Subject
Pale Fire, balefire (fwd)
Date
Body
Has anyone ever heard the word "balefire"? I discovered
it entirely by chance one day while thumbing through the dictionary. It
means "an outdoor fire." Another, obsolete definition is "a funeral pyre"
-- not insignificant in a novel that is so preoccupied with death and
vanishing.
As we all know, the title of Nabokov's novel comes from TIMON OF
ATHENS; is it nonetheless possible that our word-loving author was doubly
suggesting another, more obscure word? Any comments?
--RW
P.S. It's amazing what unexpected literary discoveries
dictionaries can provide. I was delighted to learn, long after
finishing Updike's Rabbit tetralogy, that an angstrom is "one
hundred-millionth of a centimeter, a unit used in measuring the length of
light waves."
(Oh, NOW I get it....)
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EDITOR's COMMENT. I don't recall "balefire" but the definitive set of
scrambles on the title PALE FIRE occur in a 999-line poem (plus
Commentary), DARK ICE, by poet-artist Tom Bolt. First published in the
arts magazine BOMB minus the Commentary, we hope to run the full text on ZEMBLA
& NABOKV-L in the near future.