----- Original Message -----

From: Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello

To: don barton johnson

Sent: Sunday, October 10, 2004 6:31 AM

Subject: Fw: tralatitions

----- Original Message -----

From: Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello

To: Akiko Nakata

Sent: Sunday, October 10, 2004 8:28 AM

Subject: tralatitions

76.01-02: had it been in her childhood . . . as delectably described in the novel? Or did he flirt with her in her first college year. . .?: Neither is what we heard in Ch. 11: "Julia, who according to Phil had been debauched at thirteen by R., right at the start of her mother's disastrous marriage." Too obvious an allusion to *Lolita*.

The title of R´s book Tralatitions ( Metaphors ) not only calls attention to VN´s metaphorical intentions but he achieves this in a true non-metaphorical way ( litteral translation of words by changing prefixes or suffices from the Greek to Latin ).
When Person informs him about the possibility that hasty readers "substitute an 'l' for the second of the three "t´s" he is clearly also alluding to Lolita ( the pronunciation of her name, with its two "l´s" and one " t´" as described in the" Lolita light of my life etc" opening chapter ).

R ( ch.18) also makes reference to pedophilia when he plays with "titles and libels" ( watch the play with the "t" and "l" in titles and libels, and the exchange from label to libel ) " I have been accused of trifling with minors" ( ie. pedophilia) , but my minor characters are untouchable, if you permit me a pun ( here there is a play with minor character as his litterary creations that are secondary in the plot, "minor", of "lesser importance", but also minor/underage. But there is also a reference to the use of "capital" or "bold" letters since "minor character" can also mean ( as in business contracts ) the "small letters of a script", "defects of the type and the virtues of the text". Type and character mean two different things...

I´m not familiar with the Spanish "anide" and "anidar" ( in Portuguese we would write "aninhar" ) but there are several things that come to my mind here.
First, the bird on a perch and "anidar" could be a reference to the Swiss industry of milk and chocolates, " Nestlé" ( "aninhado" or "anidado" ) and its image of a bird and a nest.

Second, a "niche" could refer to some sort of "nest" and then on chp.18 we find " when a timid editor made the artist change "slender" to "plump"...he disfigured both the image and the niche where it stood and the entire chapel around it" . So we could imagine that "Pauline anide" ( and we have just learned that Pauline, the femme de ménage is obese ) refers to a sculpture ( an image) moved from its niche ( nest)

Third: the moving on the top floor of a "Pauline sculpture" is also a way to describe a concrete "tralatition" ( the image is moved from one place to another and an entire series of substitutions, which had been alluded before in the slender/plump or else, obese/thin , "brown/blond" is suggested) A sculpture leaves its niche suggests that a verbal image is displaced in a tralatition.

4. Pauline is also a way of referring to "pauline texts" in the Bible: Saint Paul wrote letters to several peoples: romans, colosseans, philistines ( ?) - I´d have to check the Bible in English I only remember their names in Portuguese...) There is then a connection bt. Pauline and Phil, and we should not forget that phil means "friend, lover" ( as in pedophile and philosophy )

Congs for you on the connection of "eye and spine" with the image of the "true readers organs". The choice of VN for "occluding" is peculiar, though. Occlusion means "covering", does it not? But could we also think of eye as "occuli" , like in "binocular" or "monocle" ? I haven´t searched this further but I was touched by the image suggested by the word for "eye-glasses" in Portuguese : "oculos" that has the two "o" as a representation of two eyes or eye-lenses, such as also Nabokov pointed out for the Spanish word "cojones" ( male organ with two balls and a stick represented by "ojo" and "ojo" is also "eye" in Spanish )

Dear Akiko, tralatitions and tralalitions can go on forever. The French philosopher and writer Bataille has a book named like " The Story of the Eye" where he develops the links between "eyes" and "balls" and "eggs" and then these "eggs" could be placed in a "nest" ( nido, ninho). These displacements of statues and meanings are so wide that I would never dare to bring them to the N-List... but they just might have been associations kept in the "back of the mind" and which motivated VN in his creation, but without his deliberate intention of using them...