Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0011100, Wed, 23 Feb 2005 09:17:22 -0800

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Fw: mulberry/ amora
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----- Original Message -----
From: Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello
To: don barton johnson
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 8:39 AM
Subject: mulberry/ amora


It never occurred to me to look up "mulberry" in an English/Portuguese dictionary but I always knew that silk-worms need the "amoreira tree" to develop. Like it is foreshadowed in the "first shattal tree" by Van´s silk-threads covering his mouth after kissing Ada.
Mulberry in Portuguese is "amora" ( a lovely word, i.e, a word that is "amoravel" - and it could share the palyndrome about being enamoured with Rome: "amor a Roma" ).

I don´t have a dictionary to find the word in Spanish, though, with which VN would certainly be more familiar where we could find a new extension into the "love" direction.


My husband mocked me today because while I discussed this idea of Boyd´s that Lucette should be considered as " a young martyr" ( because she comes associated with krestiks, signets and the Christian crucifixion images ) I suggested that the "cross" might simply be a kind of "shifter" to announce a "cross-word puzzle" or an "acrostic" and not be an indicator of an actual "suffering at the cross".
He concluded that I was creating a new breed of "crossberries" ...
Jansy
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HMM...there might be a whole net of motifs of which mulberry is a part. Something like the elaborate daisy chain in Speak Memory with rainbows, jewels, colored glass, etc which is decoded in the Index. In my Mulberry browsing I note that in times past, the Chinese used silkworm feces as a medical treatment for vomiting.
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