Dear DN and List,
DN, thank you for the help with the
translation of rast( " scale in Turkish music" ).
I was also told by Alex that "Baldy" was
totally unrelated to any apparition of Nabokov . I had
pictured him there like an oak like in the
Hitchcock movies, where Hitch shows himself in the scenery holding a
viola, as a passenger in a bus, leaving a taxi but A. told me
that
"Baldy" as the name of an oak is an allusion to Pushkin. The name of
his family estate (where he wrote some of his best works) was Boldino, and
one of his most famous line (the first of his long poem "Ruslan and
Liudmila") is "U lukomoria dub zelionyi" ("There is a green oak at the sea
shore"). "Peter de Rast" is an obvious joke that plays on "pederast."
Sometimes it is really not enough to know
a language without being familiar with its cultural environment (
such as recognizing Pushkin´s estate "Boldino") or with its
pronunciation ( such as grasping an " obvious joke on
"pederast" - which I still cannot "hear"). There was
also a message by Sergey Re "British and Brazilian":
The link might be aural and graphic rather than semantic: "Br. -
Br..." I think this was one of VN's (or Humbert's) favorite usages.
The "brink of the brook" kind of sounds in Ada reinforce Sergey´s
answer for the "aural" instead of "semantic" aspect. Being a foreigner to
English usage and spoken language "brit" and "braz" sound
not similar to me and their coupling seems to follow a kind of
clue that is different from the "brink/brook" kind of creations.
David Powelstock posting confirms Alexey´s opinion stating that
"given the passage's mixing of sex and childhood, doesn't Peter de Rast (alias
Pieter Rast, for democratic Netherlanders) suggest "pederast"? "
But he had to switch to the democratic nethelander to pronounce it.
Besides, he added: "recall the marked emphasis in HH's
pederasty in Lolita ".
Am I totally confused now or there is no mention
to pederasty in Lolita?
I thought Lolita´s Humbert Humbert was
a pedophile, not a pederast.
Jansy
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, April 22, 2005 8:41 AM
Subject: Fwd: TR : Re: Meaning of "Enchanter" and a new question
about "Rast"
"the long and lofty limb of Baldy, a partly leafless but
still healthy old oak (which appeared - oh, I remember,Van!
- in a
century-old lithograph of Ardis, by Peter de Rast...)
In my regular
dictionary I found a reference to the latin rastrum "rake" from "radere ras"
that means " to scrape". Google took me to Van Veen´s Holland and their
paintings with pastoral
scenes. In it there was Rast as : Koerdisch voor
geluk of een rechte lijn, een toonladder (makam) in de Turkse muziek,
Perzisch voor waarheid.
I don´t speak Dutch but I understood there were
references to the Curds, to the Turks [IF I AM NOT MISTAKEN, IT'S A SCALE IN
TURKISH MUSIC -- DN]
and to the Persian. Rast, in Persian, would mean "
Truth".