Subject
Fw: textual error in Ada?
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Date
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Kevin Troy" <kevin@useless.net
>
> On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, D. Barton Johnson wrote:
>
> > Her intimacy with [Van] changed the reading situation entirely whatever
> > decrees still remained pinned up in mid-air.
>
> Can also be read as
>
> > Whatever decrees still remained pinned up in mid-air, her intimacy with
> > Van changed the reading situation entirely.
>
> The original sentence might parse better if a comma were added after
> "entirely."
-----------------------------------------------
EDNOTE. I looked at the original. By the way, Carolyn is right to cite the
Library of America edition of ADA. It is the best version and Boyd has
indicated corrected misprints in an appendix. I think the sentence in
question is OK, although it does lend itself to misunderstanding. Both
Carolyn and Kevin miss a crucial small something, i.e., "Her intimacy with
cher, trop cher Rene, as she sometimes called Van in gentle jest, changed
the reading situation entirely---whatever decrees still remained pinned up
in mid-air."
Thanks to the limitations of e-mail that --- (dash) gets scrambled into
a < and is omitted altogether in Kevin's. VN sometimes uses dashes (---) in
distinctive ways. It seems to me that if you make a longish pause where the
dash stands, the sentence reads properly. I have recently done a paper
dealing with a few of VN's distinctive use of punctuation marks and
typologocal device. It may be seen at
http://www.nabokovinrussia.org/PDF/Johnson.pdf, although it contains a few
misprints itself.
From: "Kevin Troy" <kevin@useless.net
>
> On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, D. Barton Johnson wrote:
>
> > Her intimacy with [Van] changed the reading situation entirely whatever
> > decrees still remained pinned up in mid-air.
>
> Can also be read as
>
> > Whatever decrees still remained pinned up in mid-air, her intimacy with
> > Van changed the reading situation entirely.
>
> The original sentence might parse better if a comma were added after
> "entirely."
-----------------------------------------------
EDNOTE. I looked at the original. By the way, Carolyn is right to cite the
Library of America edition of ADA. It is the best version and Boyd has
indicated corrected misprints in an appendix. I think the sentence in
question is OK, although it does lend itself to misunderstanding. Both
Carolyn and Kevin miss a crucial small something, i.e., "Her intimacy with
cher, trop cher Rene, as she sometimes called Van in gentle jest, changed
the reading situation entirely---whatever decrees still remained pinned up
in mid-air."
Thanks to the limitations of e-mail that --- (dash) gets scrambled into
a < and is omitted altogether in Kevin's. VN sometimes uses dashes (---) in
distinctive ways. It seems to me that if you make a longish pause where the
dash stands, the sentence reads properly. I have recently done a paper
dealing with a few of VN's distinctive use of punctuation marks and
typologocal device. It may be seen at
http://www.nabokovinrussia.org/PDF/Johnson.pdf, although it contains a few
misprints itself.