 06, 2006 7:21 PM
Subject: [NABOKV-L] Pale Fire's "Backdracht"
From Commentary to Line 12: that crystal land"
"Medical care was spreading to the confines of the state: less and less often, on his tour of the country, every autumn, when the rowans hung coral-heavy, and the puddles tinkled with Muscovy glass, the friendly and eloquent monarch would be interrupted by a pertussal "backdraucht" in a crowd of schoolchildren"
----------------------------------------------------
"Pertussal" simply pertains to "cough".
"Backdraucht" is a Scottish term glossed as in (2).
--------------------------------------------------
BACKDRAUCHT, n. [ˈbɑkˈdrɑxt]
(1) The drawing in of the breath.
*Ags.(D) 1922 J. B. Salmond Bawbee Bowden xii.:
Wi’ the backdraucht [he] sent a moofu’ o’ tea up throo his nose.
*Fif. 1825 Jam.2:
We was whaslin like a blastit stirk i’ the backdraucht.
(2) The gasp of one with whooping-cough.
Search the Nabokv-L archive at UCSB
Contact the Editors
All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.
Visit Zembla
View Nabokv-L Policies
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm